Unlimited residential proxies vs pay per GB, which costs less?

Residential proxy bills grow with your traffic. Every page, image and retry adds to the total. Unlimited plans stop that by charging a flat rate, but you pay the same whether you use 5 GB or 500 GB.

So which is cheaper? The answer to unlimited residential proxies vs pay per GB comes down to one number: how much data you move each day. This guide shows how to find that number and where the break-even point sits.

How the two pricing models work

Pay-per-GB proxies bill you for every gigabyte of traffic. Across the market, residential rates range from about $1 to $15 per GB, and the price usually drops as you buy more volume. At CoreProxy, Core Residential starts at $1.50/GB. Rotating Residential starts at $2.30/GB and adds a larger pool and longer sticky sessions, with up to 40% off on orders of 250 GB or more.

Unlimited residential proxies charge for time instead of data. You buy access for a day, a week or a month and send as much traffic as you need. CoreProxy's Unlimited Residential plan works this way, from $40 for a single day down to $23.33 per day on the monthly plan, with rotating and sticky sessions over HTTP or SOCKS5. Some providers price unlimited plans by thread count or speed tier instead, so check what the "unlimited" label actually covers.

What actually drives your bandwidth usage

You can't compare prices until you know your traffic. That depends mostly on how you load pages.

A full browser load pulls in scripts, images, fonts and trackers. The HTTP Archive Web Almanac puts the median mobile page at about 2.3 MB, and desktop pages sit closer to 2.6 MB. Requesting only the HTML is far lighter, often a few dozen kilobytes per page.

Other things add to the bill:

• Retries after timeouts or blocks

• Duplicate URLs crawled twice

• Pages that haven't changed since your last visit

• Headless browsers that never cache anything

To estimate your usage, run a small test batch of 500–1,000 requests through a per-GB plan. Check the traffic in your dashboard, then divide by the number of requests to get MB per request. Multiply that by your daily volume to get your daily GB.

If the number looks high, try cutting it before you switch plans. Our guide on cutting proxy costs for web scraping covers resource blocking, compression and smarter crawling.

Finding your break-even point

The math is simple. Divide the unlimited plan price by your per-GB rate, and you get the traffic level where both cost the same.

Break-even GB = unlimited plan price ÷ your per-GB rate

Here's how CoreProxy's Unlimited Residential plans compare with Core Residential at $1.50/GB:

Use more than the break-even amount and unlimited wins. Use less, and per-GB is cheaper.

Against Rotating Residential, the monthly break-even shifts to about 507 GB at the discounted $1.38/GB rate. The longer the plan, the lower your daily usage needs to be for unlimited to pay off.

Here are a few example workloads over a 30-day month, assuming about 2.6 MB per full page load:

The lightweight scraper should stay on per-GB. The heavy browser workload saves more than $1,600 a month on unlimited.

Which model fits your use case

Pay per GB is the better fit when traffic is light or comes in bursts. That covers:

• Managing social media or ad accounts, where each profile uses little data

• Small scraping jobs that fetch HTML or JSON only

• Testing a new target before you scale

• Projects that run a few days a month

Multi-account work rarely comes close to break-even. Account sessions are mostly logins, feeds and form posts, so traffic per profile stays low. What each account needs is a clean, consistent IP, and our guide to running multiple accounts safely explains how to set that up.

Unlimited makes sense when you run heavy traffic every day. Browser automation with dozens of threads, round-the-clock price monitoring and media-heavy targets can all burn through hundreds of GB a month. On a flat rate, you stop worrying about how much each request costs and start scaling.

A hybrid setup also works. Keep a per-GB plan for account work and small jobs, and buy an unlimited day or week pass when a large crawl comes up. A $40 day pass beats per-GB pricing on any day you expect to pass about 27 GB.

Hidden costs to check before you commit

The sticker price is only part of the cost. Before you buy, look at these:

• Speed and thread limits. Some unlimited plans cap concurrency or throttle speed. A slow plan may never move enough traffic to beat per-GB pricing, so measure your proxy latency and throughput on the first day.

• Failed requests. On per-GB plans, blocked requests still use bandwidth. On unlimited plans, they waste time you've already paid for.

• IP quality. A pool full of flagged IPs causes more blocks, retries and CAPTCHAs, and each one adds cost. You can check IP reputation and fraud scores on a sample of IPs before you commit.

• Unused data. Check whether purchased GB expires before you can use it.

Track cost per successful request instead of cost per GB. A cheap plan with a 60% success rate can cost more than a pricier one that works on the first try.

Test before you scale. Run your real target through a short trial and record the success rate, speed and error codes. Our checklist for testing proxies before you use them walks through each step.

Start with a per-GB plan to measure your real usage. If you regularly pass 15–20 GB a day, a weekly or monthly Unlimited Residential plan will likely cost you less.