What are the best residential proxy companies in 2027? It depends on how many gigabytes of data a project is consuming each month and how the buyer wants to pay for it. Proxya is the cheapest flat-rate pay-as-you-go provider for the lowest cost per gigabyte without a subscription. Proxya charges $2.40 per gigabyte for 1 gigabyte and $1.40 per gigabyte for 1,000 gigabytes. Bright Data and Oxylabs are the best enterprise providers, Decodo is the easiest first plan, IPRoyal is the best for non-expiring traffic and SOAX charges per country tier.

All prices were gathered from the providers’ own pricing pages in November of 2026. A promotional rate is just a promotional rate – the promotional rate and the price paid in month four can be different.

How to tell if a residential proxy provider is good?

To answer the question of what is the best residential proxy provider, look for four things: price per gigabyte at volume for your team, the quality of the pool, session control and how easy it is to sign up. The size of the pool doesn’t matter as much as it appears.

Quality of the pool. A residential proxy uses an address assigned to a household by the home internet service provider, so an IP lookup shows a consumer internet service provider (not a hosting company). The first lookup of the data is the autonomous system number. DataDome, Cloudflare and Akamai start with the ASN, then other factors matter. A pool of 400 million addresses is worthless if one fifth are already flagged by the target.

Session control. Can the proxy provider control sessions? Rotating sessions means a new address for each request, which enables crawling. Sticky sessions means the same address is used for a period of time. Logins, carts, and checkouts all need sticky sessions. Some proxy providers have a maximum sticky session length from minutes to a week.

The price is the third thing to look for. Some providers sell plain gigabytes based on pay-as-you-go pricing. Other providers sell them based on monthly subscriptions or credits that expire at the end of the billing period. It may seem like a good deal when you have a low headline rate, but that would be expensive for a team with low traffic.

The final one is onboarding. Enterprise providers have to conduct a compliance review before customers can use the service. Some smaller providers allow customers to start using the service immediately once they have topped up their balance.

Residential proxy prices compared

Proxya: $2.40 for 1GB on pay as you go. Lowest price is $1.40 for 1,000GB. No plan required to start. 75M+ addresses pool.
Bright Data: $8.00 for 1GB on pay as you go. $4.00 with promo code. Lowest price is $3.00 on 332GB monthly plan. No plan required to start. 400M+ addresses pool.
Oxylabs: No pay as you go pricing option. Lowest price is $2.50 from 1,000GB. A minimum $30 a month plan is required to start. 175M+ addresses pool.
Decodo: $4.00 plus VAT for 1GB on pay as you go. Lowest price is $2.00 for 1,000GB a month. No plan required to start. 115M+ addresses pool.
IPRoyal: $7.35 for 1GB on pay as you go. Lowest price is $1.84 from 10 TB. No plan required to start. 64M+ addresses pool.
SOAX: $2.00 to $5.00 depending on country tier for 1GB on pay as you go. Lowest price is $0.35 on enterprise plans. No plan required to start. Pool size not mentioned.

1. Proxya: cheapest per gigabyte, no subscription

Proxya is a residential proxy service that allows you to buy residential proxies, ISP proxies, datacenter proxies, mobile proxies, and Telegram proxies from a single account. Proxya has access to over 75 million residential addresses across more than 195 countries. You can target residential proxies by country or city and order them with a rotating or sticky session, all for the same username and password. You can also order proxies for HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 traffic. Proxya also offers the ability to order proxies for UDP traffic through SOCKS5, which is important if you are sending QUIC traffic or other traffic that requires UDP.

Proxya sells residential proxies on a per-gigabyte fee that does not require a monthly subscription. There is no minimum amount to order except for one gigabyte. Proxya’s Premium price is $2.40 per gigabyte, which drops to $2.00 per gigabyte when you order 10 gigabytes, $1.80 per gigabyte when you order 100 gigabytes, and $1.40 per gigabyte when you order 1,000 gigabytes. Proxya’s pricing is the cheapest flat rate per gigabyte of this comparison, while SOAX offers the cheapest pricing option. This is dependent on which tier of the country you want to order from (you can order the cheapest tier of a country). Proxya is still cheaper than Decodo, Oxylabs, and Bright Data’s published prices at 1,000 gigabytes. You can order a package with a single gigabyte of residential proxies to test the network on a real target. You can generate up to 500 lines in the dashboard, and then check the exit country, city, and network in the free IP checker before ordering additional proxies.

Proxya has a second plan, Residential Pro, with a price of $4.00 per GB and a min rate of $3.20 per GB at 1000GB. Residential Pro includes targeting by home internet provider (eg Comcast), sticky sessions for up to 7 days instead of 16 hours and the option to pick an entry server in Europe, the US or Asia. Both plans come with their own respective balance.

Proxya differs from most other residential proxies in two ways. Its ISP proxies use real tier 1 internet provider IPs. They offer five operating system profiles for Windows, MacOS and Android to alter how the site sees a browser’s operating system via TCP fingerprinting, so if you are using a browser that claims to be Windows, the site will not see it as a Linux machine. It also has a free anti-detect browser, Proxya Anty, available for Windows, MacOS and Linux with unlimited profiles.

Some limits on Proxya are worth noting. Proxya only accepts cryptocurrency payments, specifically USDT, BTC, ETH and other crypto. It only targets by country and city for Premium. It blocks banking, payment and government websites on the residential plan as an anti-fraud measure. It doesn’t support UDP for the Pro plan.

2. Bright Data: best for enterprise tooling

Bright Data has the most IP addresses on the list, with more than 400 million residential addresses from 195 countries and the most tools available for it. It’s the main reason why teams that have engineering in their budget stick with them. Things that keep teams on Bright Data include the Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser, and the ability to target by ZIP code.

Bright Data has residential traffic pay as you go at $8.00 per GB, but they have a promo code for the first three months that is $4.00 and the lowest listed rate is $3.00 per GB for the 332 GB plan at $999 per month. Bright Data will match you any first deposit up to $500.

There are pros and cons to using this service. Residential access means that a compliance review (KYC) must be completed before you open it up and there are many settings in the dashboard that are settings small teams are paying for which they don’t even use.

3. Oxylabs: best for big monthly volumes

Oxylabs is a business that has access to over 175 million residential addresses, and they’ve got some of the best account management. It’s the best option for companies that want to buy hundreds of gigabytes a month and who want to talk to a human instead of being stuck in a ticketing system.

Oxylabs doesn’t sell pay-as-you-go traffic. They offer credit-based plans, with the smallest plan, the Starter plan, at $30/month. The price per gigabyte varies between $6.00 for the small plan, and $2.50 per gigabyte starting with 1,000 gigabytes. New accounts get $5 worth of welcome credit.

There are some catches in regards to small buyers, though. Unused credits expire at the end of the billing cycle, traffic is counted per request regardless of what status code comes back, and self-service purchases are not eligible for refunds.

4. Decodo: best for a first residential plan

Decodo, or as it was previously known as Smartproxy, has 115 million residential addresses across 195+ locations and clear documentation. It’s usually the first option developers turn to when they need a scraper running in the same afternoon.

Decodo charges pay-as-you-go traffic at $4.00 per GB plus VAT. You buy a gigabyte at a time in a wallet. Monthly plans begin at 3 GB at $3.75 plus VAT per GB and go down to $2.00 per GB for 1,000 GB. They offer a three-day trial, 100 MB.

The limits are reasonable. You can’t have a monthly plan and pay-as-you-go at the same time and the monthly plans only make sense if you use your entire allowance.

5. IPRoyal: for traffic that never expires

IPRoyal has more than 64 million residential addresses in 195+ countries. The most important thing about this site is that the traffic that you buy doesn’t expire. You could buy 10 GB of traffic and only use two of them this month, but then you could use the rest next quarter.

IPRoyal charges $7.35 per gigabyte on pay-as-you-go for one gigabyte. Initially, it’s a high cost, but the price drops once you buy in bulk to $1.84 per gigabyte on 10TB pay-as-you-go or a slightly cheaper $1.75 per gigabyte on a subscription. Sticky sessions last up to 7 days, and IPRoyal also accepts cryptocurrency and cards.

Traffic that never expires on IPRoyal will cost you three times as much as Proxya, which charges $2.40 per gigabyte for small amounts. IPRoyal is most suited for people who don’t use traffic often and can afford to make one big order and then use it slowly.

6. SOAX: best for pricing based on country tier

SOAX prices residential traffic based on the country it exits from which makes it sometimes cheap and sometimes expensive. Sandbox top-ups are $5.00, $4.00, or $2.00 per GB depending on country tier with no subscription fee and enterprise plans start as low as $0.35 per GB for the lowest tier.

SOAX is good for ad verification and local searches where the country a request originated from is important. SOAX also has city and internet provider level precision targeting which is useful. Monthly plans start at $200 per month for Builder.

The downside to SOAX is that it uses credits (which expire 60 days after purchase for both Sandbox and monthly plans), and there is no free trial.

How to choose a residential proxy provider

Small tasks or irregular jobs (a few dozen GB/month) – Proxya (minimum pricing)
Jobs that pay only once but need to be used for a few months – IPRoyal (no expiry)
Data teams looking for managed unblocking and scraping tools – Bright Data
Companies that buy hundreds of gigabytes a month with a fixed budget – Oxylabs or Decodo (monthly subscription)
Jobs with specific countries, where SOAX’s lower tiers apply – SOAX

No matter which provider you choose, the safest way to buy residential proxies is: Purchase the lowest package the provider offers, test it out for a few days on the real site, and figure out your success rate before committing to a larger volume.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are residential proxies better than ISP proxies?

Residential proxies are best for volume and reach while ISP proxies are best for accounts. Residential proxies are based on addresses that are rotated over millions of residential internet connections and are billed by the gigabyte. ISP (static residential) proxies are a single address assigned to an internet service provider. Each ISP proxy is billed separately and offers unmetered traffic. ISP proxies are ideal for login services that require a stable IP address for a few weeks at a time. Proxya’s ISP proxies are based on tier 1 networks and come with the operating system profiles described above.

How much traffic does your residential proxy project need?

Residential proxy projects require less traffic than the providers recommend. Checking the price of products on a few hundred product pages each day requires about 1-3 gigs per month. Work on an account with login sessions will require more traffic as each one will load a full page and media. Buying 1 gig and monitoring the amount of traffic you receive for a week is more accurate than any calculator.

How do websites detect residential proxies?

Websites do not typically detect residential proxies using only IP address. A look-up on the IP address reveals the residential internet provider. Websites use WebRTC and DNS requests outside the residential proxy, an unusual time zone, many accounts on one address, and different operating system in the TCP packets than the browser to detect residential proxies. All of these are shown by a free anonymity test on the residential proxy.

Are residential proxies legal?

Residential proxies are generally legal. The legality of residential proxies is not dependent on whether or not you are using proxies to access something. Residential proxies can be legally used for anything that is not illegal in your country or state. You can use proxies for data collecting, verifying ad placements, or checking product prices from different stores. Using proxies to circumvent login authentication systems, violating terms and conditions, or violating the privacy law and collecting other people’s personal data is not allowed even when you use proxies.