Cheapest Residential Proxies in 2026 That Are Still Safe to Use

DataImpulse buys the most gigabytes per dollar at every budget modeled here — a flat $1.00/GB pay-as-you-go on traffic that never expires (August 2026) — and unlike the other cheap options it does answer the sourcing question, naming its supply app and stating what suppliers are paid. It clears this guide's floor, with one qualification that belongs in the same breath: nothing about its supply chain has been verified by anyone but the vendor, and an independent April 2026 benchmark found roughly one address in eight of its US residential pool resolving to a server. Where a buying process needs outside verification rather than a vendor's word, Decodo remains the pick at $3.75/GB entry down to $2.75/GB at 100 GB, all plus VAT, as an EWDCI co-founder. If your budget is tiny or irregular, IPRoyal is still worth its higher rates ($7.35/GB at 1 GB) for the same never-expiring property. Cheaper rates than any of these exist above 350 GB: Thordata sells prepaid packages down to $0.65/GB, and sits below the line in this guide for one reason, which is that it declines to document where its residential IPs come from. Grey-market sellers advertise under $0.50/GB and free proxy lists cost nothing, and they fail the same test more comprehensively: the floor this guide insists on is published IP sourcing, KYC, and a company you can hold to account.

What each budget buys: the money table

This guide answers the budget-first question — "I have $X a month; who gives me the most safe gigabytes?" — rather than the usage-first one, which we model at 10, 100, and 500 GB in our residential proxy pricing comparison. All figures below are computed from each provider's own published rates as displayed between July 17 and August 13, 2026, in USD; the arithmetic is shown in the per-budget sections that follow.

Sources: Decodo residential pricing, IPRoyal residential pricing, Bright Data residential pricing, Oxylabs residential pricing (as displayed July 17, 2026).

Engineer’s take (Hinata): I would budget from measured bytes, not hoped-for bytes: buy one small pay-as-you-go month, divide dollars spent by pages successfully fetched, and only then commit to a tier — the gap between "cheapest" and "cheapest you actually use" is the stranded remainder in the Oxylabs rows above. If your spend is under about $60 a month and irregular, never-expiring traffic is worth a roughly 55% per-GB premium, because your real unit cost is dollars per gigabyte consumed, not per gigabyte purchased. And I would read any struck-through price as a renewal-risk line item in the budget, not as a gift.

What $50 a month buys

The entry budget: a small SEO rank tracker, a focused price-monitoring script, or a proof of concept. Here is the arithmetic at published rates.

Three footnotes matter at this scale. First, if your real need is 10 GB or less every month, Decodo's 10 GB subscription at $35 ($3.50/GB) beats its own pay-as-you-go — you get a lower rate and keep $15 of the budget. Second, VAT bites Decodo here: at an illustrative 20% VAT, $4.00/GB becomes $4.80/GB and the same $50 buys 10.4 GB, not 12.5. Third, IPRoyal's documented 10 GB pack costs $55.10 ($5.51/GB) — $5.10 over this budget line, but if you can stretch once, the never-expiring gigabytes get 12% cheaper. Before spending anything, check what you can get for free: our residential proxy free trials guide covers Decodo's 3-day trial, Bright Data's no-card trial, and Oxylabs' once-per-client trial in detail.

What $150 a month buys

The serious-hobbyist-to-small-team budget, and Decodo's sweet spot: its 50 GB tier costs exactly $150.

Decodo's lead survives tax: at an illustrative 20% VAT the plan costs $180 all-in, or $3.60 per gigabyte — still under Bright Data's pre-VAT $4.00. IPRoyal's subscription variant shaves the rate to $5.25/GB (about 28.6 GB for $150), but converts its one structural advantage — traffic that never expires — into a monthly allowance, which I would not trade at this budget. Oxylabs allows top-ups on the Basic plan (up to 100 GB), but the top-up rate was not published on the page we checked, so we exclude it from the math rather than guess.

What $500 a month buys

At $500 the ranking reshuffles — this is the one budget where Decodo does not buy the most raw gigabytes.

SOAX's $500 Team plan buys the most raw traffic at this budget — about 227 GB at $2.20/GB before VAT — but it publishes neither a sourcing nor a KYC policy at the URLs we checked, so it does not clear this guide's safety floor and we do not recommend it on price alone. Among the providers that do clear it, Bright Data's $499 plan buys the most data for a full $500 — 141 GB — but note what the win rests on: the plan is displayed with 50%-off promotional framing, and residential production access sits behind a human-reviewed company KYC that can include a corporate email domain check, an intro call, and government ID. Decodo's $2.75/GB on the 100 GB plan remains the lowest unit price among the providers that clear the safety floor; its next step up, the enterprise 250 GB tier at $2.50/GB, works out to roughly $625 and is out of reach at $500 even before VAT. If your volume is heading past this range, the usage-first scenarios in our residential proxy pricing comparison are the better map.

Why not grey-market or free proxies

Customer vetting and IP sourcing are separate questions, and the table above answers them differently. Oxylabs, Bright Data, Decodo and IPRoyal document both. Thordata publishes a KYC page but declines to document where its IPs come from. DataImpulse is the reverse case at this price: it names its supply app and what suppliers are paid, while its customer vetting is documented only for the reseller programme. SOAX publishes neither at the URLs we checked. The cheaper alternatives — free proxy lists and grey-market sellers advertising entry pricing under $0.50/GB, per Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026 — skip exactly those costs. The best available evidence on what that buys you is "Free Proxies Unmasked", a 30-month academic study of 640,600+ free proxies from 11 providers, presented at NDSS MADWeb 2024. Its findings, in budget terms:

1. Most of it does not work at all. Only 34.5% of the 640,600+ proxies studied were ever active. A $0 gigabyte you cannot fetch through has an infinite effective rate — and the retry traffic it burns costs real time.
2. The exit node may be someone's compromised machine. The study found 4,452 distinct vulnerabilities on proxy IPs, including 1,755 that allowed remote code execution and 2,036 enabling privilege escalation. Routing your traffic through infrastructure like that is a liability, not a discount.
3. You cannot trust what comes back. 16,923 proxies manipulated content in transit. For any data-collection use case, silently altered responses poison the dataset you are paying to build. Proxyway's guide on free proxies documents the same failure modes: traffic interception, content manipulation, and instability.
4. Sub-$0.50/GB grey market: the discount is the opacity. Proxyway's 2026 research ties the grey market's pricing to sourcing you cannot audit. Compare the providers in this guide: Oxylabs grades its acquisition methods and claims a majority of its pool is consent-based Tier A+ (vendor claim), Decodo says peers opt in with informed consent and earn money per GB shared (vendor claim), and IPRoyal's partner Pawns.app publishes its $0.20/GB payout to end users. When a seller charges less than legitimate providers pay for consent and compliance, the difference has to come from somewhere.

KYC is part of the same safety floor, not friction to route around: a provider that verifies its customers is less likely to have its pool poisoned by abusive traffic — which is what gets cheap IP ranges blocked and your success rate destroyed. The full cost-benefit is in free vs paid proxies, and ethical proxy sourcing covers how to audit a provider's supply chain before you buy.

Cheap that stays cheap: promo lapse, VAT, and expiry

A budget pick has to survive its own renewal. Three structural risks separate a cheap first invoice from a cheap year:

1. Promo-anchored pricing. Bright Data's $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go rate is displayed as 50% off an $8.00/GB list price, and its subscription tiers carry the same 50%-off framing (July 2026). I budget against the list price and treat the discount as upside. The industry is moving toward honesty here: Proxyway's 2026 research reports that Oxylabs and IPRoyal removed long-running discount codes and instead revised permanent plans down roughly 25% — a permanent $5.51/GB is worth more to a planner than a promotional $4.00.
2. VAT. Decodo and SOAX both list every residential price as excluding VAT. Its wins in the tables above hold at an illustrative 20% VAT ($3.60/GB all-in at the 50 GB tier, still under Bright Data's $4.00), but EU buyers on tight budgets should do the math for their own rate before committing.
3. Expiring allowances. Decodo, Bright Data, and Oxylabs sell monthly allowances: gigabytes you do not use die with the billing month. A Decodo 50 GB plan you only half-use effectively costs $6.00/GB — worse than IPRoyal's never-expiring rate. If your usage is bursty or seasonal, IPRoyal's higher sticker price is frequently the lower real price, which is exactly why it survives this comparison.

Our methodology

This is a document-based comparison. We collected every price and plan detail from the providers' published pricing and policy pages, and the free-proxy and grey-market findings from the cited NDSS MADWeb 2024 paper and Proxyway's 2026 market research, all fetched and verified between July 17 and August 13, 2026. Performance figures such as success rates are vendor claims and labeled as such; promotional prices are labeled as promotions. ProxyFacts has not yet run first-hand benchmarks; every figure above comes from the cited provider pages and dated third-party research. We disclose affiliate partnerships, and links to providers carry sponsored attributes — commissions never change the arithmetic or the ranking.

Cheapest by budget: the verdict

Both picks are covered in depth in our Decodo review and IPRoyal review, including the features and compliance detail this budget-focused guide compresses.

Frequently asked questions

Can I get safe residential proxies for under $10 a month? Yes, just barely — IPRoyal's 1 GB subscription at $7.00/mo (about 5% under its $7.35 pay-as-you-go rate) is the lowest published recurring plan among the providers that clear this guide's safety floor; the next step up is Decodo's 3 GB plan at $11.25/mo plus VAT. Thordata's 1 GB package is $2.00, but it is a one-off purchase rather than a plan, and it comes without a published sourcing policy. Under $10 as a one-off, IPRoyal sells 1 GB of never-expiring traffic for $7.35, and Decodo's 3-day free trial and Bright Data's no-card trial cost nothing to start.

Why not just buy from the sub-$0.50/GB sellers? Because the discount comes from skipping consent-based sourcing and customer vetting, per Proxyway's 2026 research — and the free tier of that market is measurably dangerous: the NDSS MADWeb 2024 study found remote-code-execution vulnerabilities on 1,755 free-proxy IPs and nearly 17,000 proxies altering content in transit.

Which provider wastes the least money at small scale? IPRoyal. Its purchased traffic never expires, so 8 GB bought for $50 today is still fully usable next quarter. Every Decodo, Bright Data, or Oxylabs plan gigabyte you fail to use within the billing month is money spent on nothing.

Is Bright Data's $4.00/GB really the same deal as Decodo's? No, for two reasons: Bright Data displays the rate as a 50%-off promotion from an $8.00/GB list price, so renewal risk is built in, and residential production access requires passing a human-reviewed company KYC. Decodo's $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go is a list price — but it excludes VAT.

For the full comparison beyond price — pool sizes, targeting granularity, performance claims, and compliance — read our best residential proxies guide.