1. IP quality and source
The whole point of residential proxies is real ISP-assigned IPs. Two questions decide it:
Where do the IPs come from? On 3 July 2026 NetNut was seized by the FBI, DOJ and IRS-CI over the Popa botnet, which had co-opted roughly 2 million consumer devices into a proxy network. Sourcing stopped being an abstract ethics question the day a well-known provider disappeared overnight — it now decides whether your supplier still exists next quarter.
Is “residential” actually residential? Some providers relabel datacenter ranges, and those IPs get blocked like datacenter IPs. The labels slip on price tags too: Infatica's navigation advertises residential “from $0.3/GB”, but that ladder belongs to its shared-datacenter product (each plan “includes 500K+ IPs”); the residential ladder (45M+ IPs) starts at $4/GB pay-as-you-go.
Then test on your actual targets during a trial. No marketing number tells you whether these particular IPs pass the particular anti-bot stack you're up against.
2. Pricing model: the headline vs. the price you pay
The biggest hidden cost is not the rate, it's the structure. The industry's standard move is a headline price that requires a volume you will never reach. Every figure below was read off the vendor's own live pricing page on 14 September 2026:
| Provider | Advertised “from” | Entry price you can actually buy | What the headline requires |
|---|
| Roam | $2/GB | $2/GB | Nothing — flat at any volume, no subscription |
| Bright Data | $5 → $2.50/GB | $8/GB list PAYG; $4/GB with coupon RESIGB50 | $2.50 is the $1,999/mo tier; residential also requires KYC |
| IPRoyal | $1.75/GB | $7.35/GB PAYG | 10 TB |
| Infatica | $0.30/GB | $4/GB PAYG | $0.30 is the shared-datacenter product; residential floor is $2.60/GB at 1,000 GB/mo |
| Oxylabs | $2.50/GB | $6/GB on the $30/mo Starter — no PAYG at all | 1 TB/mo Corporate tier |
| Decodo (ex-Smartproxy) | $2/GB | $4/GB PAYG | 1 TB/mo Enterprise ($2,000) |
| Webshare | $1.40/GB | $3.50/GB monthly sub (50% off a $7.00 list) | 3,000 GB promo rate; no PAYG |
| Proxy-Cheap | $0.78/GB | $1.50/GB (the −50% tier) | 51 GB+, while self-serve top-ups are capped at 50 GB/mo |
| Rayobyte | $0.50/GB | $3.50/GB (1–49 GB) | 5,000 GB+ — and the site says so plainly |
| PacketStream | $1/GB | $1/GB | Nothing, but there is a $50 minimum purchase |
| SOAX | $2.00/GB (Tier 3) | $5.00/GB (Tier 1) | Price is set by country tier, not volume; credits expire in 60 days |
Seven of the ten advertise a rate that is unreachable at entry level. Rayobyte and PacketStream are the honest exceptions — Rayobyte labels its $0.50 as the 5,000 GB+ tier, and PacketStream's $1/GB is genuinely flat.
One trap while you check for yourself: PacketStream's pricing page also shows “$0.10 per GB”. That is what it pays people who share bandwidth, not a selling price.
So: ignore the nav bar, open the pricing table, and find the row you would actually buy this month.
3. Does the balance expire?
A cheap GB you lose at the end of the month isn't cheap. What the vendors state, in their own words:
- SOAX — credits expire after 60 days (12 months on annual plans).
- IPRoyal — “your traffic never expires”. PacketStream — balance doesn't expire. Roam — balance never expires.
- Oxylabs and Webshare sell a monthly GB allowance, so unused traffic goes away with the billing cycle by design.
- Bright Data, Oxylabs and Webshare publish no expiry policy for unused prepaid balance. We're not going to guess one on their behalf — get it in writing before you prepay.
Pair this with the commitment column above. A $2.50/GB tier that needs 1 TB a month and resets monthly is a $2,500 monthly bill with a use-it-or-lose-it clause, not a discount.
4. Can you buy without a subscription?
Pay-as-you-go is not universal, and the minimum to get started matters more than the headline rate when you're still evaluating.
- No PAYG at all: Oxylabs (residential starts on a $30/month plan at $6/GB) and Webshare (monthly subscription only; its free tier is 10 datacenter proxies, not residential).
- PAYG available: Decodo $4/GB, Infatica $4/GB, IPRoyal $7.35/GB, PacketStream $1/GB ($50 minimum purchase), SOAX on its free $0/mo Sandbox plan, Roam $2/GB.
- Extra gate: Bright Data requires KYC before you can buy residential or mobile.
$50 up front, or $30 a month, is a lot to commit for a test that may fail in the first hour against your targets.
5. Coverage, sessions, protocols
Geo coverage: confirm the countries — ideally states and cities — you need are actually available, and check whether they cost extra. Per-country pricing is real: SOAX prices by country tier, $5.00/GB for Tier 1 down to $2.00/GB for Tier 3, so a quoted “from” price may simply not apply to the geo you need.
Session control: you want both rotating and sticky sessions, switched in the credential string rather than through a support ticket, and a sticky session that survives long enough to finish a login-and-checkout flow.
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 with standard user:pass auth, so it drops into curl, Scrapy, Playwright or your antidetect browser without custom code.
6. Trial terms
A trial is only useful if it runs on your targets, at your volume, before you pay. What's actually on offer:
- SOAX — its own FAQ answers “Is there a free trial?” with “No.”
- Webshare — no residential trial; the free tier is datacenter proxies.
- Infatica — $4.00 for a 7-day trial. That's a paid pilot, not a trial.
- Bright Data — advertises a no-credit-card trial but doesn't publish the size or the duration.
- Rayobyte — trial on account creation. Roam — 300 MB.
Read every trial as four numbers: how many GB, on which product, for how many days, and does it need a card?
7. Support and transparency
The cheapest available signal of how a provider will treat you after you pay is how it prices before you pay. A pricing page whose nav bar contradicts its own table has already told you something. So has one that won't say whether your balance expires.
Three things worth asking for in writing before you commit: a straight answer on IP sourcing, a documented rotating/sticky syntax you can read without a call, and a price you can reach without a sales conversation.
For reference, Roam: flat $2/GB pay-as-you-go at any volume, 190+ countries, rotating + sticky, HTTP/SOCKS5, a 300 MB free trial, a balance that never expires, no subscription and no minimum commitment. We are not the cheapest per GB — PacketStream's $1/GB and Rayobyte's volume tiers are lower, and we say so on our own pricing comparison. We're flat, and every competitor number above is on their page, not ours.
How we checked
Every competitor figure on this page was read from that vendor's own public pricing page on 14 September 2026 and then independently re-derived a second time before publishing; where the two passes disagreed, the page was re-read until they matched. Where a vendor publishes nothing — Bright Data's trial size, the expiry policy on unused Bright Data / Oxylabs / Webshare balance — this page says so instead of guessing.
Prices move. If you find one of these stale, tell us and we'll re-check it.