Bright Data's residential proxies cost $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go with no commitment, dropping to $3.50/GB on the $499/mo plan (141 GB), $3.00/GB at $999/mo (332 GB) and $2.50/GB at $1,999/mo (798 GB) — all as displayed on Bright Data's own pricing pages in July 2026. Web Unlocker is metered separately at $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests, with 5,000 requests a month free. Two things the pricing page does not put in the headline: that $4.00/GB is shown as 50% off an $8.00/GB list price, and that production access to the residential network is gated behind a human-reviewed company KYC.
Key takeaways
- Residential pay-as-you-go is $4.00/GB with no commitment — the cheapest no-strings entry among the providers we track that publish a PAYG rate.
- Subscription tiers only beat PAYG meaningfully above ~140 GB/month: $3.50/GB at $499/mo, $3.00/GB at $999/mo, $2.50/GB at $1,999/mo.
- The $4.00/GB headline is a displayed 50%-off promo from $8.00/GB list. Budget the list price as your downside case — promos lapse, contracts do not.
- Web Unlocker bills per successful REQUEST ($1.50/1K, $1.30/1K on the $499/mo Scale plan), not per GB, so its cost depends on page count rather than page weight.
- The real gate is not price but compliance: registered company, verified corporate email, documented use case, possibly a video call and government ID before production residential access.
- Every figure here is Bright Data's published list price as displayed on 2026-07-17, in USD. Performance figures (99.95% success, ~0.7 s response) are vendor claims we have not independently benchmarked.
Bright Data residential proxy pricing per GB
| Plan | Monthly cost | Included traffic | Effective per GB | Commitment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | $0 | Billed per GB used | $4.00/GB (promo; $8.00/GB list) | None |
| $499/mo tier | $499 | 141 GB | $3.50/GB | Monthly plan |
| $999/mo tier | $999 | 332 GB | $3.00/GB | Monthly plan |
| $1,999/mo tier | $1,999 | 798 GB | $2.50/GB | Monthly plan |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Not published | Contract |
The shape of this curve matters more than any single row. Between 0 and about 140 GB a month, the subscription tiers buy you nothing — pay-as-you-go at $4.00/GB costs less than the $499 plan until you actually consume 125 GB, at which point the plan's $3.50/GB finally overtakes it. Below that line every dollar of the plan you do not spend is pure waste. This is the single most common way teams overpay: buying a tier for the per-GB headline, then using 40% of it.
| Monthly volume | Oxylabs | Bright Data | Decodo | IPRoyal | SOAX |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 GB | $100$10/GB | $40$4/GB | $35Cheapest+VAT$3.50/GB | $52.50never-expiring $55.10$5.25/GB | $50+VAT$5/GB |
| 50 GB | $500$10/GB | $200$4/GB | $150Cheapest+VAT$3/GB | $245never-expiring $257.50$4.90/GB | $200+VAT$4/GB |
| 100 GB | $500$5/GB | $400$4/GB | $275Cheapest+VAT$2.75/GB | $490never-expiring $515est.$4.90/GB | $500+VAT$5/GB |
Each cell is the cheapest published route to that volume — the smallest covering plan or pay-as-you-go bracket — as of 2026-07-26 (USD). Effective $/GB can exceed the sticker rate when a plan is under-used, and the 'Cheapest' flag is pre-VAT. Vendor pricing changes often; verify before buying.
Estimate your own monthly cost
| Provider | Est. monthly cost | Effective $/GB |
|---|---|---|
| DecodoCheapest+VAT | $81.25 | $3.25 |
| Bright Data | $100 | $4 |
| SOAX+VAT | $125 | $5 |
| IPRoyalnever-expiring $137.75 | $131.25 | $5.25 |
| Oxylabs | $500 | $20 |
At 25 GB per month, Decodo is the cheapest at about $81.25.
Engineer's take (Hinata): The tier boundaries are step functions, and traffic is not. I would run one pay-as-you-go month first and measure real bytes per successful page — retries, redirects and blocked responses included — before committing to a tier, because an estimate that is 30% low puts you in the wrong step and erases the discount you bought the plan for. And I would re-run that measurement quarterly: target sites get heavier, and your effective per-GB drifts up even when the rate card does not move.
What the 50%-off promo actually means for a budget
Bright Data displays residential pricing as a 50% discount from an $8.00/GB list price. That framing is a vendor pricing decision, not a contractual floor, and it is the most under-discussed line item in any Bright Data budget.
Practically: if you are sizing a one-month spike, use $4.00/GB and move on. If you are writing an annual budget or a cost model that someone will hold you to, carry $8.00/GB as your downside case for the residential line and treat the promo as upside. Proxyway's 2026 market research notes that competitors took the opposite route — Oxylabs and IPRoyal removed long-running discount codes and cut permanent list prices roughly 25% instead — which is a more durable signal than a banner.
Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing per 1K requests
Web Unlocker is a separate product on a separate meter. It bills per successful request rather than per gigabyte, which changes the arithmetic completely.
| Plan | Monthly cost | Included requests | Rate per 1K | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | $0 | 5,000/month | $0 | No credit card required, ongoing rather than time-boxed |
| Pay-as-you-go | $0 | Billed per request | $1.50 | Billed only on success |
| Scale | $499 | 383,000 | $1.30 overage | Unlimited concurrency on paid tiers |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Not published | Contract |
JavaScript rendering, full-browser mode and CAPTCHA solving are included at the same rate rather than surcharged — worth noting because per-request competitors often price rendering separately. Bright Data advertises a 98% success rate on this product (vendor claim).
Because the meter is per request and residential proxies meter per gigabyte, the two products cross over at a specific average page weight. Against Oxylabs Web Unblocker's $9.40/GB entry tier, Bright Data's $1.50 per 1K is cheaper above roughly 160 KB per page — the full break-even math, including Decodo and IPRoyal, is in our web unblocker comparison.
Web Scraper API and the rest of the catalogue
Price your monthly volume
| Scraping API | Est. monthly cost | Per-1K rate |
|---|---|---|
| OxylabsCheapestfromper result | $12.50 | $0.25/1K |
| Decodo+VAT | $24 | $0.50/1K |
| Bright Data | $67.50 | $1.50/1K |
At 50,000 requests a month, Oxylabs is cheapest — about $12.50.
At 50,000 requests a month, Oxylabs is cheapest — about $12.50.
Cheapest published per-1K rate for each API, with recurring monthly free tiers netted off (Bright Data 5,000/mo, Decodo 2,000/mo; Oxylabs' 2K is a one-off trial, not a monthly allowance). Oxylabs bills per successful RESULT and the others per REQUEST, so a 1:1 comparison assumes one result per request. Published rates as of 2026-07-26 (USD); Decodo's exclude VAT. Verify before buying.
The cost that is not on the price list: KYC
Bright Data runs the strictest compliance gate of the providers we track. Residential network access in production is limited to verified companies that pass a human-reviewed KYC by its compliance team: signing up as a registered company, verifying a corporate email domain, and describing the intended use case, with the process potentially extending to an introductory video call and a government-issued ID for the point of contact.
None of that appears in a per-GB figure, and it is why "Bright Data is $4.00/GB" is an incomplete answer for anyone planning a start date. If you are a solo developer, an unregistered side project, or on a deadline measured in days, this is the constraint that decides the vendor — not the rate card. Providers with lighter onboarding are covered in our residential proxy free trials guide.
How Bright Data's rates compare with the alternatives
| Bright Data | Oxylabs | Decodo | IPRoyal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | $4.00/GB (promo; $8.00 list) | Not shown on pricing page | $4.00/GB plus VAT | $7.35/GB at 1 GB |
| Entry subscription | None below $499/mo | $30/mo for 5 GB ($6.00/GB) | $11.25/mo for 3 GB ($3.75/GB) | About 5% under PAYG |
| Rate at ~100-140 GB | $3.50/GB ($499/mo) | $5.00/GB at 20 GB | $2.75/GB at 100 GB | $4.90/GB at 50 GB |
| High volume | $2.50/GB at 798 GB | $2.50/GB at 1 TB | $2.50-$2.00/GB at 250-1,000 GB | Bulk rates cited to $1.75/GB |
| Onboarding friction | Company KYC required | Trial via contact form | 3-day trial, self-serve | Buy 1 GB minimum |
Read across the "Rate at ~100-140 GB" row and the pattern is clear: Bright Data is not the per-GB price leader at any volume we modeled — Decodo is. What Bright Data sells is the combination of a no-commitment PAYG rate, the largest claimed pool (400M+ IPs across 195 countries, vendor claim), and a product line that spans proxies, Web Unlocker and Scraper APIs on one account. The full budget-first breakdown is in our residential proxy pricing comparison.
Where Bright Data's pricing wins
- No-commitment $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go — no minimum subscription below $499/mo
- Web Unlocker's 5,000 free requests a month is an ongoing tier, not a time-boxed trial
- Rendering and CAPTCHA solving bundled into the per-request rate rather than surcharged
- $2.50/GB reached at 798 GB, a lower entry point than Oxylabs' 1 TB Corporate tier
- One account spans residential, Web Unlocker and Scraper APIs — no separate vendor per meter
Where it costs you
- The $4.00/GB headline is a displayed 50%-off promo from $8.00/GB list, not a committed rate
- Beaten on pure per-GB price by Decodo at every residential volume we modeled
- No subscription tier between pay-as-you-go and $499/mo — a hard jump for mid-size teams
- Company-level KYC gates production residential access; unusable for unregistered projects
- Monthly plan gigabytes do not carry over, so an over-bought tier is money burned
Who this pricing suits
Bright Data's rate card fits a registered company with spiky or unpredictable volume that values not committing over the lowest sticker price — the PAYG rate with no minimum is genuinely the cheapest way to run an irregular workload among providers that publish one. It also fits teams that need Web Unlocker and residential proxies on the same account and would rather pay a small premium than integrate two vendors.
It does not fit a solo developer or an unregistered project, which the KYC gate rules out regardless of budget, and it does not fit a team whose only criterion is cost per gigabyte at steady volume — that comparison goes to Decodo.
Verdict on Bright Data's pricing
4.0/5
Bright Data
Pay-as-you-go from $4.00/GB with no minimum, plus 5,000 free Web Unlocker requests a month — verify current rates on the official pricing page, as displayed rates include a promotional discount
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Our methodology
Every price on this page was read from Bright Data's own pricing pages on 2026-07-17 and is recorded in our machine-readable pricing dataset, which is also what drives the calculators above — the tables cannot drift from the prose because they read the same source. We do not run independent performance benchmarks, so success rates, response times and pool sizes are labeled as vendor claims throughout. This is a document-based comparison. Prices change; the retrieval date is the thing to check before you quote a figure.