Mobile proxies route through IP addresses belonging to cellular carriers. Because carriers share a single address across many subscribers, blocking one mobile IP means blocking a large number of ordinary phone users at once, and most sites are unwilling to do that. This makes mobile the hardest category to filter out and the natural choice for social platforms, app backends and targets that have already defeated your residential pool.
It is also the most expensive category by a wide margin, and the one where list prices are least comparable between providers. Some sell bandwidth, some sell dedicated devices, some sell rotation windows. The ordering below normalises everything to the same measure — what you pay to get 1,000 usable pages back — so that plans structured differently can still be compared side by side.
A guide to choosing mobile proxies for web scraping
What mobile proxies are
A mobile proxy routes your request through an IP address belonging to a cellular carrier — the address a phone gets when it is on mobile data rather than wifi. Carriers assign these addresses from a limited pool shared across large numbers of subscribers, using carrier-grade network address translation, so at any moment one address may be serving hundreds or thousands of ordinary people.
That sharing is what makes mobile so effective. Blocking a mobile address means blocking everyone behind it, including a large group of genuine users on their phones. Most sites are unwilling to accept that collateral damage, which is why mobile addresses survive filtering that stops residential cold.
When to reach for them
Mobile is a specialist tool, not a default. It earns its cost in three situations.
The first is social platforms and app backends, which are built mobile-first and treat mobile traffic as the normal case. The second is any target that has already defeated a good residential pool — at that point you have run out of cheaper options. The third is mobile-specific data: app store listings, mobile-only pricing, carrier-gated content, or anything where the mobile experience genuinely differs from the desktop one.
For everything else, residential does the same job for a fraction of the price.
How the plans are structured
This is the category where list prices are least comparable, because providers sell three different things.
Bandwidth plans work like residential: you buy gigabytes and the meter runs. Dedicated device plans give you exclusive use of a specific modem or SIM for a period, with unmetered traffic and a rotation you trigger yourself. Rotating pool plans give you shared access to many devices with automatic rotation.
These three models cannot be compared on headline price, because they are priced per gigabyte, per device per month and per gigabyte respectively. The ranking on this page normalises everything to the same measure — what you pay to get a thousand usable pages back — which is the only way plans structured this differently can be placed side by side.
What to check before committing
Carrier and country coverage first. Mobile pools are far smaller than residential ones and much more concentrated. If you need a specific carrier in a specific country, confirm it exists rather than assuming a large provider covers everything.
Rotation control second. On a dedicated device you usually rotate by triggering a reconnection, and how fast that is and how much control you have over it varies a lot. On a shared pool you are at the mercy of the provider's rotation logic.
Session stability third. Mobile connections drop. A device that reconnects mid-session will change address, which breaks logged-in flows in ways that look like a bot detection problem but are not.
The realistic alternative
Before paying mobile rates, confirm that residential has actually failed on your target rather than merely underperformed. A poorly configured residential crawl — wrong headers, no session management, too much concurrency — fails in ways that look like IP-level blocking and are not. Fixing the crawl is free; moving to mobile is not.
