Residential proxy pricing, explained: models, medians and what a gigabyte buys

The five pricing models

1. Flat pay-as-you-go

One rate for every gigabyte, prepaid, with no plan. PacketStream is the only provider here whose entire pricing works this way: $1.00/GB for all traffic, rotating or sticky, a $50 minimum purchase and a balance that never expires^1,2. Easy to budget and to audit. Decodo, Infatica and Bright Data also sell at a single pay-as-you-go rate ($4, $4 and $8 list), but as the expensive entry point to their plans^3,4,5.

2. Tiered pay-as-you-go

The rate falls as the purchase grows, still with no plan. Rayobyte runs from $3.50 down to $0.70/GB⁶; IPRoyal from $7.35 to $1.84⁷; Evomi’s Core from $0.99 to $0.79⁸. Because tiers are set by purchase size, buying a little more can cost less: at Rayobyte, 50 GB ($100) is cheaper than 40 GB ($140). Whether that’s a bargain depends on expiry — IPRoyal and Evomi pay-as-you-go traffic never expires^7,8.

3. Monthly subscriptions

A fixed allowance each month at a lower rate, usually lost if unused. Webshare sells only plans, from 1 GB at $3.50 to 3 TB at $1.40/GB⁹; Oxylabs sells only subscriptions, which expire monthly¹⁰. Decodo, Infatica and Evomi sell plans alongside pay-as-you-go^3,4,8. Plans reward steady usage and punish lumpy usage: the real rate is the plan price divided by what you actually use.

4. Credits priced by country

SOAX sells dollar credits and charges per gigabyte according to the exit country’s tier: on its pay-as-you-go Sandbox, $5 for Tier 1 (the US, for instance), $4 for Tier 2 and $2 for Tier 3. Monthly plans lower the Tier-1 rate to as little as $0.85, and credits expire 60 days after purchase¹¹. If your traffic is mostly in cheaper countries this can work in your favour; it also makes the bill harder to predict.

5. Feature multipliers

Evomi’s Core rate includes country, region, city and ISP targeting, but some extras are charged in traffic. Proxyway lists 6× for the “more IPs” option, 4× for ASN targeting and 2× each for fraud-score and minimum-latency filters, up to 15× in extreme cases¹². A $0.99 gigabyte with ASN targeting on costs $3.96. Multipliers aren’t hidden — but they mean the advertised rate is a floor, not the price.

Large buyers can usually negotiate: Rayobyte quotes Enterprise from $0.50/GB, Decodo lists Enterprise rates down to $2.00/GB at 1 TB, and Bright Data prices custom above 1 TB^6,3,5.

What a gigabyte buys

Per-GB prices only mean something once you know how big your requests are. The HTTP Archive’s 2025 Web Almanac puts the median home page at 2,862 KB on desktop and 2,559 KB on mobile, and the median inner page at 1,963 KB and 1,769 KB. The HTML document alone is about 20–22 KB¹³. The difference between fetching only the HTML and rendering everything is roughly a hundredfold.

$1.00 is PacketStream’s flat rate, $4.00 the 2026 median entry price, $8.00 Bright Data’s pay-as-you-go list price^1,14,5.

One adjustment matters: retries. At the 74.43% median success rate Proxyway measured on Amazon, Google and Instagram in 2026, retrying until every page succeeds can multiply traffic by up to about 1.34×¹⁴.

Market medians in 2026

Proxyway’s Proxy Market Research 2026, using data collected in March and April 2026, gives the clearest view of the going rate¹⁴.

The same research notes that several providers dropped pay-as-you-go in 2026, nudging buyers towards plans¹⁴. Against these medians, Evomi Core ($0.99 at entry), PacketStream ($1.00 flat) and Rayobyte at volume ($2.00 at 50 GB, $0.70 at 1 TB) are far cheaper than the market; Decodo’s $4.00 entry and $3.00 at 50 GB sit exactly on it; IPRoyal’s $7.35 and Oxylabs’ $6.00 entry prices are well above it^8,1,6,3,7,10.

Price calculator

Enter the gigabytes you expect to use in a month. For each provider the calculator finds the cheapest single confirmed purchase that covers it — a pay-as-you-go amount or a monthly plan — including any minimum. It doesn’t combine plans, apply promotions or estimate prices between confirmed tiers; where no confirmed tier covers your volume, it says so.

Rates are for standard residential traffic in a top-tier country such as the US. SOAX is cheaper in Tier-2 and Tier-3 countries; Evomi costs more with ASN targeting or extra-IP mode; Bright Data requires company KYC; Proxy-Cheap’s rates are shown as discounts of unclear duration. Check each provider’s page before buying.

How to spend less

• Fetch HTML, not pages. If you only need the data in the HTML, skip rendering. The table above shows the gap: about 22 KB against about 2 MB¹³.
• When you must render, block assets. Images, fonts and stylesheets are most of a page’s weight. Browser automation tools can abort those requests — Playwright’s route.abort(), for example, or Crawlee’s blockRequests.
• Match the billing model to your usage. Lumpy usage suits non-expiring pay-as-you-go; steady usage suits a plan.
• Measure success on your own targets. A cheap gigabyte that fails half the time costs double. Use trials: Rayobyte has one without a card, Decodo offers 100 MB for three days, Infatica seven days for $4^6,3,4.
• Check the meter. Log bytes on your side for a day and compare with the provider’s dashboard before you buy in bulk.

For when to hold one IP and when to rotate — which also affects how much traffic you burn — see rotating vs sticky residential proxies.