Why proxy price per GB misleads

Price-per-gigabyte is the headline number on every proxy pricing page, and it is close to meaningless on its own.

Overage rates dominate. A plan advertising $2/GB may charge $6/GB past its cap. Heavy users on the wrong plan pay the overage rate for most of their traffic.

Dedicated vs shared bandwidth. Some "unlimited" plans meter by port count and concurrency instead of traffic. Comparing those to GB-metered plans is comparing hours to gallons.

Minimum commitments. Monthly minimums make small projects pay enterprise prices. A cheap headline rate with a $500 floor is not cheap for a hobby scraper.

Billing quirks. Retries, failed requests and handshake overhead count as traffic on most residential networks. Effective cost per successful request can double the sticker math.

The honest comparison uses your own projected usage: cap, overage rate, minimum, and what actually happens when you hit the ceiling. Use the trial to test the ceiling, not the floor: most trials give enough traffic for a handful of requests. Spend them on your real target under your real concurrency, and count successes, not requests sent — that ratio is the effective price of the plan.

Geo-targeting granularity is a price tier: country-level targeting is usually included, city-level and ASN-level targeting narrow the pool sharply and often carry a premium or a separate rate. A provider that quotes one headline rate for all levels is quoting the country-level rate.

Transparency signals: providers that publish their pool sourcing, subnet counts and an incident or status history are easier to hold to their spec sheet than ones that quote a big pool number and nothing else. Absence of a published answer is itself a data point.

Published plan terms — caps, overage rates, minimums and billing quirks — are recorded at Proxy Compare, quoted verbatim from each provider with the date each fact was checked, and fields a provider does not publish are marked as unknown rather than filled in with guesses.