Unlimited Bandwidth on Dedicated vs Per-GB Rotating

Rotating and residential proxies are metered. Dedicated datacenter proxies are not. Which one is cheaper depends entirely on what your traffic looks like.

Search for rotating proxies and you will find bandwidth described as unlimited on a great many of them. It is worth understanding what that phrase can and cannot mean, because the two billing models behind it suit opposite kinds of work, and picking the wrong one is the most common way to overpay for proxies by a large multiple.

Here is the honest version for this site, stated plainly before anything else:

Node4 rotating proxies are metered. Rotating shared and rotating premium are both billed per gigabyte, with a monthly allowance. So are residential proxies. Node4 dedicated datacenter proxies carry unlimited bandwidth, because they are billed per proxy per month and no meter is applied to them at all.

If you arrived looking for a rotating product with no meter on it, that specific combination is not something we sell, and this guide explains what to do instead rather than pretending otherwise.

The two models, and what each is really charging for

A per-gigabyte product charges for traffic. The address is almost free; what costs money is the data crossing it. This is how residential and rotating pools are priced almost everywhere, because the supply behind them is genuinely consumed by volume: someone is paying for that transit, and a customer moving ten times more data costs ten times more to serve.

A per-proxy product charges for exclusivity. You are renting an address for a month. Whether you push a hundred megabytes or a hundred gigabytes through it, the cost to the provider is roughly the same, because the address was allocated to you either way and the bandwidth sits on a datacenter uplink that is already paid for. That is why unlimited bandwidth is a normal and honest offer on dedicated datacenter proxies and an implausible one on residential.

When a provider advertises residential or rotating traffic as unmetered, look immediately for the qualifier. There is almost always one: a speed cap after some threshold, a fair-use clause, a concurrency limit that makes volume impractical, or a price per address high enough that the bandwidth is priced in regardless. None of those are dishonest by themselves. The problem is when the limit is discoverable only after you have committed.

Which one is cheaper for your job

The break-even is not about size. It is about bytes per request.

Consider a job making many small requests. API polling, price checks, availability lookups, status pages. Each response is a few kilobytes. A hundred thousand of those might total a couple of gigabytes. On a per-GB product that is trivial. On a per-proxy product you are paying a monthly rental for addresses that spend most of the month idle. Per-GB wins.

Now consider a job moving large responses. Full page HTML with assets, file downloads, media, anything where a single response is measured in megabytes. Ten thousand of those can be tens of gigabytes. On a per-GB product the bill scales directly with the thing you are doing. On a dedicated proxy the bill does not move at all. Per-proxy wins, often by a wide margin.

The third case is the one people misjudge: sustained, predictable, high volume. If you are moving the same large amount every month and the target accepts datacenter addresses, a small number of dedicated proxies is usually far cheaper than any metered product, and it is the case where unlimited bandwidth on dedicated datacenter proxies stops being a feature and becomes the entire reason to choose it.

The counter-case is equally important. If your target refuses datacenter ranges, none of this arithmetic matters, because the cheap option does not work. Residential costs more per gigabyte for a reason, and the reason is that the addresses come from consumer networks rather than hosting ranges. Work out whether you actually need that before optimizing the bill: block replay will fetch the URL you care about from both kinds of address and tell you whether they are treated differently.

Why rotation and metering tend to travel together

There is a structural reason rotating products are metered almost everywhere, and it is worth understanding rather than treating as an arbitrary vendor choice.

A rotating gateway does not give you an address. It gives you an endpoint, and behind it a pool that supplies a different exit for each request or each session. You cannot rent an address from that model because you are not being given one; you are being given access to a supply that many customers draw from at once. The only fair unit left to charge for is the traffic.

A dedicated proxy is the opposite arrangement. The address is yours for the period, nobody else is on it, and its reputation is a consequence of your behavior alone. That exclusivity is the product, which is why it is priced by the address and why the bandwidth can be left unmetered.

So a rotating product with no meter on it is not a gap in the market waiting to be filled. It is a request for two things that are priced by different units. Where you see it offered, the practical shape is usually a large fixed monthly commitment with a fair-use ceiling, which is a per-proxy model wearing a rotating label.

Rotation without metering, if that is what you actually need

If the appeal of rotation is simply that you want requests spread across several addresses rather than concentrated on one, you do not necessarily need a rotating product. A set of dedicated proxies, rotated by your own code, gives you address diversity on an unmetered product. You choose the rotation policy, you keep the same addresses long enough to build reputation, and nothing meters the traffic.

What that will not give you is scale of diversity. A handful of dedicated addresses is a handful, whereas a rotating pool draws on a much larger set. If your problem is that a target blocks addresses quickly and you need a continuous supply of fresh ones, self-rotating a small set will not solve it and a metered rotating product is the right tool. If your problem is only that one address is carrying too much, self-rotation over dedicated proxies is cheaper and steadier. The mechanics of both, including sticky sessions, are covered in the IP rotation guide, and choosing the right proxy type walks the same decision from the product end.

What the free tier does and does not include

The free tier is 3 free shared proxies with 1 GB/month bandwidth and 10 concurrent threads. Those are shared datacenter proxies, and that matters for anyone arriving from a search for a rotating trial: the free tier is not a rotating product, and it will not let you evaluate rotation behavior or country targeting.

What it is genuinely good for is everything upstream of that decision. You can confirm your client authenticates correctly, that your code paths work through a proxy at all, that your headers and TLS behave as you expect, and that the target responds to a datacenter address. Those are the questions that sink most integrations, and none of them need a paid plan. When you have answered them, the pricing page lays out what each product meters and what it does not.

Deciding, in order

Start with whether the target accepts datacenter addresses, because that decision constrains every other one. Test it rather than assuming.

If datacenter works, measure your bytes per request. Small responses at high count point at per-GB. Large responses, or sustained predictable volume, point at dedicated, where the bandwidth is not metered.

If datacenter does not work, you are choosing between residential and rotating, both metered, and the question becomes how much address diversity you need rather than how you would like to be billed.

And in every case, measure before committing. Bandwidth estimates made by intuition are wrong by an order of magnitude in both directions surprisingly often, which is why the proxy calculator asks for volume and response size rather than asking how many proxies you think you want.