Proxy Pricing 2026: Complete Breakdown by Type & Vendor

By Elena Park · 2026-03-12 · 14 min read · Pricing

Proxy pricing in 2026 spans $0.30/IP to $20/GB depending on type. Here's the complete cost map for every category and top provider.

The short answer

In 2026, residential proxies cost $1.75-8/GB, datacenter and ISP proxies cost $0.60-3/IP per month, mobile proxies cost $4-15/GB, and managed scraping APIs cost $1-15 per 1,000 requests. Decodo offers the strongest overall value across multiple proxy types with mid-tier residential pricing around $2.20-3.50/GB and competitive API pricing, while Bright Data and Oxylabs sit at the premium end and IPRoyal and Webshare anchor the budget end. The right choice depends entirely on target defense level, volume and whether your team can maintain scraping infrastructure.

Pricing by proxy type

Residential proxies are billed per GB of bandwidth consumed and range from $1.75/GB at IPRoyal and Webshare up to $8/GB at Bright Data and Oxylabs pay-as-you-go tiers, with Decodo and SOAX occupying the $2.20-3.50/GB middle ground at mid-volume tiers. Price scales down significantly with committed monthly volume across every provider.

Datacenter and ISP (static residential) proxies are billed per IP per month rather than per GB, typically $0.60-3.00/IP, since bandwidth is effectively unlimited on these tiers. This makes them dramatically cheaper for high-throughput, low-diversity workloads compared to metered bandwidth.

Mobile proxies run $4-15/GB, the most expensive per-GB tier, reflecting both the scarcity of carrier IP addresses and the exceptional trust they carry against anti-bot systems. Managed scraper/unblocker APIs charge per request rather than per GB or IP, typically $1-15 per 1,000 requests depending on whether JavaScript rendering and CAPTCHA solving are included.

Top vendor entry prices

Entry-level pricing (no volume commitment) across major providers as of 2026.

• IPRoyal - residential from $1.75/GB, ISP from $1.80/IP, no minimum spend, best entry price
• Webshare - datacenter from $0.60/IP/month, residential add-on tier available, best datacenter entry price
• Decodo - residential from around $2.20/GB at mid-volume, Site Unblocker API from $2.50/1,000 requests, best overall value
• SOAX - residential and mobile from $9/GB, strong targeting granularity
• Bright Data - residential pay-as-you-go from $8/GB, Web Unlocker API from $3/1,000 requests, premium tier
• Oxylabs - residential pay-as-you-go from around $8/GB, premium enterprise tier with dedicated support

What changes the price

Volume commitment is the single biggest price lever - moving from pay-as-you-go to a committed monthly plan of 50-100GB typically cuts per-GB residential pricing by 30-50% across every major provider. Geo-targeting specificity also affects price: country-level targeting is usually included in base pricing, while city-level or ASN-specific targeting can carry a premium at some providers.

Proxy type is the second biggest lever - mobile costs more than residential, which costs more than datacenter, reflecting the relative trust and scarcity of each IP class. Session type matters too: sticky sessions and dedicated/static IPs typically cost more than freely rotating pools because they guarantee availability of a specific identity over time.

Hidden costs to watch for

Bandwidth rounding is a common hidden cost - some providers round up usage to the nearest MB or charge for failed/blocked requests, meaning your effective cost per successful page is higher than the advertised per-GB rate suggests. Always check the provider's billing documentation for how failed requests are counted.

Minimum monthly commitments and unused-bandwidth expiration are the other major hidden costs - many mid-tier and premium plans require purchasing a fixed monthly bandwidth block that expires unused at the end of the billing cycle rather than rolling over, effectively raising your real cost if your usage varies month to month.

How to model your cost

Start by classifying your target's defense level: unprotected sites can run on cheap datacenter or residential proxies, moderately protected sites need mid-tier residential like Decodo or SOAX, and heavily protected sites (DataDome, Akamai, PerimeterX) likely need mobile proxies or a managed unblocker API regardless of raw cost.

Next, estimate bandwidth per page including any JavaScript rendering overhead - rendered pages typically consume 5-10x the bandwidth of raw HTML. Multiply expected page volume by per-page bandwidth to get monthly GB, then apply the relevant provider's per-GB rate at your expected commitment tier.

Finally, model failure rate into the cost. A cheap provider with a 60% success rate on your target may cost more in effective terms than a pricier provider with a 95% success rate, once you account for wasted bandwidth and engineering time spent on retries. The proxy comparison table on this site includes a side-by-side calculator-style breakdown for exactly this comparison across all major providers.

Frequently Asked Questions