Proxy Cost Per GB Explained: What You're Really Paying For

By Elena Park 2026-03-28 7 min read Pricing

The spread between cheap and expensive residential is 10×. Here's exactly what the markup buys you in 2026.

Where the cost comes from

Peer-SDK payouts ($0.30–$0.80/GB), infrastructure ($0.10–$0.30), compliance & support ($0.20–$1.00), software (Web Unlocker, dashboards), and margin. Floor cost is ~$1/GB; everything above is service and brand.

What $5/GB buys vs $2/GB

At $5/GB you typically get SOC 2 compliance, 24/7 enterprise support with SLA, larger pool (100M+ vs 30–60M IPs), and better unblocking software. At $2/GB you give up support polish but keep equivalent IP quality.

When you should pay more

Regulated industries. Mission-critical pipelines. No in-house anti-bot expertise. Workloads where downtime costs more than the proxy upgrade.

When cheap is the right answer

Side projects. SEO crawling. Hobby scraping. Anywhere you can absorb a 5% failure rate.

Math: when to switch

If saving $3/GB × 100GB/month = $300/month is more than 4 hours of your engineering time, the budget vendor wins.

Read more on ToptierProxy Blog or see our Best Proxies 2026 guide.