Best Cheap Proxies That Actually Work in 2026
By Elena Park · 2026-07-09 · 10 min read · Pricing
Free proxies are a scam. Sub-$2/GB residentials are real. Here are the four budget pools we'd actually use in production.
Free proxies are not free
Public free proxy lists are honeypots, dead, or MITM-injecting. They steal credentials, inject ads and capture session cookies. Never use one. The 'free' tier of every legitimate provider is a trial — use those instead.
Real budget residentials
IPRoyal — $1.75/GB, pay-as-you-go, no commitment. The current budget leader.
Decodo — $2/GB, larger pool, slightly better success rate
Webshare residential — $4.50/GB, smaller pool but the cheapest with dedicated US-only targeting
Rayobyte residential — $5/GB, US-focused, strong for SEO and e-commerce
Datacenter is even cheaper
For unprotected targets, Webshare datacenter at $0.50/GB or IPRoyal datacenter at $1.39/IP/month is the cost floor that still actually works.
Trial credits
Every major provider offers 24h-7d free trials with $5-$50 of credit: Decodo, Oxylabs, Bright Data, SOAX. Stack them when evaluating — gets you a few hundred GB of real testing for free.
What to avoid
Reseller pools (you don't know who controls the IPs), 'lifetime' deals (unsustainable economics = pool collapse within months), and any provider asking you to install an app to 'earn' bandwidth — that's how the gray-pool problem starts.
FAQ
Is $1.75/GB sustainable long-term?
IPRoyal has held this price for 18+ months and grown the pool, so yes — the economics work at scale. But always assume premium-pool quality is going to cost premium prices.