Per-GB or flat rate: what a mobile proxy really costs you

Proxy pricing pages are built to make one model look obviously cheaper. We would rather show you the whole sheet and let you check it. Below you will find the per-GB rates from a public US mobile residential price list, our own flat prices, the exact point where one beats the other, and the costs that do not appear on either price tag. You will also find a plain list of cases where you should not buy from us, plus a low-cost way to test your own usage before you spend real money on either model.

The short answer

If you move less than about 3.5 GB of mobile proxy traffic a month, a per-GB plan is probably cheaper. If you move more than about 6 GB, a BetterProxies 4G line almost certainly is. Between those two figures it depends on whether you would buy a larger per-GB package.

Those numbers come from simple division. Our 4G line costs $70 a month. The per-GB list we compare against, published by a US provider in September 2026, charges $20 per GB on pay-as-you-go, $40 for 2 GB, and $300 for 25 GB, which is $12 per GB. So $70 divided by $20 is 3.5 GB, and $70 divided by $12 is about 5.8 GB. For our 5G line at $85 the same sums give about 4.25 GB and 7.1 GB.

The full price sheet, no rounding in our favor

The table prices the same monthly traffic both ways. For the per-GB side we list both the pay-as-you-go cost and the cost of buying whole 25 GB packages, because you cannot buy a fraction of a package.

The last row is there because of how our allowance works. Every BetterProxies plan includes 15 GB of data per day. Used fully on each day of a 30-day month, that is about 450 GB. Very few customers get anywhere near it, but it shows where the limit of a single line actually sits. It is counted per day, so plan unusually large jobs across several days or several lines.

Costs that are not on either price tag

A per-GB bill counts every byte through the gateway. On most such plans that includes pages that loaded only to show a block or a captcha, retries after a timeout, and images or scripts you never needed. If your tool is not tuned to skip heavy assets, the real cost per useful page can sit well above the headline rate.

A flat line has its own hidden cost: you pay for it whether or not you use it. A line that sits idle for three weeks of the month is money spent on nothing. And one line is one device, with 4G speeds of roughly 20 to 45 Mbps and 5G speeds of 50 Mbps or more depending on signal, so work that needs hundreds of different addresses in the same second is simply not what it is built for.

There is also a quality question no price sheet captures. On a pool, you do not choose the device, carrier or city behind each request, and the next person routed through that same peer is a stranger. On our line you pick AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, the hardware, and one of eight US metros, and the device is assigned to nobody but you. Because a mobile IP is shared through carrier-grade NAT by many real phones, sites mostly judge it by behavior, so a line whose history is only yours is easier to reason about.

When you should not buy from us

We mean this. Choose a per-GB provider instead if one of these describes you.

If none of those fit, and especially if you need the same IP for days at a time, a flat line is usually the better value.

• Your total traffic is a few hundred megabytes a month.
• You need IPs outside the United States. We cover New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, North Carolina and Boston, and that is all.
• You run one-time tests and do not plan to return.
• You need a huge, simultaneous spread of addresses rather than one controlled connection.

Test before you trust: a two-step check

You should not take our word for your usage, or anyone else's. Here is the cheapest way we know to find out which side of the break-even you are on.

Step one: buy a single 4G day for $5. Run your normal workload through it for a full day and read the data counter in your dashboard. Multiply by the number of days you actually work in a month. If the answer is below 3.5 GB, stop there and use a per-GB plan with a clear conscience.

Step two: if the day looked busy, take a 4G week for $30 and repeat, which smooths out any unusual day. Four separate weeks would cost $120, so once you know your traffic, the $70 monthly plan is the obvious next step for steady work. During the test, check the things price sheets skip: whether the IP holds steady, whether rotation from the link or API behaves the way your tool expects, and whether the speed suits you.

What the flat price buys

Each line is a real 4G or 5G USB modem, router or Android phone with its own US carrier SIM. The IP stays put until you rotate it with a link, the API or per-request mode, and rotations are unlimited with no waiting in between. New addresses come from the carrier's regional pool, which is finite, so seeing a repeat within a day is normal and expected. HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 are both available, UDP runs over SOCKS5, moving the line to another metro is free, and support answers 24/7 by email and through our Telegram bot. You can pay by card, PayPal, Zelle, bank wire, Bitcoin, USDT or Ethereum.

Questions about per-GB pricing