The cheapest proxy providers are almost never the ones with the lowest price per gigabyte, because a cheap proxy that gets blocked mid-task costs you every retry, every failed job, and every hour spent debugging why. Picture the common trap: you switch to a bargain residential pool at half your old rate, feel clever for a week, then watch the scraping success rate fall from 96% to 61%. Count the failed requests and reruns, and the cheap proxies cost more than the ones you left. The sticker was lower. The bill was higher.
That's the trap this guide is built to avoid. Proxy pricing looks simple, a dollar figure per GB or per IP, but the number that actually matters is cost per successful request. A provider at $3 per GB with a 60% success rate is dearer than one at $6 with 95%, and no pricing page will tell you that.
I test tools and offers at Coupo9, and proxy providers are one of the noisiest markets we cover. Prices shift monthly, "best proxy" lists are usually affiliate rankings in disguise, and the gap between marketing and reality is wide. So a plain warning up front: the figures below are indicative starting points for 2026, not quotes. Proxy pricing changes often, so treat them as a map, not a bill, and check the live rate before you buy.
What this guide gives you is the honest shape of the market: which providers are genuinely cheap and still reliable, which are premium but worth it for hard targets, and which job each one actually fits. Pick by use case, not by the headline number, and the right stop being a gamble.
