Residential Proxy Pricing Explained: Per GB, Unlimited And Per IP
Three billing models, three very different bills. How to work out which one is cheapest for your actual traffic before you commit.
Per GB: you pay for what leaves the wire
The default for rotating residential. You buy bandwidth and spend it however you like — any country, any number of IPs, any concurrency. It suits variable work and small volumes, and it punishes waste: every image you load, every retry, and every redirect is billed.
Cheapest when your traffic is bursty or under a few hundred gigabytes a month.
Unlimited: you pay for speed, not volume
Priced by port or by Mbps rather than by data. The bill is flat regardless of how much you move, which changes the economics completely for heavy, continuous work — video, large media, long-running crawls, streaming pipelines.
The catch is throughput. A 10 Mbps line moves roughly 3 TB a month at full tilt, and real-world usage is always lower. Work out your required sustained speed before comparing the headline price.
Cheapest when you would otherwise buy more than roughly 500 GB-1 TB a month.
Per IP: you pay for an address you keep
Static ISP and datacenter proxies are sold per IP per month with unmetered or generous bandwidth. You get the same address every time, which matters for accounts, dashboards and anything that treats an IP change as suspicious.
Cheapest when you need a handful of stable identities rather than a large pool.
Working out your real cost
Do not compare per-GB rates. Compare cost per successful request:
cost per success = (GB used x rate) / successful requests
A $1.50/GB pool with a 95% success rate beats a $1.00/GB pool at 70%, and the gap widens once you count the engineering time spent on retries.
Cutting the bill without changing provider
- Block images, fonts, video and analytics in browser automation
- Cache responses and never fetch the same URL twice in a run
- Use datacenter or ISP proxies for the targets that tolerate them
- Compress where the target supports it
- Fix redirect chains — each hop is billed
- Move to a volume tier once your usage is predictable
Most teams find 40-60% of their bandwidth is media they never look at.
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