The residential proxy market has been opaque on purpose for a decade. Providers bury pricing behind sales calls, negotiate on volume in private, and publish rack rates nobody actually pays. We changed that. In January 2026 we signed up for the published Business plan on 14 major providers, ran identical test scrapes, and measured the real cost at three volume tiers. Here is what we found.
Methodology
We tested 14 providers: Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, IPRoyal, SOAX, Webshare, Rayobyte, Infatica, NetNut, Geonode, Shifter, Proxyrack, Stormproxies, and ProxyEmpire. For each, we signed up for their published Business or Growth plan, made no special requests for pricing, and measured effective cost per GB at three consumption levels: 100 GB per month, 1 TB per month, and 10 TB per month. Where a plan charged by bandwidth, we used actual transfer. Where a plan charged by port or IP count, we divided total plan cost by measured GB transferred in a standardized 48-hour scraping session.
The headline numbers
At 100 GB per month, the median effective price is $5.20 per GB. The range runs from $2.80 (cheapest entrant) to $12.50 (premium US incumbent). At 1 TB per month, the median drops to $3.40 per GB as volume discounts kick in. At 10 TB per month the median is $2.10 per GB, but the spread narrows - only five providers actually serve this volume reliably without SLA degradation. The gap between cheapest and most expensive at each tier averages 4.5x - larger than most buyers assume when they sign their first annual proxy contract.
Who is cheap and why
The four providers with the lowest effective cost at every tier are all Southeast Asian or Eastern European in origin: IPRoyal, ProxyEmpire, Geonode, and Infatica. They price 30-40% below the US and UK incumbents at comparable volumes. The tradeoff is geo-coverage depth: these providers have strong pools in North America and Western Europe but thin coverage in Southeast Asia and LATAM - specifically the smaller cities that enterprise scrapers often need for localization testing. For commodity scraping of US or EU sources, they are genuinely excellent value. For fine-grained geo-targeting below metro level, they are not reliable.
Who is expensive and what you get for it
Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Smartproxy are the three highest-priced providers in our sample at every volume tier. They charge a premium for four things: verified residential IPs with lower ban rates on hardened targets, SOC 2 compliance documentation that enterprise procurement teams require, SLA guarantees with uptime measured at 99.9%, and dedicated account managers who will negotiate on complex multi-region requests. For teams scraping Google, Amazon, LinkedIn, or any other heavily anti-bot target at scale, the higher success rate often justifies the cost. A 40% higher proxy price that halves your retry overhead and halves your scraping infrastructure cost often comes out ahead. For teams hitting softer targets - news sites, directories, standard e-commerce - the premium is harder to justify.
Which provider for which use case
If you are scraping US e-commerce at under 500 GB per month and cost is the priority, IPRoyal and ProxyEmpire are the clear choices. If you are hitting hardened targets (Google SERPs, Amazon product pages, LinkedIn) at over 1 TB per month, Bright Data or Oxylabs are worth the premium because their success rates on those specific targets are meaningfully higher. If you need global geo-coverage below city level for localization testing, Smartproxy and SOAX have the deepest pools. For dev and test workloads under 100 GB where you just need clean IPs and do not care about enterprise SLAs, Webshare and Geonode both offer plans under $3 per GB at small volume.
What this means for buyers
If you are spending more than $3,000 per month on residential proxies and have not run a competitive bake-off in the last 12 months, you are almost certainly overpaying by 25-40%. The market has gotten more competitive since 2023. Three of the Southeast Asian entrants have improved their IP pool quality substantially. Running a parallel test with a challenger provider for 30 days costs less than one month of overpayment at most volume levels. See our Bright Data deal and Smartproxy deal for current negotiated rates below published pricing.
Full pricing dataset
We are publishing the raw pricing spreadsheet with per-provider effective cost at every tier, success rate on five standard targets, and IP pool size estimates. Sign up to the SaaSTweaks newsletter to get the spreadsheet first - it ships next Tuesday.
