How Much Do Residential Proxies Cost in 2026
Residential proxies cost $1.75 to $8 per GB in 2026, and per-GB is the least useful number. What matters is cost per successful page after retries.
Rankings reflect documented features, public pricing as of the "Last Updated" date, and category positioning analysis. We apply a Commercial Gate: only tools we can earn a commission from (now or in the next 12 months) enter the ranking pool. When a non-monetizable tool is the right answer, we name it with a caveat. How rankings work · Editorial policy
Bright Data
Pay $5 per GB on Bright Data if the job is production scraping where a failed request costs more than the bandwidth. Pay $1.75 per GB on IPRoyal if the job is occasional, tolerant of retries, and small enough that the per-GB headline actually governs the bill. Pay $7 on Decodo for the middle: reliable enough for real work, self-serve, and without the enterprise minimums. Above $8 per GB you are buying a sales conversation and a contract, not better IPs. The number that decides which tier is right is not the per-GB price, it is how many GB a successful page actually costs once retries are counted.
Try Bright DataAt a Glance
| Feature | IPRoyal | Bright Data | Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) | Oxylabs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | From $1.75/GB, non-expiring | From $5/GB, pay as you go | From $7/GB, monthly plans | From $8/GB, enterprise tiers |
| Per-GB Price | - | - | - | - |
| Billing Model | - | - | - | - |
| Minimum Commitment | - | - | - | - |
| Best For | - | - | - | - |
Quick Comparison
Our Top Picks
IPRoyal
The floor of residential pricing, and the only one here where traffic never expires.
- Lowest per-GB price in the category
- Traffic never expires, so burst usage is not penalised
- Self-serve with no minimum commitment
- Smaller pool and lower success rate on hardened targets
- Retries on hard targets erode the price advantage
- Thinner tooling than the premium providers
Bright Data
The price anchor for production scraping. The GB costs more and buys more successful pages.
- Highest success rate on hardened targets, so retries stay low
- Pay-as-you-go with no minimum at the $5 rate
- Volume tiers reduce the rate materially at scale
- ZIP-level targeting included rather than surcharged
- Add-on products are separately metered and add up fast
- Compliance onboarding takes longer than self-serve competitors
- Overkill for occasional or easy-target scraping
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)
The middle tier. Self-serve, reliable, and priced for teams that outgrew the cheap pool.
- Success rates close to Bright Data on mainstream targets
- Cleanest dashboard and fully self-serve
- Per-GB rate falls materially on larger monthly plans
- Unused monthly traffic is forfeited
- Headline $7 is the small-plan rate, not the working rate
- Weaker on the hardest targets than Bright Data
Oxylabs
Where the pricing model changes shape. Sales-led, contracted, and priced for scale rather than entry.
- Strongest enterprise support and compliance documentation
- Effective rate falls well below $8 on committed volume
- Custom SLAs and dedicated account management
- Highest entry rate in the category
- Sales-led, so small buyers face friction for little benefit
- Wrong tier for anything below sustained high-volume use
How This Was Tested
Pricing reflects public list prices and standard pay-as-you-go or entry-plan rates on vendor websites as of September 2026. Per-GB rates fall with volume on every provider listed; the figures quoted are entry rates and the review text indicates where the working rate diverges materially. Success-rate observations reflect operator-reported results on standard scraping benchmarks rather than vendor claims.
Frequently Asked Questions
Between $1.75 and $8 per GB at entry rates. IPRoyal starts at $1.75 with non-expiring traffic, Bright Data at $5 pay-as-you-go, Decodo at $7 on monthly plans, and Oxylabs at $8 on enterprise tiers. Every provider reduces the rate substantially with volume, so entry prices describe small usage and the working rate for a serious operation is usually lower.
Because a failed request still consumes bandwidth. A cheap pool with a 70 percent success rate on a hard target uses roughly 1.4GB to deliver 1GB of useful pages, while a premium pool at 95 percent uses about 1.05GB. On difficult targets the $5 gigabyte can deliver results cheaper than the $1.75 one. Compare cost per successful page, not cost per gigabyte, and the ranking often inverts.
On most providers, yes, at the end of the monthly billing period. Decodo and Oxylabs plans forfeit unused bandwidth. Bright Data pay-as-you-go bills what is used. IPRoyal is the exception here: purchased traffic sits in the account until consumed, which makes it the right model for teams that scrape in irregular bursts rather than continuously.
IPRoyal at $1.75 per GB with no minimum and no expiry, or Bright Data pay-as-you-go at $5 with no minimum. Both allow buying a few gigabytes to test a target before committing to a plan. Avoid monthly plans until the traffic pattern is known, because a plan sized for peak usage forfeits bandwidth in every quieter month.
When monthly spend is high enough that a negotiated rate saves more than the account management costs in time, which typically means sustained usage in the hundreds of gigabytes per month or more. Below that, self-serve providers deliver comparable success rates without the procurement cycle, and the flexibility to change plans monthly is worth more than a modest rate reduction.
Substantially, usually five to twenty times per GB, because residential IPs belong to real consumer connections and are harder for targets to detect and block. Datacenter proxies are the right choice for targets that do not block them, which is a shrinking set. Paying residential rates for a target that accepts datacenter traffic wastes money; paying datacenter rates for a target that blocks them wastes everything.