Cheapest Residential Proxies in 2026: Verified Price per GB

The cheapest residential proxy depends entirely on how much bandwidth you actually use. Under 50 GB/month, DataImpulse at a flat $1.00/GB with a $5 minimum is the cheapest real option. Above 50 GB/month, Evomi at $49.99 for 100 GB ($0.50/GB) takes over and stays cheapest into the terabytes.

Every price below was checked against the provider's live pricing page on 28 July 2026. Headline rates on proxy sites are almost always the largest bundle, so this guide lists what you pay at the volume you're actually buying.

Key takeaways

• The lowest advertised $/GB is often the most expensive plan. Evomi advertises $0.49/GB but the entry plan is $49.99 for 100 GB — at 5 GB/month that is an effective $10.00/GB, ten times DataImpulse.
• IPRoyal's public table bottoms out at $4.90/GB, not the "$1.75/GB" in its site navigation. That rate is not shown on the pricing page at any listed tier.
• SOAX prices by geography, not just volume. The $2.20/GB figure is Tier‑1 traffic on the $500/month Team plan; Sandbox users pay $5.00/GB for the same countries.
• Bright Data and Webshare are both running 50%-off promotions right now. Bright Data's real list price is $8.00/GB pay-as-you-go; Webshare's is $7.00/GB. Budget for the undiscounted rate at renewal.
• Only three providers document that traffic doesn't expire: DataImpulse, IPRoyal, and Rayobyte (pay-as-you-go). SOAX credits expire after 60 days on monthly billing.
• Cost per GB is the wrong metric if you get blocked. You pay for the bytes in a 403 response exactly as you pay for the bytes in a 200.

Cheapest residential proxies compared (verified 28 July 2026)

Entry price is the smallest amount of money a new customer can hand over. Best rate is the cheapest per-GB tier published on the public pricing page — enterprise "contact us" rates are excluded because they aren't verifiable.

Disclosure: some provider links on this page are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission if you sign up through them. This never affects which providers we include or how we rank them — every price below comes from the provider's own public pricing page.

Webshare's and Bright Data's rates above are the promotional prices live on 28 July 2026. Undiscounted, they are $7.00/GB and $8.00/GB respectively.

What does 5, 25, and 100 GB per month actually cost?

The ranking inverts depending on volume. This is the same table priced at three realistic monthly workloads, buying the smallest plan that covers the usage.

Two decision rules fall out of this:

• Under ~50 GB/month, buy DataImpulse. Its flat $1/GB with a $5 minimum beats every subscription because subscriptions charge you for a bundle you don't finish.
• At 50 GB/month and above, Evomi's $49.99/100 GB is cheaper than everything else and stays at $0.49/GB beyond the bundle. The crossover is at almost exactly 50 GB — the point where DataImpulse's $1/GB catches Evomi's flat fee.

The nine-way spread at 5 GB/month is $5 to $52.50 for identical volume. That is the entire value of reading a pricing page carefully.

Why the advertised price is never what you pay

The headline rate is the biggest bundle

Every provider quotes its floor. IPRoyal's navigation says "from $1.75/GB"; the public pricing table's cheapest listed tier is $4.90/GB at 50 GB. Rayobyte's $0.50/GB requires 5,000 GB. Decodo's $2.00/GB requires a 1,000 GB enterprise plan. Read the rate at your row, not the marketing line.

Geographic tiering

SOAX charges by country class as well as volume. On the Builder plan, Tier‑1 traffic (US, UK, Western Europe) is $3.00/GB while Tier‑3 emerging markets are $1.20/GB. If you scrape US retail sites, the Tier‑3 price on the comparison chart you read elsewhere is irrelevant to you.

Subscription minimums you can't grow into

Oxylabs' cheapest residential plan is $30/month for 5 GB. SOAX's cheapest paid tier is $200/month. If you need 2 GB this month, you are buying 5 GB or 67 GB respectively. Pay-as-you-go providers — DataImpulse, Rayobyte, Bright Data — let the bill track the work.

Expiry vs rollover

This is the single least-advertised term. DataImpulse states traffic never expires and unused GB rolls over. IPRoyal says traffic stays "available until you decide to use it". Rayobyte's FAQ commits to non-expiring pay-as-you-go bandwidth. SOAX credits expire in 60 days on monthly billing. Webshare, Decodo, Oxylabs, and Bright Data do not state a rollover policy on their pricing pages — ask support in writing before you prepay, because unused bandwidth that resets monthly turns a $2.45/GB plan into $4/GB the moment your usage is lumpy.

You pay for blocked responses

Bandwidth billing is indifferent to HTTP status. A Cloudflare challenge page is 30–80 KB of transfer you are charged for, and then you retry. If 20% of your requests fail and you retry each once, your effective cost is 1.2× the sticker rate. At $3/GB that is $3.60/GB. This is why a slightly pricier provider with a cleaner pool is frequently the cheaper one — see our breakdown of residential provider quality for pool size, sourcing ethics, and session persistence, which are the factors that actually drive that failure rate.

Is a cheaper proxy type good enough?

Per-GB residential pricing only makes sense if you actually need residential IPs. The cost ladder, cheapest first:

The decision rule: start on datacenter proxies and only move to residential for the specific hosts that block you. Most scraping jobs are a long tail of easy domains plus a handful of hard ones, and paying residential rates for the easy ones is how budgets disappear. The proxy type taxonomy covers the technical differences; the general provider roundup covers the vendors across all types.

Cut your bill by cutting bytes

Since you're billed by transfer, the cheapest GB is the one you don't fetch. Blocking images, fonts, media and stylesheets in a headless browser typically removes the large majority of a page's payload while leaving the DOM you actually parse intact.

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

BLOCKED = {"image", "media", "font", "stylesheet"}

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(
        proxy={
            "server": "http://gw.dataimpulse.com:823",
            "username": "USERNAME",
            "password": "PASSWORD",
        }
    )
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.route(
        "**/*",
        lambda route: route.abort()
        if route.request.resource_type in BLOCKED
        else route.continue_(),
    )
    page.goto("https://example.com/product/123", wait_until="domcontentloaded")
    print(page.locator("h1").inner_text())
    browser.close()

Three more habits that cut the bill directly:

• Send Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br. You are billed on the compressed bytes on the wire, and HTML compresses roughly 4:1.
• Cap retries and back off. An unbounded retry loop against a blocked host bills you for every attempt.
• Cache aggressively. Re-fetching a page whose ETag hasn't changed is bandwidth you paid for twice — relevant for anything on a schedule, like price monitoring.

When per-request pricing beats per-GB

Raw proxies bill bandwidth; scraping APIs bill requests. Which is cheaper is arithmetic, not opinion.

WebScraping.AI charges credits per request: 10 credits for a residential request without JS rendering, 25 with it. On the $29/month plan (250,000 credits) that is $0.00116 and $0.0029 per request. Failed requests are not charged.

Set the two models equal to find your break-even page size:

break_even_MB = (credits_per_request × price_per_credit) / price_per_GB × 1024

At the $29 tier against DataImpulse's $1.00/GB, a non-JS residential request breaks even at ~1.2 MB of transfer, and a JS-rendered one at ~3.0 MB. Below those sizes raw proxies are cheaper; above them the API is. Median pages have been over 2 MB for years, and a headless browser pulling a full asset load is well past 3 MB, so JS-heavy targets usually land on the API side of the line.

Be clear about what that comparison includes: you're weighing raw bandwidth against a managed request that also covers the headless browser, the retry logic, and the infrastructure to run both. If you already operate a browser fleet, the bandwidth-only number is the fair one.

import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.webscraping.ai/html",
    params={
        "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
        "url": "https://example.com/product/123",
        "proxy": "residential",
        "country": "us",
        "js": "true",
    },
)
print(resp.text)

Credit costs are published per proxy type and per feature, so the bill is predictable before you send a request — but credits do expire at the end of each month and do not carry over. The free tier is 2,000 credits/month with no credit card, which is 200 residential requests without JS, enough to measure your own average page size before committing to either model. Full parameter reference is in the docs.

Whichever route you take, scraping in a way that respects the target's terms and applicable law is a separate question from cost — is web scraping legal covers it properly.

Frequently asked questions

Are there residential proxies under $2 per GB?

Yes. As of 28 July 2026, DataImpulse sells residential traffic at a flat $1.00/GB with a $5 minimum and no subscription, and Evomi works out to $0.50/GB on its $49.99/100 GB plan. Rayobyte reaches $1.50/GB at 250 GB and $0.70/GB at 1,000 GB. Below 50 GB/month, DataImpulse is the only sub‑$2 option that doesn't require a large bundle.

What is the cheapest residential proxy in 2026?

By entry cost, DataImpulse at $5 for 5 GB. By best published rate, Rayobyte and Evomi at $0.49–$0.50/GB, though Rayobyte's requires 5,000 GB and Evomi's requires a $49.99/month plan. There is no single cheapest provider independent of volume.

Is pay-as-you-go or a monthly plan cheaper?

Pay-as-you-go is cheaper whenever your usage is below the smallest subscription bundle or varies month to month, because subscriptions charge for the whole bundle regardless. Monthly plans win once your usage reliably exceeds the bundle size — the per-GB rate is typically 20–40% lower than the same provider's PAYG rate.

Do cheap residential proxies expire?

It varies and it is rarely on the pricing page. DataImpulse, IPRoyal, and Rayobyte's pay-as-you-go bandwidth are documented as non-expiring. SOAX credits expire after 60 days on monthly billing. Webshare, Decodo, Oxylabs, and Bright Data don't publish a policy — confirm with support before prepaying.

Are cheap residential proxies reliable enough for scraping?

Price and block rate are independent variables, and the cost that matters is per successful response, not per GB. Test any provider against your actual target hosts during a trial and measure the failure rate — a $1/GB pool that fails 40% of the time costs more per useful page than a $3/GB pool that fails 5%. Provider quality criteria are covered separately.

The short version

• Spending under $50/month: DataImpulse. Flat $1/GB, $5 minimum, traffic never expires.
• 50–1,000 GB/month: Evomi at $49.99/100 GB, then $0.49/GB.
• Need non-expiring bandwidth with no subscription: Rayobyte pay-as-you-go.
• Already blocked at these price points: the problem is pool quality, not price — spend up, or move to a request-priced API and stop paying for failures.

Compare our residential pricing against the incumbents on the Bright Data and Oxylabs comparisons, or start on the free tier and measure your own page sizes before you commit to a billing model.