Cheap Proxy Providers Compared by How They Bill

Six proxy providers compared on billing unit, free tier, data expiry and self-serve limits, from their own pricing pages, to find the lowest bill.

The lowest bill comes from the provider whose billing unit matches your traffic. If you run a steady scraper, per-proxy or per-connection billing keeps the bill flat. If your usage is irregular, prepaid gigabytes that do not expire beat a monthly allowance you lose at renewal. If you only need to prove a script works, a free plan costs nothing. This guide compares six providers on those terms: Node4, Webshare, IPRoyal, Decodo, Oxylabs and Bright Data. Node4 publishes this guide and sells one of the products in it.

Competitor figures come from each vendor's own pages, checked October 5, 2026, and each one links to the page it came from. They are published terms, not measurements: nothing here was speed or block tested, and rates change, so open the linked page before you buy.

The criteria

Each provider is compared on the same six questions, because these decide the total bill for a small or mid-sized buyer:

1. Billing unit: per gigabyte, per proxy, or per concurrent connection.
2. Smallest purchase: what you must buy to start.
3. Entry and bulk rate: what the smallest purchase costs per unit against the largest published rate.
4. Expiry: whether unused data rolls over, resets monthly, or expires.
5. Free plan or trial: what you can test before paying.
6. Self-serve ceiling: where published pricing stops and a sales quote starts.

Six providers compared

"Not stated" means the linked page did not say, not that the option does not exist, and it is never counted as a point for Node4. Two promotions affect the table: Bright Data's rates are shown as 50% off with a coupon, and Webshare's residential rates are shown against a higher list price.

Where each one is cheapest

Node4. Datacenter, shared and rotating datacenter proxies use blocks Node4 owns in the US, Italy and Spain; residential exits come from a partner network in 170+ countries. The low-cost datacenter options are shared proxies, where up to five customers share each address and your order draws from one data pool, and dedicated proxies, priced per proxy with no data cap, from $7.45 a month for five. For steady rotating traffic, Rotating Unmetered charges by concurrent connections instead of data, from $29.00 a month for 250 connections, so heavy pages do not raise the bill. The free plan is 3 free shared proxies, 1 GB a month, no card required, over HTTP(S) only; SOCKS5 and the rotating and residential gateways need a paid plan. The free plan has no end date; if your free proxies carry no traffic for 30 days we pause them, and you can reactivate a fresh set from your dashboard in one click. Where Node4 costs more: residential allowances reset each billing period, so irregular users pay for data they do not use, and datacenter locations are limited to three countries.

Webshare. The free plan is 10 datacenter proxies with up to 1 GB of data a month, with no expiry, and needs no credit card and no trial period. Paid datacenter proxies run from $2.99 a month for 100 proxies to $1,794 a month for 100,000 proxies (shown as 40% off a $2,990 list price), with bandwidth tiers from 250 GB to Unlimited, subject to its Fair Usage Policy. Cheapest fit: a datacenter job that grows from a free test to thousands of proxies on one account.

IPRoyal. It sells prepaid residential traffic that never expires with a zero monthly minimum and no long-term contracts, which suits occasional use. The catch is the gap between the entry rate, $7.35/GB for 1 GB pay as you go, and the bulk rate, $1.84/GB pay as you go from 10 TB. Cheapest fit: irregular residential use, a few gigabytes bought and used over months. Its datacenter proxies are fixed-term packages, from $1.57 a proxy for 30 days, $1.48 for 60 days and $1.39 for 90 days, and its own pages disagree about their traffic: the product FAQ gives 100 GB of traffic per proxy per monthly cycle, pooled across the order, then a speed reduction, while the general pricing page says unlimited bandwidth on datacenter proxies. Ask IPRoyal which applies before a data-heavy order.

Decodo. Residential starts at $11.25 a month for 3 GB, $3.75/GB, and every plan has continent, country, state, city, ZIP and ASN targeting included at no extra cost. Note the expiry rules: unused GB on a monthly plan does not carry into the next billing cycle, but the pay-as-you-go option ($4/GB pay as you go, bought one GB at a time) comes with pay-as-you-go traffic usable for 12 months. Cheapest fit: small residential jobs that need ZIP or ASN targeting without paying extra for it.

Oxylabs. Residential is sold as monthly plans with top-ups and no pay-as-you-go plan, from $30 a month for 5 GB, $6/GB to $2,500 a month for 1 TB, $2.50/GB. Cheapest fit: a team that will use a large plan every month.

Bright Data. It prices residential, ISP and datacenter on one pricing page. Residential costs $4.00/GB pay as you go, shown as 50% off $8 (a promotional coupon price, code RESIGB50); the monthly plans start at $499 a month for 141 GB, $3.50/GB, and above that the page offers a custom per-GB price through sales above 1 TB. Cheapest fit: a buyer who wants several proxy types on one invoice and can commit to a monthly plan.

A worked example: 20 GB of residential traffic a month

Suppose a scraper needs 20 GB of residential data every month, steadily. On the published terms, before VAT and with each vendor's current promotion as shown:

• Oxylabs sells exactly this size: $100 a month for 20 GB, $5/GB.
• Node4 has no 20 GB plan. The 25 GB plan is $19.99 a month. The alternative is the 10 GB plan at $9.99 a month plus 10 GB of top-ups, which are priced from your plan's own per-GB rate with a markup, so compare both totals on residential pricing before choosing.
• Decodo has no 20 GB plan either: $81.25 a month for 25 GB, $3.25/GB, or twenty gigabytes at $4/GB pay as you go, bought one GB at a time.
• Webshare charges $2.60/GB on the 25 GB plan, billed monthly, shown against a $7.00/GB list price.
• Bright Data charges $4.00/GB pay as you go, shown as 50% off $8, so 20 GB costs twenty times that rate; its smallest monthly plan, $499 a month for 141 GB, $3.50/GB, is sized for far more traffic.
• IPRoyal shows fixed tiers up to 10 GB, the largest at $5.51/GB for 10 GB pay as you go, and custom pricing from 10 TB; a 20 GB price is not published, so price it in their checkout. Its advantage here is not the rate but expiry: unused gigabytes carry forward.

If the 20 GB is really "60 GB this quarter, nothing next quarter", the order changes: a monthly plan wastes the idle months, and IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic or Decodo's 12-month pay-as-you-go traffic wins. The free plans at Webshare and Node4 cover testing, not this job: both are datacenter, and Node4's cannot reach the residential gateway.

For a steady datacenter scraper rather than residential, per-proxy plans (Node4 dedicated or shared, Webshare, IPRoyal packages) or Node4's connection-billed Rotating Unmetered usually beat per-gigabyte billing, because the bill no longer depends on page weight. The proxy calculator sizes either case from your own numbers.

Which provider to choose

Pick the billing unit first. Irregular residential use: IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic, or Decodo pay as you go. Steady residential use at a known monthly volume: compare the plan that covers your volume at each vendor, including Node4 residential, using the totals above rather than the headline rates. Steady datacenter scraping: per-proxy plans, or Node4 Rotating Unmetered if you want rotating exits without a data meter on your bill. Testing a script before paying: Webshare's or Node4's free plan. For datacenter providers in more depth, see datacenter proxy providers compared; for job-specific choices, see proxies for sneaker bots and proxies for SEO rank tracking.