There are four types of proxies by where the IP address comes from: residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter. Every proxy also answers three more questions: which protocol it speaks, whether its address rotates, and whether you share it. Lists of proxy types disagree because they mix these questions. The address source sets most of the price. We read our price records on October 22, 2026. The median smallest plan cost $4.00 per GB for mobile, $3.65 for residential and $0.60 for datacenter. An ISP address cost a median $2.66 a month.
What are the main types of proxies?
Each proxy answers four separate questions, and a full description names all four:
- Whose network is the address on? Residential, ISP, mobile or datacenter.
- Does the address change? Rotating or static.
- Who else uses it? Shared or dedicated.
- Which protocol do you speak to it? HTTP or SOCKS5.
A rotating shared residential SOCKS5 proxy is a complete description, and so is a static dedicated ISP HTTP proxy. When a seller names one axis, the other three still have values.
Whose network is the address on?
residential, ISP, mobile or datacenter
Does the address change?
rotating or static
Who else is using it?
shared or dedicated
What protocol do you speak to it?
HTTP or SOCKS5
The first question matters most, because a site can answer it before it reads your request. Every public address belongs to an autonomous system, and who holds which ranges is public. Six cloud companies alone publish 185,168,739 IPv4 addresses in their own range files, as we counted on October 22, 2026. That is 4.31% of all IPv4 addresses.
Residential proxies
Residential proxies send your traffic through addresses that home internet providers assigned to their customers. Sellers offer them through a rotating gateway and bill by traffic. Across 64 sellers in our price records, the median smallest plan cost $3.65 per GB, and the median largest plan $1.00.
Our residential plans cost $0.50 for one GB and $0.18/GB at 1,000 GB+. Our guide to what a residential proxy is covers how they work.
ISP proxies, or static residential
ISP proxies run on servers but use addresses registered to an internet provider, which is why sellers also call them static residential. Oxylabs writes that its static residential proxies "originate from datacenter proxies". Shifter says it gets such addresses through partnerships with consumer ISPs and serves them from its own infrastructure.
Sellers bill ISP proxies by the address. The median cheapest offer was $2.66 per IP a month across 24 sellers. Of the 56 ISP sellers in our records, 55 price per IP. Our static ISP proxies cost $2.70 per IP a month for a dedicated address. Our page on what an ISP proxy is compares ten sellers' offers.
Mobile proxies
Mobile proxies use addresses from mobile carriers. Carriers often share one public address among many subscribers with carrier-grade NAT. A 2016 study at the Internet Measurement Conference found it in more than 90% of cellular networks. Some operators in that study reported as many as 20 subscribers per address.
Mobile traffic cost the most: a median $4.00 per GB on the smallest plan across 33 sellers, and $2.20 on the largest. Ours costs $1.50 per GB, and our page on mobile vs residential proxies compares the two.
Datacenter proxies
Datacenter proxies run on hosting addresses. They are the cheapest type: a median $0.60 per GB on the smallest plan across 17 sellers. Sold per address, a datacenter IP cost a median $1.21 a month at each seller's cheapest offer, across 16 sellers. The big cloud companies publish their ranges, so a site can look an address up in one step.
Our dedicated datacenter IPv4 costs $1.58 per IP a month. Our page on datacenter vs residential proxies covers where each one wins.
What does each type of proxy cost?
Three types sell by the gigabyte, and the gap between them is wide:
- Smallest plan
- Largest plan
Two types sell by the address. At each seller's cheapest monthly offer for one IP:
| Type | Sellers | Median per IP |
|---|---|---|
| ISP | 24 | $2.66 a month |
| Datacenter | 16 | $1.21 a month |
Billing follows the address source. Residential and mobile sellers charge for traffic. ISP sellers charge by the address, and datacenter sellers do both.
Rotating or static?
Rotating means you connect to one gateway proxy, and it picks a different exit per request or per session. Static means one address stays yours. Rotation spreads your requests, so a site that counts per address sees each one rarely. AWS WAF, for one, applies its rate limiting per request IP by default.
A login or a cart needs one address for the whole visit. A sticky session holds one exit for a set time. On our Residential Premium, you choose from 3 minutes to 24 hours per line. Our pages on rotating vs static residential proxies and proxy rotation go further.
Shared or dedicated?
Shared splits an address among several customers, and dedicated gives it to you alone. What you share is the address's reputation: everything anyone has done through it.
Free public proxies show the far end. We had discovered 589,918 of them by 2026-08-11, and 4,023 were alive that day. On October 22, 2026, an IP reputation check flagged 99.3% of the 4,992 working ones as proxies. Of those 4,992, 1,870 sat on datacenter addresses, 3,120 on home or business networks and 4 on mobile carriers.
HTTP or SOCKS5?
HTTP proxies speak the web's own protocol. RFC 9110 defines a proxy as "a message-forwarding agent that is chosen by the client". For an https page, the client asks it for a tunnel with the CONNECT method.
An HTTP proxy can add headers, so it can also leak. An X-Forwarded-For header can pass on the address the proxy was meant to hide, which is what anonymity grades measure. On October 22, 2026, 3,089 working free proxies relayed a plain HTTP request to our test server. Of these, 86% named a proxy in a header.
SOCKS5 proxies relay connections without reading them. RFC 1928 built SOCKS5 as "a framework for client-server applications in both the TCP and UDP domains". It therefore carries mail, games and other traffic beyond the web. A SOCKS5 client can also hand the proxy a host name to resolve. That keeps the lookup off your own network and avoids a DNS leak.
Our residential lines come as HTTP or SOCKS5, and Residential Premium SOCKS5 lines can relay UDP. Our page on HTTP vs SOCKS5 proxies compares the two in detail.
What are the two types of proxies?
People who ask this usually mean forward and reverse. A forward proxy works for the client, which chooses it. A reverse proxy works for a website and stands in front of its servers. RFC 9110 calls it a gateway, "an intermediary that acts as an origin server for the outbound connection". Every proxy on this page is a forward proxy.
Which type of proxy do you need?
Work backwards from the target:
- Does the site check which network an address belongs to? Test it with datacenter first, the cheapest type by a wide margin. If the site turns hosting addresses away, move to residential, ISP or mobile.
- Does your task hold a session? For a login or a cart, use a static address or a sticky session long enough to finish. When each request stands alone, rotate.
- Does a clean history matter? If a block would cost you a result, pay for a dedicated address. If a retry is cheap, shared will do.
- Is your traffic web traffic? Then HTTP is simpler. For anything else, use SOCKS5.
When even the right type fails, the cause often sits above the address. A TLS fingerprint can name a scripting library. A browser fingerprint can report a time zone that contradicts the exit's country. Our residential proxies start at $0.50 for one GB, with a balance that does not expire. Residential pricing lists every tier.
What this page could not check
- Price records, not checkouts. The medians use each seller's latest price list in our records, captured July 20 to October 14, 2026, in US dollars. Headline "from" prices are left out, and so are sellers that price in other currencies. Prices change.
- No performance tests. We did not test how any type performs or how often sites block it, ours included.
- An older study. The carrier-grade NAT figures come from a 2016 measurement.
- Our free list only. The free proxy figures cover the public proxies our checker collects.
- Check by January 22, 2027. Prices and seller descriptions change.
Sources
- RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics, sections 3.7 and 9.3.6. IETF, June 2022.
- RFC 1928: SOCKS Protocol Version 5. IETF, March 1996.
- A Multi-perspective Analysis of Carrier-Grade NAT Deployment. Richter and others, ACM Internet Measurement Conference, 2016.
- Static residential proxies product page (Oxylabs) and ISP proxy glossary (Shifter), read October 22, 2026.
- Published IP range files of AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, DigitalOcean and Linode, downloaded October 22, 2026.
- AWS WAF Developer Guide: aggregating rate-based rules, read October 22, 2026.
- HProxy price records of residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter sellers, captured July 20 to October 14, 2026.
- HProxy free proxy list: reputation check and anonymity grades, October 22, 2026.
- HProxy API documentation and product pages, read October 22, 2026.
