Cheapest Proxy Providers

Understanding proxy pricing across the market

Why the prices span two orders of magnitude

This page puts datacenter, residential and mobile in one list, which makes the range look extreme — fractions of a cent per gigabyte at one end, tens of dollars at the other. The spread is not inconsistency. It reflects what each category costs the provider to supply.

Datacenter addresses are a commodity bought in blocks and racked on servers. Residential addresses are borrowed from real consumer connections and the provider pays for every gigabyte. Mobile addresses sit behind physical SIM cards on paid carrier plans. The prices follow the supply costs almost exactly.

Why the cheapest option is usually the wrong one

A price is only meaningful against a target. The cheapest plan on this page is an excellent choice for a public registry and completely useless against a defended retail site, where every request would be blocked and every blocked request still billed.

So the sequence that works is: decide which proxy type your target requires, then compare prices within that type. Sorting the whole market by price and starting at the top produces a plan that cannot do the job, which is the most expensive outcome available.

The three numbers that make up a real price

The unit rate is the advertised figure, per gigabyte or per thousand requests.

The included allowance turns that rate into a monthly bill, and is where most comparison errors happen. A cheaper plan with a smaller allowance is frequently more expensive per unit, particularly at entry tiers where providers price for accessibility rather than value.

The success rate turns the bill into a cost per delivered page. On bandwidth plans this is the largest variable in the whole calculation, and the one no price sheet mentions. A pool that fails a third of your requests costs fifty percent more per usable page than its rate suggests.

Promotions, tiers and what the price will be in six months

Much of the low end of this market is promotional: introductory discounts, first-deposit matches, capped rates that revert past a volume threshold. These are worth taking and worth knowing the expiry of.

Volume tiers move in the other direction. Nearly every provider drops the unit rate substantially as you commit to more, and the gap between the entry rate and the largest tier is routinely three or four times. If your volume is stable, pricing the committed tier is usually a bigger saving than switching providers.

Getting to a number you can trust

Pick the two or three providers that fit your proxy type and budget. Buy the smallest amount each allows. Run your real target through all of them and measure your own success rate. Then compare cost per delivered page using your own figures.

That takes an afternoon and a few dollars, and it replaces every published comparison — including this one — with data that is actually about your workload.