The Best Residential Proxies of September 2026

This is the ranked list of residential proxy providers on this site, with every price re-read from the vendor’s own page on 2026-09-19. The short version: cheapest published entry is IPRoyal at $1.75/GB, the cleanest flat-rate value is Decodo at $3.75/GB, and the largest published pool is Bright Data’s 400M+ IPs. NetNut is not ranked because there is nothing official left to rank — its domain shows a seizure banner.

How we ranked these providers

The score on each pick is ours and stated as such. It is built from five things, all of them backed by a dated row in the dataset: the entry price with the billing condition it requires, the pool size as published, targeting depth, promo fine print (does the cheap rate survive renewal?), and the trial or free tier. A provider that does not publish a number scores lower for it — not published is a finding here, not a gap. The full procedure, including what we test on real machines, is on How we test.

The comparison table

All prices below were read from each vendor’s own page on 2026-09-19. The “starting price” column is the smallest plan you can actually buy — a bigger plan is usually cheaper per GB, and the per-tier rates live on each provider’s review page.

Table read 2026-09-19. Promo prices carry their list price and condition. “Starting price” is the smallest purchasable plan, not the lowest unit cost — see each review for the per-tier rates.

The ranked picks

1. Bright Data — best published pool, enterprise muscle (score 8.2/10)

The only provider in this set that publishes a 400M+ monthly residential pool across 195 countries, with geo-location targeting listed as free. Entry is $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go — but that is a 50% promo off the $8.00/GB list, coupon RESIGB50, no commitment. At volume it falls: $3.50/GB at 141 GB, $3.00/GB at 332 GB, $2.50/GB at 798 GB. Free trial, no credit card. It isn’t cheap — but it is the biggest published pool on this list, and the promo terms are printed on the page rather than buried. Full Bright Data review.

2. Decodo — the cleanest flat-rate pricing (score 8.0/10)

No promo codes, no list-versus-sale theatre: $3.75/GB on a 3 GB plan, stepping down to $2.75/GB at 100 GB, with $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go on top. The 115M+ pool and 195+ locations are published, and monthly plans come with a free trial and 14-day money-back. The “from $2/GB” headline is real but refers to higher-volume enterprise tiers — the plan you can actually buy starts at $3.75/GB. Formerly Smartproxy; decodo.com is the current domain. Full Decodo review.

3. Webshare — best self-serve value with a real dashboard (score 7.8/10)

$3.50/GB at 1 GB rotating residential is a promo off $7.00/GB list — the discount deepens to $1.40/GB at 3,000 GB. The 80M+ residential pool and 195 countries are published, as is city/ZIP/ASN targeting, and 10 free datacenter proxies need no card. Webshare is the pick when you want to click around a dashboard yourself instead of emailing sales. Best proxies for scraping has it in the same seat.

4. IPRoyal — cheapest published entry, no contracts (score 7.0/10)

$1.75/GB from is the lowest published residential entry rate on this list, and the page states no contracts and that residential traffic never expires. The pool (64M+ residential, 500K+ ISP, 4.5M+ mobile) is published; session types and any free tier are not. It scores lower on targeting depth and transparency — two fields the pricing page simply does not answer. Full IPRoyal review.

5. Infatica — solid mid-volume pricing (score 6.4/10)

$4.00/GB pay-as-you-go, $3.84/GB at 25 GB falling to $2.60/GB at 1,000 GB, 45M+ published IPs, and a 7-day trial that costs $4.00. The country total is not published, though per-country counts are shown on the pricing page. A dependable middle-of-the-pack option with no promo noise.

6. SOAX — plan-based pricing with the deepest targeting (score 6.2/10)

SOAX rebuilt its pricing in 2026: a fixed monthly fee plus metered network usage. The free sandbox (200 credits) is the cheapest way to test it; the first paid step is $200/mo with network usage from $3.00/GB. Country, region, city and ISP targeting are published, with ASN+ZIP on Scale and Enterprise — the deepest published targeting in this list. The pool size is not published, and the $200 floor rules out casual buyers.

7. Oxylabs — enterprise tooling, premium entry (score 6.0/10)

Residential from $6.00/GB is the most expensive published entry here, and the pricing page publishes no pool size or country count. What it does publish is breadth: web scraper API from $49/mo, web unblocker from $9.40/GB, mobile from $7.50/GB, ISP from $16/GB, SOCKS5 from $8/GB, plus a free IPs program. This is the pick when you need managed tooling and a sales rep, not the cheapest GB. Full Oxylabs review.

8. ProxyEmpire — promo-first pricing (score 5.8/10)

$3.50/GB pay-as-you-go looks like IPRoyal’s neighbourhood — until you read the fine print: every captured price carries 50% off list (code EMPIRE50), and pool size is not published on the pricing page. The $1.97 trial is the cheapest live test on this list. It ranks where it does because the discount, not the list price, is what you are really buying.

9. Rayobyte — scraping tiers, unpublished pool (score 5.8/10)

Residential rotating from $3.50/GB at 1–49 GB falls fast with volume — $1.50/GB at 250–999 GB, $0.70/GB at 1,000–4,999 GB, $0.50/GB at 5 TB+. Datacenter rotating starts at $0.30/GB, which matters if your targets are not residential-only. The pool size is not published, and the free tier is not published either — the two reasons it sits where it does.

What the table doesn’t tell you

• A promo price is a price with a condition. Bright Data ($4.00/GB = 50% off $8.00 list), Webshare ($3.50/GB = 50% off $7.00 list), ProxyEmpire ($3.50/GB = 50% off $7.00 list) — all three print the promo rate on the page today. Budget for the list price when the promo ends, and check the review page for the exact coupon terms.
• “From” prices are not what you pay at 1 GB. IPRoyal’s $1.75/GB and Oxylabs’ $6.00/GB are “from” figures on the vendor’s pricing page. The tier you can actually buy at small volume is usually higher; the per-tier rows in each review show the difference.
• Pool sizes are vendor claims, dated. “400M+”, “115M+”, “80M+” come from each vendor’s own page as of 2026-09-19. We run real sessions on these networks, but we do not count IPs at scale — see How we test for exactly what we measure.
• NetNut is gone from this ranking. netnut.io served an FBI/IRS seizure banner when checked in a browser on 2026-09-19. The parent (Alarum Technologies, NASDAQ: ALAR) has been linked in multiple independent reports to the “Popa” residential-proxy botnet. There is no official price to verify, so there is no row — the seizure is the finding.

How the numbers were collected

Every row was read from the provider’s own pricing or documentation page on 2026-09-19 and logged in the dataset with its source URL and date. Nothing on this page comes from an aggregator or another review site. Where a provider does not publish a figure, the cell says not published instead of carrying an estimate.

Who wrote this

Written by the Runein operator — the same person who pays for and runs these tools. Corrections and vendor price changes go to [email protected] and are re-read, re-dated and logged. Disclosure: some links on this page point to vendor official sites; if we later add affiliate links, buying through one may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you, and it never changes what we recommend.