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Short answer. For most scraping teams in 2026 the right residential proxy is Oxylabs at $6/GB if you want a plain monthly plan, Webshare at $2.25/GB if you already push 100GB a month, and Apify Proxy at $8/GB if the proxy should just be part of the scraper you are already running. The bigger point of this guide is that on 4 of the 6 networks we priced today, the per-GB number in the headline is not a number you can buy. We checked all six on the same day, September 5, 2026, and put the advertised floor next to the rate a first-time buyer actually pays.
What six proxy networks actually charge today
Rotating residential rates, read from each vendor's own pricing page on September 5, 2026. Residential is the type that matters for scraping, because datacenter IPs get blocked by anything with real bot defences.
- Bright Data: $8/GB pay as you go, cut to $4/GB by a coupon that lasts three months. Committed plans run $499, $999 and $1,999 a month.
- Oxylabs: $6/GB at 5GB for $30 a month, $5/GB at 20GB for $100, $4/GB at 125GB for $500, $2.50/GB at 1TB for $2,500. VAT may apply.
- Decodo: $4/GB pay as you go, then $3.75/GB at 3GB, $3.25/GB at 25GB, $2.75/GB at 100GB for $275. Plus VAT.
- Webshare: $3.50/GB at 1GB, $2.75/GB at 10GB, $2.25/GB at 100GB for $225, $1.50/GB at 1,000GB.
- IPRoyal: $7/GB at 1GB, $5.95/GB at 2GB, $5.25/GB at 10GB, and $1.75/GB on custom plans.
- Apify Proxy: $8/GB on the free and $19 Starter plans, $7.50/GB on Scale at $199, $7/GB on Business at $999.
The advertised floor is rarely the entry price
Now put each vendor's marketing number beside the rate you would pay buying the smallest amount. IPRoyal advertises $1.75/GB and charges $7/GB for a single gigabyte, a factor of four. Webshare advertises $1.40/GB and charges $3.50/GB at 1GB, a factor of two and a half. Decodo's page title, meta description and hero copy all say $2/GB, and its own plan table on that same page has no $2 row at all, bottoming out at $2.75/GB. Bright Data's global navigation says $2.50/GB, which is roughly what you get only at $1,999 a month, and only for three months.
Two of the six quote a floor you can actually buy on day one. Oxylabs says $6/GB and sells you 5GB at $6/GB. Apify says $8/GB and charges $8/GB. They are the two most expensive networks on this list, and they are also the only two whose headline number survives contact with the checkout page. That trade matters, because a proxy budget wrong by a factor of four wrecks the unit economics of a lead generation pipeline faster than any other line item.
Bright Data states three different prices
This is the clearest example, and every part of it is on the vendor's own site right now. On the residential proxies pricing page, last modified August 31, 2026, three documents disagree:
- The site navigation that links to the page says residential starts at $5/GB, reduced to $2.50/GB.
- The page's own meta description, the line Google shows in results, says starting from $5.88/GB.
- The plan cards on the page show $4, $4, $3 and $3 per GB, with a list price of $8, $7, $6 and $5.
None of the three agrees with the other two, and the $2.50 in the navigation appears nowhere on the page it points at. Divide each commitment by its included traffic and you get the real effective rates: $499 for 141GB is $3.54/GB, $999 for 332GB is $3.01/GB, and $1,999 for 798GB is $2.51/GB. So the $2.50 headline is real, but it is the top tier, and it is a coupon. Bright Data states plainly that the code gives 50 percent off residential proxies for three months. After that the pay as you go rate returns to $8/GB, which is the same number Apify charges without any coupon at all.
Two things sit in Bright Data's FAQ rather than on the pricing card, and both change the decision. Residential and mobile networks require a KYC process that may include an intro video call and company verification, so this is not a same-afternoon purchase. And the monthly commitment does not roll over: use less than you committed and the balance is gone on the first.
Check current Apify Proxy and platform pricing
Oxylabs is the arithmetic that reconciles
Oxylabs prices four residential tiers and every one of them multiplies out exactly. Starter is 5GB at $6/GB for $30. Basic is 20GB at $5/GB for $100. Advanced is 125GB at $4/GB for $500. Corporate is 1TB at $2.50/GB for $2,500. Nothing is rounded, nothing is a coupon, and the $6/GB quoted on the pricing hub is genuinely what the smallest plan costs. Add VAT where it applies.
It is not spotless. The FAQ further down that same page still says plans start from $99 a month with an 11GB allowance, which is $9/GB and matches none of the four tiers above it. A stale support answer rather than a pricing trick, but even the cleanest vendor here contradicts itself if you scroll far enough.
Decodo and Webshare run honest ladders with loud floors
Both price cleanly per tier and both shout a number from the bottom of the ladder. Decodo's rows multiply out correctly, 100GB at $2.75 really is $275, and its marketing line even needles rivals by promising rates with no coupon needed. The rate it promises, $2/GB, is simply not on the table. Webshare publishes the most transparent ladder of the six, nine tiers from 1GB to 3,000GB with per-gigabyte price and monthly total side by side, all reconciling. Its advertised $1.40/GB is the 3,000GB row, so reaching it costs $4,200 a month. Every Webshare row is struck through from a $7 list price with a discount badge, and since every row carries one, that $7 anchor is not a price anyone pays.
For a small agency the useful Webshare number is not $1.40. It is $2.25/GB at 100GB for $225 a month, which is the cheapest credible rate on this whole list at a spend a working team can justify.
IPRoyal prints the qualifier next to the number
IPRoyal advertises $1.75/GB and is the only vendor of the six that tells you the condition in the same breath, in a line directly under the plan cards: $1.75/GB is available from 10TB. That is 10,000GB, or $17,500. Everything else is $7/GB at 1GB, $5.95 at 2GB and $5.25 at 10GB, with 5 percent off if you take a subscription instead of buying on demand.
Its real differentiator is not price. IPRoyal traffic does not expire. Every other network here either bills a monthly commitment that vanishes unused, as Bright Data spells out, or sells prepaid credit that dies at the end of the cycle, as Apify does. If your scraping is bursty, three heavy weeks a quarter rather than steady daily volume, non-expiring traffic beats a lower per-GB rate outright.
Apify Proxy is the priciest, and sometimes still right
We will publish the number that works against us: at $8/GB, Apify Proxy is the most expensive residential proxy in this comparison, more than three times Webshare at 100GB and more than four times its own cheapest rival at volume. Buying it purely as bandwidth is the wrong call.
Buying it as part of a scraper is a different question. Apify Proxy is already wired into every Actor, so there is no second vendor, no second invoice, no KYC video call and no minimum commitment. Geo-targeting to country and US state is included. Datacenter IPs are bundled before they are billed: 5 on the free plan, 30 on the $19 Starter, 200 on Scale, 500 on Business. SERP proxy is $2.50 per 1,000 results and the Unblocker $1.50 per 1,000 requests, both usually cheaper than rebuilding the same result from raw bandwidth plus your own retry logic.
Two catches you should know first. Apify's own pricing page advertises datacenter proxy from $0.60 per IP on an add-on card, but the comparison table lower down shows $0.60 is the Business plan rate at $999 a month, while Starter pays $1. And Apify Proxy is not a standalone proxy network: the docs state that connecting from outside the Apify platform requires a paid plan, and that the free plan's proxy works only inside the platform. If you want IPs to point a scraper you already built somewhere else, buy from one of the five above instead. Our full breakdown of the platform sits in the Apify review, and the head-to-head is in Apify vs Bright Data.
Start free on Apify and price a real run before you commit
The meter counts headers and retries, not rows
Per-GB pricing hides a second problem that no comparison table shows. Bright Data defines billable bandwidth in its own FAQ as the sum of request headers, POST data, response headers and response data. You are billed for the overhead of every request and for every failed attempt, not for the records you keep. A scraper with a 40 percent block rate does not pay 40 percent more, it pays for all the retries plus all the headers on all of them.
This is the single biggest reason a proxy bill comes in above forecast. Before committing to any tier, run a week on pay as you go, measure gigabytes per thousand successful records, and price the ladder off that. Sessions matter too: Apify documents datacenter sessions persisting 26 hours and residential sessions about 30 minutes, and a login flow that outlives its session burns bandwidth re-authenticating.
How to pick in 2026
Start with volume, not brand. Under 10GB a month the ladders barely differ, so Webshare at $2.75/GB or Decodo at $3.75/GB will do, with IPRoyal worth the premium if your usage is bursty because the traffic keeps. Around 100GB, Webshare at $2.25/GB is the value pick and Oxylabs at $4/GB buys clean billing and a support relationship. Above 1TB, get quotes and negotiate, because at that level every public page is a starting position.
If you are not building the scraper yourself, the proxy line is not the decision. The platform is. Pick Apify or another managed option, accept the higher bandwidth rate, and spend the saved engineering time on what the data is for. That is the trade we make on client work, and why our web scraping tools roundup ranks platforms rather than IP pools, and what our automation team builds end to end.
Whatever you pick, do the one check this guide exists for. Find the advertised rate, find the smallest amount you can actually buy, and divide price by traffic. On four of these six networks those two numbers differ, and on one of them by a factor of four.
Frequently Asked Questions
At small volume, Webshare is cheapest at $3.50 per GB for 1GB and $2.75 per GB at 10GB, verified on September 5, 2026. At around 100GB a month Webshare is $2.25 per GB for $225. The much lower rates advertised across the industry, $1.40 from Webshare and $1.75 from IPRoyal, require 3,000GB and 10,000GB respectively.
Most providers advertise the bottom rung of a volume ladder as a starting price. IPRoyal advertises $1.75 per GB and charges $7 per GB for a single gigabyte. Decodo advertises $2 per GB and its own plan table starts at $3.75. Bright Data's $2.50 per GB is a coupon rate that lasts three months. Always divide the smallest plan's price by its included traffic.
Datacenter proxies are much cheaper, roughly $0.60 to $1 per IP on Apify and from $0.90 per IP on Bright Data, and they are fine for sites with little bot defence. Anything with serious anti-bot protection blocks datacenter ranges quickly, which is why residential IPs cost several dollars per gigabyte instead.
Bright Data defines billable bandwidth as request headers plus POST data plus response headers plus response data. You pay for protocol overhead and for every failed retry, not only for the records you keep. This is why real proxy bills routinely exceed forecasts based on payload size alone.
Only if you are already running scrapers on Apify. As raw bandwidth it is the most expensive option here. As part of the platform it removes a second vendor, a second invoice, a KYC video call and any minimum commitment, and it bundles datacenter IPs, SERP proxy at $2.50 per 1,000 results and an Unblocker at $1.50 per 1,000 requests.
Bright Data requires a KYC compliance process before you can use its residential or mobile networks, which may include a short intro video call and verification of your company details. Budget time for it. Apify Proxy has no equivalent gate, but connecting from outside the Apify platform requires a paid plan.