Estimate your monthly spend
Estimated monthly costs
How proxy pricing works
Proxy providers bill in one of three ways, and the model you pick has more impact on your monthly bill than the headline rate. Understanding which one fits your workload is the single biggest lever on cost.
Per-GB dominates residential and mobile pools — you pay for every gigabyte that passes through, so a data-heavy job (scraping images, video, large pages) costs far more than thin HTML scraping at the same request count. Per-IP is typical for ISP and static datacenter proxies: a fixed monthly price per address regardless of bandwidth, which is cheaper once your traffic is high and predictable. Unmetered port plans cap concurrency instead of data and suit always-on, high-volume pipelines.
What affects your monthly cost
Two teams running the same target list can pay wildly different amounts. The main cost drivers:
- Proxy type. Datacenter is the cheapest per GB but easiest to block; residential and mobile cost more because the IPs are scarcer and more trusted. Mobile (4G/5G) is usually the most expensive per gigabyte.
- Bandwidth volume. On per-GB pricing this is everything. Estimate it as avg page size × pages per day × 30. Stripping images and assets, requesting compressed responses, and caching can cut bandwidth — and the bill — by half or more.
- Geo and city targeting. Country-level targeting is often included; precise city or ISP-level targeting frequently carries a premium or requires a higher tier.
- Commitment length. Monthly plans cost more per GB than quarterly or annual commitments; most networks discount 10–30% for longer terms.
- Concurrency and rotation. Sticky sessions and large concurrent pools can push you into higher tiers even at the same total bandwidth.
Pricing FAQ
Is per-GB or per-IP pricing cheaper?
It depends on your bandwidth-to-IP ratio. Per-GB wins when traffic is low or bursty; per-IP (subscription) wins once you push a lot of steady traffic through a small, fixed set of addresses — common for static ISP proxies used in account management.
How do I estimate my bandwidth?
Multiply your average response size by the number of requests per month. A typical HTML-only page is 50–500 KB; a full page with assets can be 2–5 MB. Run a small sample, measure the bytes transferred, then scale up. Add ~10–20% headroom for retries and overhead.
Why are residential proxies more expensive than datacenter?
Residential IPs come from real consumer devices and ISPs, so they're scarcer, harder to source ethically, and far more trusted by anti-bot systems. That trust premium is why they cost several times more per GB than cloud-hosted datacenter IPs.