Mobile Proxy Pricing in 2026: The Three Models, Break-Even Math, and What Each Use Case Actually Costs

Mobile proxy pricing is a mess to compare, and most of the comparison pages out there make it worse.

The problem isn't that vendors hide their numbers. It's that they sell the same product three completely different ways — per gigabyte, per dedicated proxy, per day — and a "$2/GB" headline and a "$10/day" headline aren't remotely the same unit. Stack a few of those side by side and you can't tell what you'd actually pay until you know your own usage.

So this isn't a ranking. I'm not crowning a winner here — if you want my ordered buyer's pick at roughly 100GB, that's a separate piece: Best Mobile Proxy Providers in 2026. This page does the boring, load-bearing work nobody else seems to finish: lay out the three pricing models, put real verified rates in one table, explain why mobile costs what it does, then show the break-even math that tells you which model is cheaper for your workload.

Every number below was rechecked against each vendor's own pricing page in June 2026. Where a figure is a directional estimate rather than a published rate, I say so.

The three pricing models

Mobile proxies are sold one of three ways. Get the model right and the per-unit number almost sorts itself out.

1. Per-GB (metered). You pay for bandwidth — every gigabyte that flows through the proxy. This is the dominant model and the only one most vendors offer. It's the right fit when your usage is variable or you can't predict it, and it's the model that punishes you hardest if you accidentally render full pages instead of blocking images.
2. Per-proxy / dedicated (flat monthly). You rent a specific mobile endpoint — a SIM on real carrier hardware — for a flat monthly fee, usually with a generous (but rarely truly infinite) data allowance. You're buying a stable identity, not raw bytes. This wins when one consistent mobile exit matters more than rotation: account work, sustained agent sessions, anything that needs the same IP behavior across many requests.
3. Per-day unlimited (flat daily). A short-term dedicated proxy billed by the day, marketed as unlimited bandwidth. It's the model that makes sense for short, bandwidth-intensive bursts where you'll move a lot of data through a single endpoint for a few days and then stop.

Most vendors only sell model 1. The handful that offer a dedicated option — Proxidize on per-proxy, IPRoyal on both per-proxy and per-day — are the ones worth a second look if your usage profile fits a flat rate.

Verified per-vendor pricing (June 2026)

Here's the live data, sorted by pricing model and then by rate. This is not a leaderboard — order here means nothing about quality. For the ranked pick, see the companion buyer's guide.

Per-GB providers (entry rate, ascending):

Dedicated per-proxy and per-day (the artifact most pricing pages skip):

A few things to read carefully before you anchor on any of these:

• Decodo's headline rates are on a 50%-off promo. The $3.75/GB entry and $2.75/GB at 100GB are promotional; list rates are roughly double ($7.50 down to $5.50/GB, PAYG $8.00). If you're budgeting past the promo window, assume the higher numbers. I'll flag that some pages still quote a "$2.25/GB start" for Decodo — that figure doesn't appear anywhere in the live pricing collection, so I'm not using it.
• SOAX charges one rate across residential and mobile, tiered by country and by plan. Tier-1 (US/UK) runs $5.00/GB at entry down to $0.85/GB at Enterprise; Tier-3 markets start near $2.00/GB. Its blended marketing line is "as low as $2.20/GB," and everything is +VAT. The older "$3.60/GB" figure floating around (including in my own earlier write-ups) doesn't match the current geo-tiered structure, so treat it as stale.
• Proxidize's per-proxy plan is the cleaner of the two dedicated options here because its allowance is explicit: 50GB/month is prioritized, after which traffic can be deprioritized under load but the connection stays live. Its mobile network is US-only on real US carrier IPs (no MVNOs or resellers). Above 1TB or 100 proxies, custom pricing starts at $0.50/GB (verified June 2026).

Why mobile costs more

If you've only ever bought datacenter or residential proxies, the mobile premium looks like markup. It isn't — the cost structure underneath mobile is genuinely different, and five drivers stack on top of each other.

IPv4 scarcity and CGNAT. IPv4 exhaustion forces carriers to run Carrier-Grade NAT, sharing one public IPv4 across hundreds to thousands of subscribers. The publicly routable carrier IPs a provider can actually expose are inherently scarce. That same sharing is exactly what makes mobile IPs the hardest to block — an anti-bot system can't ban one without collateral-damaging real paying subscribers — so mobile carries the highest trust score on the internet. Scarcity and trust, both priced in.

Real carrier SIM and device hardware. Each mobile endpoint is backed by a physical SIM on a real carrier plus a dedicated modem, router, or phone in a managed device farm. Capacity is built from hardware you can touch, not spun up in software like datacenter proxies or sourced from peer SDKs like residential pools.

Metered carrier data cost. Every gigabyte routed consumes real cellular data the provider pays a carrier for, and carrier plans come with their own caps and throttling. Bandwidth is a recurring metered cost, not effectively-free datacenter transit — which is precisely why mobile is sold per-GB and why even "unlimited" dedicated plans are fair-use capped.

Rotation infrastructure and fleet upkeep. Cycling each endpoint through fresh carrier IPs needs provider-built rotation systems layered on top of the device fleet, and the fleet itself needs continuous maintenance: SIMs expire, modems fail, carriers change policies. That's operational overhead datacenter and peer-sourced residential pools simply don't carry.

Inelastic supply. Datacenter IPs provision instantly; residential pools scale across large peer-to-peer networks. Mobile capacity is capped by physical hardware and by uneven 4G/5G availability and carrier restrictions across regions. Supply can't scale freely with demand, so the per-GB premium persists.

Mobile vs residential vs datacenter

So how big is the gap? Treat the figures below as directional, tier-dependent ranges — never a single precise "average."

• Mobile (verified, June 2026): the rates in the table above span about $2/GB at the budget and US-only end (Proxidize, DataImpulse) up to $7.50–$8/GB entry at the global premium vendors (Oxylabs, NetNut, Infatica). Decodo sits in the middle near $3.75/GB, but only on its current promo.
• Residential: roughly $1.75–$8.50/GB depending on vendor and tier — a directional band drawn from third-party roundups, not a figure I re-verified per vendor for this piece.
• Datacenter: roughly $0.40–$2/GB, and effectively pennies per GB at volume on the per-IP plans most vendors actually sell — also directional.

Like-for-like at the same vendor and tier, mobile is consistently the most expensive of the three — commonly a couple to several times the per-GB cost of residential, and far more than datacenter. I'm deliberately not pinning that to a single multiplier: the ratio swings with vendor, region, and volume, and anyone quoting one exact number is rounding hard.

The number that actually decides this isn't the headline $/GB — it's cost-per-successful-request. A cheap datacenter IP that gets blocked 90% of the time on a hard target costs more in practice than mobile that sails through. And paying mobile rates for an unprotected site is pure waste.

When mobile earns the premium: the hardest anti-bot targets (sneaker and ticket drops, large-scale social automation on Instagram/TikTok/X, Google scraping at scale, aggressive fingerprinting), native mobile-app or cellular-only traffic, and account-trust-sensitive work.

When it's overkill: residential is usually enough for general scraping, geo-unblocking, e-commerce and price monitoring, and SERP work — real-user trust at roughly half to a third of mobile's cost. Datacenter handles high-volume scraping of weakly-defended sites, QA, and uptime monitoring for pennies.

The break-even math nobody shows you

Here's the part most pricing pages never finish: when does a flat-rate plan actually beat metered per-GB? The formula is simple.

Crossover GB = (flat period price) ÷ (your per-GB rate). Above that volume, the flat rate wins. Below it, metered wins. Then sanity-check against any fair-use cap.

Worked from verified June 2026 numbers, all against a $2/GB baseline:

• IPRoyal $10.11/day vs $2/GB → ~5GB/day. Push more than about 5GB/day through one IPRoyal dedicated proxy and the flat daily rate beats buying that data at $2/GB. Below ~5GB/day, per-GB is cheaper. (Caveat: that vendor snippet hinting at a ~30GB/day per-proxy cap would conflict with the "unlimited" claim — verify before relying on true-unlimited above ~30GB/day.)
• IPRoyal $117/month (90-day term) vs $2/GB → ~58.5GB/proxy/month. Above roughly 58–59GB/month per proxy, the $117 flat beats $2/GB. At the 30-day rate ($130/mo) the crossover shifts to ~65GB/month.
• Proxidize $59/month per-proxy vs $2/GB → ~29.5GB/proxy/month as the raw arithmetic crossover. But the per-proxy plan only prioritizes 50GB/month before possible deprioritization, so the practical sweet spot is ~30–50GB/proxy/month — where you pay $59 flat instead of $60–$100 of metered data and get a stable single mobile identity. Below ~30GB/proxy/month, per-GB is cheaper, and the per-proxy plan's real value is identity stability, not just bytes.

If you want a fuller cost model before you even get to break-even, the rule of thumb for a per-GB job is requests/day × average response size × 30 × 1.3 (retries) × your $/GB rate. That gives you a monthly bandwidth bill you can then test against the flat-rate crossover above.

What each use case actually costs

The per-GB rate is only half the bill — the other half is how many gigabytes your workload actually moves. The figures below are directional planning estimates, not vendor-published numbers. The underlying byte rates they're built on — typical page weight and app data consumption — come from widely-published industry data (HTTP Archive page-weight medians and commonly-cited app usage rates), and I've shown them so you can re-run the math for your own job.

Two takeaways from that table. First, for scraping, resource-blocking is worth more than any vendor discount — it's a 6–20x swing in bandwidth, far larger than the gap between a $2 and $3.75 per-GB rate. Second, the higher your volume, the more the per-GB rate is the only number that matters. For the AI-scale end of this table specifically, I've gone deeper in Best Mobile Proxies for AI Data Collection & Automation in 2026.

Putting it together

There's no universal cheapest mobile proxy — there's only the cheapest one for your volume and your model.

If your usage is variable or you can't predict it, stay metered and shop on $/GB: at ~100GB/month the verified floor is Proxidize and DataImpulse near $2/GB (about $200), with Decodo reaching ~$2.75/GB at 100GB but only under its current promo. If you'll reliably push more than ~30–50GB through a single endpoint or you need one stable mobile identity, run the break-even formula and a flat per-proxy plan likely wins — Proxidize's $59/month per-proxy and IPRoyal's $117/month dedicated are the two real options. And if your job is a short, heavy burst, IPRoyal's $10.11/day pays off above ~5GB/day.

The one structural insight worth carrying out of all this: a US-only network can undercut the global pools because it isn't paying to maintain carrier hardware and SIMs across 100+ countries. That's exactly how Proxidize lands at a $2/GB floor on real US carrier IPs while global-coverage vendors sit at $5–8/GB entry — if your workload is US-focused, you're often paying a premium for international capacity you'll never touch.

Whatever model you land on, do the arithmetic against your own bandwidth before you commit. The headline rate is the start of the calculation, not the end of it.