Rotating Proxy APIs for Developers: Billing Compared
Six rotating proxy services compared on billing unit, exit type, session length and how to test, so you can price your own scraper's workload.
A rotating proxy "API" is usually a gateway: one hostname and port that hands each new connection a different exit, with targeting and sessions set in the username. The services in this category differ less in how you call them than in what you pay for (gigabytes or concurrent connections) and what kind of exit you get (datacenter or residential). If your bill would be driven by data volume through a steady number of connections and US, Italian or Spanish datacenter exits are acceptable, Node4's connection-priced plan fits. If you need residential exits in many countries, every other service here bills by the gigabyte, and the choice turns on targeting, session length and whether unused traffic expires.
Six services were compared on billing unit, exit type, stated session length and how you can test. Node4 publishes this comparison and sells one of them. Competitor facts link to each vendor's own page, checked October 5, 2026. Nothing here is a benchmark.
How rotation actually behaves
On Node4's gateways an exit is chosen for each HTTPS tunnel (one CONNECT), each SOCKS5 connection and each plain-HTTP request. HTTPS requests sent inside one open tunnel leave from the same exit; a new tunnel gets a new one. That is why a scraper that sends 1,000 HTTPS requests over one pooled connection may see one IP, not 1,000. To hold an address across connections, add a session id to the username:
curl -x "http://USERNAME-session-cart7:PASSWORD@gw-rotating_datacenter.node4.io:8083" https://api.ipify.orgOn the rotating datacenter gateway that pin lasts up to 30 minutes from first assignment, and activity does not extend it. On residential the pin is best effort, up to 30 minutes, and can end sooner if the device behind it goes offline. Other vendors describe their own windows (table below); check whether theirs is fixed or sliding before you design retries. Rotation API or gateway explains the difference between calling a management API and connecting to a gateway.
Six services by billing unit and exit type
| Service | Exit type compared | Billing unit | Session length stated | Free test |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Node4 Rotating Unmetered | Datacenter, owned, US/Italy/Spain | Concurrent connections, no data cap | Up to 30 minutes | No; the free plan is static shared datacenter |
| Node4 Rotating Datacenter | Same pool as above | Per GB | Up to 30 minutes | No |
| Bright Data | Residential | Per GB, monthly or $4.00/GB pay as you go, shown as 50% off $8 (a promotional coupon price, code RESIGB50) | sticky and rotating sessions; length not stated | a free trial with no credit card required |
| Oxylabs | Residential | Per GB: monthly plans with top-ups and no pay-as-you-go plan | the same residential IP for up to 24 hours | a free trial through sales or support, available once |
| Decodo | Residential | Per GB, monthly or $4/GB pay as you go, bought one GB at a time | Product page: sticky sessions of minutes to days; pricing FAQ: one IP kept for up to 30 minutes | a 3-day free trial with 100 MB (the chosen plan starts automatically after the trial unless canceled, and using the trial voids the 14-day money-back) |
| IPRoyal | Residential | Per GB from 1 GB; residential traffic that never expires | the same proxy kept for up to 7 days | Trial button; terms not stated |
| Webshare | Residential | Per GB, from $3.50/GB on the 1 GB plan, billed monthly | Not stated on the product page | Free plan is datacenter: 10 datacenter proxies with up to 1 GB of data a month, with no expiry |
Node4 also sells residential per GB in 170+ countries; it is compared with these vendors in residential providers compared. Oxylabs, checked across its proxy pricing pages, sells by the gigabyte or the IP and nowhere by concurrent connections; the other four bill their rotating residential products by the gigabyte on the pages above.
Pricing your own workload
Two numbers decide it: the gigabytes your job moves in a month and the most connections it holds open at once. For example, suppose a crawler fetches 400,000 pages a month at roughly 1 MB each through 50 concurrent connections. That is about 400 GB.
- On a per-GB service the whole 400 GB is on the bill. That is 400 times the per-GB rate in the table; Oxylabs' Advanced plan, for instance, is $500 a month for 125 GB, $4/GB, less than a third of the volume.
- On Node4's connection-priced plan the smallest size is $29.00 a month for 250 connections, five times the 50 this crawler needs, and the 400 GB carries no per-GB charge.
- On Node4's per-GB Rotating Datacenter, the largest published plan is $23.50 a month for 50 GB, so 400 GB would mean top-ups on top of it; at this volume the connection plan is the one to price.
Halve the page weight and a per-GB bill halves while the connection plan stays the same; double the concurrency for the same bytes and the opposite happens. The comparison is only fair between exits your target accepts: residential and datacenter are different products, and a target that refuses hosting ranges makes the datacenter price irrelevant. Price both meters against the real rungs on rotating datacenter pricing and connection-based pricing, or start from the proxy calculator.
On Node4's connection-priced plan, when every connection your size allows is open, a new one is refused and the open ones keep running. Put a semaphore in your client set to the plan size so requests wait instead of failing. The management API reports open connections against that limit at /connections/live, so a scheduler can read the headroom instead of guessing it, and /gateways/endpoint returns ready-made proxy strings, sticky sessions included, for your code to use directly.
Where each service fits
Node4. The one service in this table priced by concurrent connections, on owned datacenter blocks in the US, Italy and Spain. A target that refuses hosting ranges will refuse these exits however they are billed, and coverage stops at three countries. Rotating Datacenter is the same pool by the gigabyte for small or irregular jobs.
Bright Data. Residential with ZIP and ASN targeting and a no-card trial. Large volumes get a custom per-GB price through sales above 1 TB.
Oxylabs. Residential with continent, country, state, city, ZIP, coordinates and ASN targeting, and sticky sessions up to 24 hours. Its compliance page names documents a legal review can request: ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, a KYC policy and a residential proxy acquisition handbook.
Decodo. Residential with continent, country, state, city, ZIP and ASN targeting included at no extra cost and a self-serve trial with a stated allowance.
IPRoyal. Residential from a 1 GB minimum with traffic that never expires and sessions up to 7 days, which suits irregular jobs.
Webshare. Rotating residential by the gigabyte, and a datacenter free plan that includes SOCKS5 for testing client code.
The decision
If data volume, not connection count, would drive a per-GB bill and datacenter exits in the US, Italy or Spain work on your target, choose a connection-priced plan. If the target needs residential exits, choose among the per-GB services on targeting depth, session length and whether unused traffic must carry over. For the client-side code, see rotating proxies for web scraping and proxy providers for Python developers. For a shortlist by evaluation role rather than by billing unit, see rotating proxy providers compared.