Mobile is the most expensive proxy category, so "cheapest" here means the least expensive way into a category that starts high. The plans at the top of this list are typically entry tiers with small allowances, designed to get you started rather than to run production volume, and the unit price drops substantially at higher tiers.
Read the included allowance alongside the monthly price. A twenty dollar plan carrying one gigabyte is not cheaper than a fifty dollar plan carrying five; it is three times more expensive per unit. The plan details on each card show both numbers so the comparison is on the same footing.
What drives the price of mobile proxies
Why mobile is the most expensive category
Every address in a mobile pool is attached to a physical device with a SIM card on a paid data plan, or to a real subscriber sharing their connection. The provider is paying carrier rates for that data, maintaining hardware, and replacing SIMs as carriers detect and terminate them. None of those costs fall away at scale the way server bandwidth does.
The result is a market where the cheapest credible option still costs more than premium residential, and where "cheapest" means the least expensive way into an expensive category rather than a bargain in absolute terms.
Reading entry-tier pricing
The plans at the top of this list are almost all entry tiers: small allowances at a high unit rate, designed to get you started rather than to run production work. The per-unit price typically drops sharply at higher tiers, so the cheapest plan on the page is rarely the cheapest way to buy the volume you actually need.
Compare the included allowance and the monthly price together. Twenty dollars for one gigabyte is three times the unit cost of fifty dollars for five. The plan details on each card show both figures for exactly this reason.
What the low end usually gives up
Smaller pools, concentrated in fewer carriers and countries. If your work needs a particular market, cheap plans are the most likely to lack it.
Less rotation control. Budget shared pools rotate on their own schedule rather than yours, which makes session-dependent work unreliable.
Shorter session windows and less stable connections, which matters more in mobile than anywhere else because a dropped connection means a changed address mid-flow.
Where an unusually low price comes from
Occasionally a mobile price sits far below the rest of the market. That usually has an explanation worth knowing. The pool may be residential addresses described loosely as mobile. It may be concentrated on a single carrier already heavily flagged by the targets you care about. Or the plan may carry a hard concurrency cap that makes the allowance impossible to use at any reasonable speed.
None of these are necessarily disqualifying, but they are all things to confirm during a trial rather than discover in production.
