Residential Proxy Pricing Explained: What You Pay For Per Gigabyte
Residential proxies are priced by bandwidth: you pay for the gigabytes that pass through the proxy, not for the number of IPs or requests. At seamless the list price is €1.20 per GB on Lite, €3.50 on Omni and €5.00 for mobile, for traffic that never expires. Choosing a shorter validity period lowers the rate by 2–8%, and buying in volume lowers it further — Lite drops to €0.95 per GB from 500 GB. What you actually spend depends mostly on how heavy your pages are, which you control.
- pricing
- residential proxies
- bandwidth
- buyer guide
Table of contents
Why residential is billed per gigabyte
Residential exits are real home connections, and the scarce resource is their bandwidth, not their addresses. A pool of millions of IPs is only useful if you can move traffic through them, so providers price the traffic. The upside for you: unlimited IPs, rotation and concurrency are included, and a light workload costs very little.
What one gigabyte buys
| What you fetch | Typical size | Pages per GB |
|---|---|---|
| JSON API response | 5–50 KB | 20,000–200,000 |
| Search result page, HTML only | ~300 KB | ~3,300 |
| Product page, HTML only | ~250 KB | ~4,000 |
| Full page in a browser, images blocked | ~600 KB | ~1,700 |
| Full page in a browser, everything loaded | ~2.5 MB | ~400 |
The same job can cost ten times more depending on how you fetch it. Before comparing providers' per-GB rates, compare your own fetch methods — that is usually the larger saving.
The plans
| Plan | List price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Lite | €1.20/GB | 130+ countries, country and city targeting, sticky sessions up to 30 minutes |
| Omni | €3.50/GB | Cleaner IPs, city and ASN targeting, ISP filtering, custom session TTL, per-hostname analytics |
| Mobile | €5.00/GB | 4G/5G carrier IPs in 19 countries, country targeting |
Start on Lite. Move a target to Omni when success rate on Lite is the bottleneck, and to mobile only when residential is blocked for reasons you have ruled out.
Validity periods
The list price is for traffic that never expires. If you know you will use it soon, a shorter validity is cheaper because you carry the risk of leftovers:
| Validity | Discount on the rate | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| No expiry | — | Irregular use, testing, stocking up |
| 180 days | 2% | Steady use over half a year |
| 90 days | 3% | Quarterly budgets |
| 30 days | 5% | Recurring monthly jobs |
| 7 days | 8% | One-off jobs finished this week |
Packages with different validities stack into one balance, and traffic is always drawn from the batch that expires first, so nothing is wasted while any of it is still valid.
Volume tiers
| Volume | Lite | Omni |
|---|---|---|
| 50 GB | 3% off | 3% off |
| 100 GB | 6% off | €2.00/GB |
| 250 GB | 10% off | €2.00/GB |
| 500 GB | €0.95/GB | €2.00/GB |
| 1,000 GB | €0.90/GB | €1.90/GB |
| 2,000 GB | €0.90/GB | €1.50/GB |
| 5,000 GB | €0.80/GB | €0.95/GB |
Volume and validity discounts combine. A discount code applies to the list price instead of the volume price, and checkout always charges whichever of the two is cheaper for you. Current prices are always on the pricing page.
Start with one gigabyte
Test your real target on Lite for €1.20. If it works, scale with volume pricing; if not, you have spent the price of a coffee to find out.
Estimating your monthly cost
- 1Measure the average transferred size of one request on your target, with your real fetcher.
- 2Multiply by requests per month, then add 10–20% for retries.
- 3Pick the plan that clears the target at an acceptable success rate.
- 4Apply the volume tier and validity that fit how you consume it.
Worked examples for scraping, monitoring and multi-accounting are in how many proxies do I need, and the per-job comparison against ISP and datacenter proxies is in residential vs datacenter vs ISP.
Cutting the bill without cutting quality
- Block images, fonts and media in browser-based fetchers.
- Prefer JSON endpoints to rendered HTML where the site offers them.
- Cache aggressively during development — do not pay to re-download a page while you fix a selector.
- Stop retrying blocks. A 403 retried five times costs five pages of bandwidth and changes nothing.
- Keep compression on. Most HTTP clients request gzip or brotli by default; do not disable it.
Frequently asked questions
How much do residential proxies cost?
At seamless, residential proxies start at €1.20 per GB on the Lite plan for traffic that never expires. Omni costs €3.50 per GB and mobile €5.00 per GB. Shorter validity periods and volume tiers lower the rate, down to €0.80 per GB on Lite at 5,000 GB.
Why are residential proxies priced per GB instead of per IP?
Because the scarce resource is the bandwidth of real home connections, not the number of addresses. Per-GB pricing includes unlimited IPs, rotation and concurrent connections.
How many pages can I load with 1 GB of residential proxy traffic?
Roughly 4,000 product pages fetched as HTML only, around 3,300 search result pages, or about 400 full pages loaded in a browser with images. The fetch method matters more than the price.
Does residential proxy traffic expire?
Not if you choose the no-expiry option, which is the default and the list price. You can pick a 7, 30, 90 or 180-day validity instead for a lower rate; leftover traffic is removed when that period ends.
What is the cheapest way to buy residential proxies?
Reduce what you transfer first by blocking images and using JSON endpoints, then buy the volume tier and validity period that match your actual usage.
The seamless team runs residential, ISP and datacenter proxy infrastructure and writes these guides from day-to-day operational experience.
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