Why the first residential gigabyte costs up to 5x the last

One gigabyte from IPRoyal, bought to try them out, is $7.35. Same page, lower down, there's $1.84 a gigabyte. I checked it on November 6. The $1.84 has "custom plans" written beside it and starts at 10 TB, so you would need to buy ten thousand gigabytes to see it, and the one you bought to test with cost you four times that.

Both numbers are printed right there, so nobody lied to you. The thing is that at small volumes the ladder decides your bill more than the brand does.

Already buying hundreds of gigs a month on a tier you know? Go to the 1,000 GB part. If you buy five, or haven't bought anything yet, start here.

A ladder prices the order, not the gigabyte

Proxyway's 2026 market research has one standardized residential table, Byteful at the top and Webshare at the bottom, built from data they collected in March and April. We read it again on 2026-11-06. The average across the table is $4.16 per GB at 5 GB and $1.94 at 1,000 GB, with $3.00 at 50 GB and $2.28 at 500 GB in between. A 2.1× fall, top to bottom.

Rayobyte's ladder is the steep one: $3.50 at 5 GB and $0.70 at 1,000 GB.

People read a ladder as if it were a cost curve, as though the first gigabyte simply costs more to deliver. We can't show you that's true and neither can anyone selling you one, because no provider publishes its cost per gigabyte. We don't either. The only thing a ladder actually shows is what one seller charges for each size of order.

Want to see how little that tells you about the bandwidth itself? Price a single gigabyte at three companies on the same day. On 2026-11-06 it was $2.00 at ThorData, $7.35 at IPRoyal and $8.00 on Bright Data's pay-as-you-go list price. Identical unit, four times apart. The average ladder only spans 2.1× from end to end.

Geonode and Floppydata won't sell you a gigabyte at all. Geonode starts at 10 GB for $8.80. Floppydata starts at 19 GB and charges $19.00 for it, or $28.50 if you don't want it to expire. So when a forum post says Geonode is 88 cents a gig, fine, it is, provided you wanted ten gigs.

Every cheap rung on these pages came with a condition

Before you put two ladders side by side, find out where each cheap number comes from. On the pages behind this post, four questions changed the price more than the tier did:

• Can you buy the bottom rung yourself? IPRoyal's $1.84 is labelled "custom plans" and starts at 10 TB. There is no button for it.
• Is it a promotion? Bright Data shows a public 50%-off code that takes $8 to $4 per GB, for three months. ThorData's $0.65 per GB at 5,000 GB is a sale rate against a $1.05 list price.
• Does the traffic expire? Floppydata prices expiry as its own line: $1.00 per GB for traffic that lasts 30 days, $1.50 for traffic that never expires.
• Is it a subscription? Oxylabs publishes bands, $6 per GB on the smallest down to $2.50 at 1,000 GB or more, sold as plans.

Subscriptions first. Proxyway writes that monthly subscriptions "remain the preferred pricing model" and that some providers have pulled pay-as-you-go entirely, "raising the price ceiling and reducing their flexibility". On a plan, a scraper that sat broken for two weeks still bills you for the month.

Expiry is easier to miss. Floppydata's $1.00 only beats its own $1.50 when you get through the whole order in 30 days. Day 31, the rest disappears. Every gigabyte you didn't get to raises the real price of the ones you did.

Last, check what the page counts as a gigabyte. We count outbound plus inbound bytes through the proxy, so a gigabyte on our bill is all the traffic, not only the response bodies you saved. We didn't find wording that explicit from any of the five vendors we looked at, which doesn't prove they count differently. It means the units might not match. Ask them in a ticket.

Flat wins the test and loses to the cheap ladders at a thousand

Rival prices below are from each vendor's own page on 2026-11-06, unless we say they're Proxyway's. Ours come from the pricing page, which today lists Essential residential at $1.50 per GB, flat, anywhere from 0.1 to 1,000 GB. If you're going to quote us, quote that page. It changes; this post won't.

1 GB: the test

A single gigabyte is the worst place on any ladder. ThorData, $2.00. IPRoyal, $7.35. Bright Data, $8.00 at list without the code. You can't do a one-gig test at Geonode or Oxylabs because neither sells one, so the first thing you buy from them is bigger.

With us the pricing page today has a gigabyte at $1.50 and a $0.50 minimum payment, about 333 MB at that rate. Enough to aim one job at one target, look at per-domain usage in the dashboard, and know whether it works for less than a coffee.

10 GB: the first real month

At ten gigabytes the ladders start to diverge properly.

Geonode's 10 GB order is $8.80 and that's cheaper than us. ThorData charges $18.00 for 10 GB. IPRoyal's 10 GB rate is $5.51 a gig, $55.10 all in, and ten gigs inside Oxylabs' "up to 20 GB" band at $5.00 comes to $50.00. Today's Essential rate on the pricing page makes it $15.00.

There's a line in AIMultiple's review of residential providers that covers this range: "monthly minimums inflate the effective rate: a 10 GB buyer pays 2–2.5× the provider's lowest price". IPRoyal comes out a bit past that. $5.51 is three times $1.84, and a ten-gig customer will never be offered the custom plan anyway.

What a ten-gig buyer sees at the bottom of a ladder is a discount that belongs to somebody else.

1,000 GB: where the ladder ends

This is the end of the ladder everything points towards. It should win here and sometimes it does.

The 1,000 GB numbers are Proxyway's, from their constructed comparison, so they're a measurement and not a price anyone has promised you. Average $1.94 per GB. Oxylabs $2.50, IPRoyal $3.15. Webshare and ProxyEmpire, $1.50 each. Proxyrack and DataImpulse are on $0.80 and Rayobyte is on $0.70.

On the pricing page our Essential rate at this volume is still $1.50, the same as for one gigabyte, which puts a thousand at $1,500. That's also the largest single top-up we sell. Anything bigger is a bulk rate we don't publish: open a ticket with your monthly volume and support quotes you.

Here is the honest version. Several ladders in Proxyway's table finish below our flat rate at a thousand gigabytes a month. Rayobyte's $0.70 and Proxyrack's $0.80 are about half of it. Evomi's Core line is $0.49 flat across every tier it sells. Moving that much traffic every month, on a cheap tier that's self-serve and not a sale, you'd get a better deal there than here, and you should go. Our comparison pages for IPRoyal, ThorData and Geonode put the figures next to each other.

The average is a different story. It still ends at $1.94 a gigabyte. Flat $1.50 is 23% under that, and 64% under the 5 GB average of $4.16, which means the last gigabyte on a typical ladder costs more than the first one on ours.

Climbing a ladder pays only at a tier you hit every month

All of it comes back to your number. Before you buy from anyone, including us:

1. Take last month's real gigabytes from your invoice or the dashboard. Not the plan you hope to grow into.
2. Find the tier on the vendor's live page that you would actually land in at that volume.
3. Cross out anything custom, promotional, or likely to expire before you'd use it.
4. Compare the per-GB rate that's left to a flat rate at the same volume.

Against Proxyway's average ladder, nothing up to 1,000 GB gets below $1.50. Against individual ladders, some do, at different points. Geonode is under from its first 10 GB order. DataImpulse is $1.00 starting at 50 GB. Rayobyte gets there at 1,000 GB and not before, at $0.70.

Climb a ladder when that seller's rate at your actual tier is under the flat rate, you'd hit the tier every month without stretching, and none of it expires before you spend it. Otherwise don't. Proxyway's 50 GB average is $3.00 a gigabyte, double the Essential rate on the pricing page today.

Pull last month's gigabytes and price them at the tier you'd really land on each live page, not at the headline. If a ladder wins at that number, buy the ladder; if it doesn't, buy flat residential and put the difference into traffic.