The PacketStream alternative for mobile, static and state-targeted proxies

The full catalogue is residential proxy bandwidth, a white-label reseller API, and Search, Fetch and MCP web data APIs. On the proxy side that means one residential pool behind one gateway host, with the exit chosen per connection or pinned to a session label.

The pool is a peer-to-peer network of household connections whose owners run its app and accrue $0.10 per GB they share. That model has a real strength: every exit is an ordinary home connection, so the traffic looks like a household rather than a data centre. It also has a limit PacketStream states openly: an exit exists only while the person sharing it is online.

The APIs are the most distinctive thing on the site. Search, Fetch and the MCP server bill per successful call from the same balance as bandwidth. If your stack is an AI agent that searches and reads pages, PacketStream has built something we have not.

What the catalogue does not include is anything beyond rotating residential: no mobile pool, no static block, no server. That is a deliberate focus.

PacketStream's rate is $1.00 per GB, the same rate for rotating and sticky traffic. There is no volume ladder and no plan to size.

Our rates are $1.50/GB on Essential, $3.00/GB on Premium and $3.00/GB on Mobile. Every one of those is higher than PacketStream's flat rate, and nothing on this page changes that arithmetic. If your job is residential gigabytes at country level, the cheaper rate is the better buy.

The one place the money runs the other way is the entry point. PacketStream asks for a $50 minimum purchase. Our wallet takes any amount from $0.50. If you are testing a target or running a small monitor, that is the difference between trying a provider and committing to one.

Both of us keep the balance: PacketStream sells purchased balance that does not expire, and ours has no expiry date under normal circumstances, as our Terms set out. Our full sheet is on pricing.

PacketStream's targeting is country level, set with a two-letter ISO code on the auth key. Its locations page carries setup guides for 30 named countries. When no exit is available in the country you asked for, the request fails instead of being rerouted elsewhere. We like that rule: a failed request is honest, and a silently rerouted one poisons your data.

Below country, PacketStream does not go: no state, city or carrier selector appears on the pages we read.

Ours starts where theirs stops. Every ResiFactory pool takes a country, a US state and a network (ASN) in the username, and Premium and Mobile add city, so you can ask for one metro or one network rather than sampling a country and filtering afterwards.

If a price, an ad or a search result changes by state, a country-level exit gives you an average of the country, and you pay for every request that lands in the wrong place. At that point the cheaper rate stops being cheaper. See residential proxies for the syntax.

This is where PacketStream has a genuine edge. Its sticky sessions have no maximum duration, on a 60-minute timer that restarts with each successful new connection. A workload that keeps opening connections can keep one exit for as long as the household behind it stays online.

The trade is availability. If the exit goes offline, connections fail until that exit comes back, and the session label never moves to another IP. That is a principled choice, since a session that quietly changes IP is worse than one that fails, but your job has to notice the failure and start a new label.

Our design is a ceiling rather than a rolling timer. Premium and Mobile hold an exit up to 24 hours (120 minutes on Essential), the same rule on every page we publish. You set the length in the username.

For an open-ended monitor that checks in regularly, PacketStream's rolling timer is the better fit. For a predictable window around a sign-in or a multi-step test, ours is stated up front, with the pool named beside it.

PacketStream sells no mobile pool. Nothing in its catalogue is a phone on a carrier network.

ResiFactory Mobile is $3.00/GB, on real phones attached to carrier networks in 150 countries, with US state and city targeting. That is the pool you want when a site checks the network type and not only the address. See mobile proxies.

Static IPs are the same story. PacketStream sells no static or ISP proxies, which its sticky-session page states outright: a sticky session there is a household exit, not a fixed address.

Our ISP product includes a whole /24 at $255 a month, sold in restock windows, members first and then everyone. Each subnet goes to exactly one customer, so the reputation of those addresses is yours. If you need an address that stays put for weeks, a rotating pool is the wrong tool. See ISP proxies.

PacketStream does not sell machines. We rent Mac servers from $32 a day or $160 a month, on 1 or 2.5 Gbps lines, for browser testing, Xcode or a macOS-only tool you would otherwise host with a third provider.

The table below is read live from our catalogue on every request. A build that is out of stock is marked as such rather than hidden.

PacketStream offers HTTPS on port 31111 (recommended), SOCKS5 on 31113 and HTTP on 31112, with username and password authentication. Two things there beat ours: SOCKS5 on its whole pool, and an HTTPS proxy endpoint that encrypts the hop between your client and the gateway.

We run HTTP on port 7777 on every pool and SOCKS5 on port 1080 on Premium, Mobile and ISP. Essential is HTTP only. Our username carries the country, state, city, ASN and session settings.

If your client only speaks SOCKS5 and you want the cheapest pool, PacketStream covers that and our Essential pool does not.

PacketStream's refund window is 24 hours from purchase, for the remaining balance. Ours is 14 days from a top-up, under the refund policy. After the rate itself, that is the most concrete commercial difference between us.

PacketStream takes credit card or PayPal, with bank transfer by approval for larger purchases. We take Visa, Mastercard and Amex through Stripe, or SOL.

On trials, both of us have a front door. PacketStream offers discretionary trial credit, granted after a person reviews the use case; ours is 1 GB of Premium free when a new account links Google.

Support at PacketStream is a human team monitoring requests around the clock, with response times that vary. Ours is Discord tickets and email, answered by the people who run the network.

On residential bandwidth alone, PacketStream is cheaper than we are, and simpler. Its flat rate undercuts every pool we sell, its sticky sessions have no fixed end, and it sells search and page APIs we have no answer to. If your job is country-level residential traffic, it is a good buy and we would not argue you out of it.

The case for us is everything around that pool: mobile on real carrier networks, static subnets owned by one customer, Mac servers, US state and ASN targeting on every pool, and city on Premium and Mobile. None of those is in PacketStream's catalogue at any price.

Two smaller points also go our way: a first top-up from $0.50 against a $50 minimum purchase, and a refund window of 14 days where PacketStream's is 24 hours from purchase, for the remaining balance. Buy from PacketStream if one country and one flat rate is the whole job. Come here if you need a phone, a block, a machine, or an exit in a particular state.

Proxyway published a hands-on review of PacketStream, last updated in November 2023. It is worth reading in full, and the link goes straight to it. We quote no scores from it or from any review site: a copied figure is a claim we cannot keep current.

Our own record is the trust page, and every price of ours on this page is read live rather than typed in.