Unlimited Bandwidth Proxies: What Each Plan Actually Limits
Unmetered proxy plans still cap something: IPs, fair use, daily volume or open connections. Eight providers' published terms side by side.
A proxy plan sold without a data meter still limits something, and that limit is what you are buying. Some plans charge per IP and attach a fair-use allowance to each one. Some cut concurrency once an IP passes a monthly threshold. Some cap traffic per day and per thread. Node4 sells two products with no data cap: dedicated datacenter proxies, billed per IP per month, and Rotating Unmetered, billed by how many connections you hold open at once. Node4 publishes this guide and sells both.
Competitor terms below come from each vendor's own pages, checked October 5, 2026, and each one links to its source. They are published terms, not measurements. No provider here was speed tested or block tested.
Eight providers, and what bounds the data
| Provider and product | Billed by | What bounds your traffic |
|---|---|---|
| Node4 dedicated datacenter | Per IP, per month | No data cap; one customer per IP, so the bound is the number of IPs you buy. $7.45/month for 5 proxies ($1.49 per proxy), falling to $0.75 per proxy on the 1,000-proxy plan |
| Node4 Rotating Unmetered | Concurrent connections | No data cap; a new connection is refused while your plan's count is open. $29.00/month for 250 connections ($0.116 per connection) |
| Oxylabs datacenter | Per IP | unlimited bandwidth with fair usage, with concurrent sessions per IP cut from 100 to 10 after 100 GB a month on dedicated IPs or 50 GB on shared IPs |
| Bright Data datacenter | Per IP | a 100 GB fair usage allowance per IP per month, with possible extra charges above it |
| Webshare Proxy Server | Per proxy, plus a bandwidth tier | bandwidth tiers from 250 GB to Unlimited, subject to its Fair Usage Policy |
| IPRoyal datacenter | Per proxy, fixed-term packages | Product FAQ: 100 GB of traffic per proxy per monthly cycle, pooled across the order, then a speed reduction. Pricing page: unlimited bandwidth on datacenter proxies (IPRoyal's datacenter product FAQ and its general pricing page disagree on datacenter bandwidth) |
| PrivateProxy.me | Per proxy | unlimited bandwidth on all packages by default |
| ProxyRotator | Threads and a monthly GB allowance | $99.95 a month for 750 GB, capped at 25 GB a day, with 25 threads |
| AggProxy rotating residential | Per GB | Unlimited Bandwidth and Requests, on a plan priced per GB |
The five shapes a data limit takes
Read the table by the right-hand column, because the billing unit alone does not tell you what stops your job.
Per IP with no cap. Each address costs the same whether it moves a gigabyte or a terabyte. The limit is how much traffic one address can carry before a target starts refusing it, which is a property of the target, not the plan. Node4 dedicated proxies work this way.
Per IP with a fair-use allowance. A monthly figure per IP, with either extra charges or a slowdown above it. Bright Data and IPRoyal's product FAQ describe this shape. If your job moves far more data per IP than the allowance, the per-IP price is no longer the whole bill.
Per IP with a concurrency cut. Oxylabs keeps bandwidth open but reduces how many sessions an IP may hold after a monthly threshold. A crawler that relies on many parallel sessions per IP slows down rather than being billed.
A daily volume cap. ProxyRotator spreads its monthly allowance across days and pairs it with a thread count. A job that runs in bursts, a large crawl one day and nothing for a week, is sized by its heaviest day.
Per concurrent connection. Rotating Unmetered does not count bytes at all. You buy a number of connections that can be open at the same time; while that many are open, the next one is refused and the open ones keep running. An HTTPS tunnel or a SOCKS5 connection holds a slot for as long as your client keeps it open, so size the plan against your client's connection pool, not its request rate.
A worked example
Suppose a price-monitoring crawler moves about 2 TB a month through rotating exits and never has more than 100 connections open at once. Its busiest day moves about 80 GB.
- Node4 Rotating Unmetered: 100 connections fits inside the smallest plan, $29.00/month for 250 connections ($0.116 per connection), and the 2 TB adds nothing to it. Rotating Datacenter, Node4's per-GB rotating plan, is sized for far less: its largest plan is $23.50/month for 50 GB ($0.47/GB), so at this volume the unmetered plan is the one built for the job.
- ProxyRotator: the 25-thread plan's daily cap is below this job's average day, so the size that fits is $349.95 a month for 3,000 GB, capped at 100 GB a day, with 100 threads. The busiest day stays under that plan's daily cap; a heavier day would not.
- Per-GB rotating plans elsewhere bill the 2 TB itself; multiply your monthly volume by the rate at the plan size you would actually buy.
ProxyRotator does something Node4's rotating plans do not: residential, datacenter, mobile and IPv6 IPs from one pool, with equal access on every plan. Node4's rotating exits are datacenter addresses on blocks Node4 owns in the US, Italy and Spain. If your targets refuse datacenter ranges, or you need exits in other countries, an unmetered datacenter plan does not help however it is priced, and per-GB residential is the product to test. Check a target before buying with block replay, which fetches a URL from both kinds of address and reports whether they are treated differently.
Static IPs or rotating: which unmetered product
Both Node4 products are unmetered, and they solve different jobs.
Choose dedicated datacenter proxies when the address has to stay the same: a login that expects one IP, a partner API that whitelists your address, or a crawl you want to spread over a fixed set of IPs you control. Each IP belongs to one customer and stays yours until you refresh it. Plans run from $7.45/month for 5 proxies ($1.49 per proxy) to $750.00/month for 1,000 proxies ($0.75 per proxy); the full ladder is on the dedicated pricing page.
Choose Rotating Unmetered when you want a different exit per connection without managing an IP list. The gateway picks an exit for each HTTPS tunnel, SOCKS5 connection or plain-HTTP request, and a session id holds one exit for up to 30 minutes when you need continuity. Rotation is per connection, not per request, so an HTTPS client that reuses one keep-alive tunnel keeps one exit until it opens a new tunnel. The mechanics are in the IP rotation guide.
If your volume is small, neither is the best buy. A few gigabytes a month at low concurrency costs less on a per-GB plan; per-GB vs connection-priced rotating plans walks through where the two meters cross.
Questions to ask before trusting an "unlimited" plan
- Is there a fair-use figure, and where is it written? A pricing page and a product FAQ can disagree, as IPRoyal's do above. Read both.
- What happens at the limit? Extra charges, a slowdown, a concurrency cut and a refused connection are four different outcomes for the same job.
- Is the limit monthly or daily? A daily cap punishes bursty work that a monthly allowance would absorb.
- Does the unmetered part cover the IP type you need? An unmetered datacenter plan and a metered residential plan from the same vendor are different products.
- How many connections can you hold open? For rotating plans, concurrency is often the real ceiling. Proxies for high concurrent connections covers how providers sell it.
For a wider per-IP comparison of datacenter providers, including minimum orders and free tests, see datacenter proxy providers compared. To size a plan from your own volume and response sizes, use the proxy calculator.