How this calculator works
Residential proxy providers bill almost entirely by gigabytes of traffic routed through their IP pool, and each vendor prices that GB in volume tiers — the rate you pay drops as your monthly usage crosses plan thresholds. This calculator applies Bright Data's, Oxylabs' and Smartproxy's (Decodo) published self-service tier rates to the GB figure you enter, so you can see the effective monthly bill and per-GB rate for each provider side by side. Because the cheapest vendor at 10GB/month is not necessarily the cheapest at 1TB/month, re-run the numbers whenever your scraping or data-collection volume changes meaningfully, and remember that GB burned per page depends heavily on whether you're fetching plain HTML or rendering JavaScript-heavy pages with images.
Frequently asked questions
How is residential proxy usage billed?
Almost all residential proxy providers bill by gigabytes of traffic that pass through their IP pool, not by number of requests. You pick (or are placed into) a per-GB rate tier based on your committed monthly volume, and that rate applies to every GB you use that month. Heavier pages (images, JS-rendered content) burn more GB per request than plain HTML.
Why do Bright Data, Oxylabs and Smartproxy have such different per-GB rates?
Each vendor prices in volume tiers: pay-as-you-go is the most expensive per GB, and rates drop as your committed monthly spend rises. Bright Data's pay-as-you-go rate (~$8.40/GB) is the highest of the three at low volume, but Oxylabs and Smartproxy also start higher and fall as usage crosses their plan thresholds (20GB, 50GB, 125GB, 1TB), so the cheapest vendor at 10GB/month is often not the cheapest at 1TB/month.
Should I pick the cheapest per-GB rate?
Not automatically. IP pool size, success rate, session control (sticky vs rotating), geo-targeting granularity and support quality all affect how many GB you actually burn to complete a job — a cheaper per-GB rate with a lower success rate can cost more in retried requests. Use this calculator for a first-pass budget, then confirm real GB-per-job usage in each provider's free trial.