How much do residential proxies cost?

The cost of residential proxies varies significantly depending on how much data you buy, the provider's network quality, and your billing model.

Because residential proxies route traffic through real household internet connections, almost all providers bill based on bandwidth consumption (per Gigabyte / GB) rather than per IP address.

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Typical Cost Ranges Per GB

Provider Tier	Average Cost	Ideal For	Common Providers
Budget / Pay-As-You-Go	$1.00 – $3.00 / GB	Light scraping, small scripts, testing, no commitments	DataImpulse, 9Proxy, Evomi
Mid-Tier / Standard	$3.00 – $8.00 / GB	E-commerce monitoring, automation, small teams	IPRoyal, Webshare, Smartproxy, Decodo
Enterprise / Premium	$5.00 – $12.00+ / GB (Low Volume) <br> Drops to $1.50 – $3.50 / GB (Bulk 1TB+)	High success rate targets, strict bot protection, scale	Bright Data, Oxylabs, SOAX

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Monthly Costs by Usage Level

When budgeting for a project, your total monthly cost depends on how much data you consume:

• Low Usage (5 GB – 10 GB / month): $10 to $100 / month
  • Ideal for casual web scraping, social media management, or localized search monitoring.
• Medium Usage (50 GB – 100 GB / month): $100 to $800 / month
  • Ideal for daily price tracking, continuous data collection, and rank tracking.
• High / Enterprise Usage (500 GB – 1TB+ / month): $1,000 to $5,000+ / month
  • Ideal for large-scale web scraping, AI training data extraction, and ad verification pipelines.

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Common Pricing Models

1. Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG):

   • You top up funds and buy bandwidth as you go.
   • Pros: Data often never expires; no monthly commitments.
   • Cons: Higher baseline rate per GB.

2. Prepaid Monthly Plans (Bundles):

   • You commit to a fixed monthly fee (e.g., $50/mo for 10 GB or $500/mo for 100 GB).
   • Pros: Lower effective price per GB.
   • Cons: Unused traffic usually expires at the end of the billing cycle.

3. Static Residential Proxies (ISP Proxies):

   • Unlike rotating proxies, static proxies assign a fixed residential IP address.
   • Often priced per IP per month (around $2.00 to $5.00+ per IP), sometimes accompanied by a lower per-GB bandwidth rate or unlimited bandwidth allowance.

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Cost "Gotchas" to Watch Out For

• Advertised vs. Real Cost: Headline rates like $0.49/GB or $1.50/GB are often bulk rates that require committing to thousands of dollars or purchasing huge 500GB+ packages upfront. At low volumes (e.g., 5GB), the effective cost per GB at those same providers can jump significantly due to minimum plan pricing.
• Unused Data Expiry: Check whether unused bandwidth rolls over or expires after 30 days.
• Granular Geo-Targeting: Standard country-level targeting is usually free, but fine-grained targeting (city, zip code, or specific ISP/ASN) may cost extra or require a higher-tier plan.
• Failed Request Bandwidth: In scraping, cheap proxies with lower success rates consume data on retries. A $1/GB proxy with a 50% success rate effectively costs $2/GB in real-world data usage.