A proxy catalogue looks simpler than it actually is. Behind the country filter sit four delivery channels and two fundamentally different billing models, and price per unit is not the main thing to compare. Here is what a product card is built from, what each channel means in practice, and which billing model fits which task.
Four delivery channels
A datacenter IP belongs to a hosting provider: fastest and cheapest, fixed address, stable connection. The drawback is that its origin is readable from the ASN in a fraction of a second — the site sees a server rack, not a home.
An ISP channel sits in between: the address is hosted in a datacenter but registered to a consumer provider, so reputation databases read it as residential — datacenter-grade speed with a friendlier reputation.
A residential channel is addresses of real home connections a provider assigns to end subscribers — indistinguishable from an ordinary user, but issued per session rather than held permanently. A mobile channel is carrier addresses: hundreds of live subscribers sit behind a single IP through NAT, so blocking it hits ordinary people too, which is why platforms block it reluctantly. The difference between the two is covered in mobile versus residential proxies.
Two billing models
Datacenter and ISP channels are billed monthly: a fixed price for an address for a chosen term, held regardless of traffic volume. That fits steady load — serving traffic from a server, calling an API, a long-lived account tied to one IP.
Residential and mobile channels are billed per gigabyte with the address assigned per session. You pay for data transferred, not for owning an IP, and the address rotates on session timeout or on request. The pool of live addresses is shared and constantly rotating, so pinning one IP to you forever is not physically possible.
How this shows up in the product card
A datacenter or ISP card lists the country, the ASN or subnet, and the rental term — day, week, month — price fixed for the whole term. A residential or mobile card shows the country (sometimes state or city) and, instead of a term, a traffic package in gigabytes with a price per gigabyte. The rotation method — on timeout or on API request — is listed too, since it determines how often your IP changes within a session.
Comparing channels by price alone does not work, because the units differ. A month of a datacenter IP and a gigabyte of mobile traffic are not directly comparable — only the total cost for a specific task volume is.
What to choose for your task
If the site does not strictly check IP origin — uptime monitoring, an open API, public data downloads — a datacenter channel is cheapest: a fixed monthly price regardless of traffic. For a residential-looking reputation without residential rates, an ISP channel fits.
If the task needs the site to see a live user — a marketplace storefront, an antidetect browser, geo-sensitive services — you need a residential or mobile channel. The choice between them depends on how tolerant the platform is of NAT: mobile IPs are rarely blocked outright because of the collateral damage, while residential IPs are cheaper but more exposed to targeted blocking. Judging the quality of an issued address is covered in how to check proxy quality.
How to estimate your spend in advance
For traffic billing, volume follows the task, not the number of addresses. A text page without media is 0.3–1 MB, a product card with images is 2–5 MB, an autoplaying video feed eats tens of megabytes per minute. A thousand product-card checks fit into 3–5 GB, a hundred into 0.3–0.5 GB, and daily monitoring of a hundred pages runs 1.5–3 GB a month.
Savings come from disabling images, fonts and trackers, not from buying the cheapest channel: broken sessions and retries from an unstable IP cost more than the gigabytes saved. Check that the fraud score of the assigned address will not break sessions before you even start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I switch channels mid-task if traffic runs over the plan?
Yes, channels in the account are independent: you can top up traffic on a residential package, or rent a separate datacenter address at any time if part of the load does not require residential-grade reputation.
Which is cheaper — a fixed monthly address or a gigabyte package?
It depends on the volume and nature of the task: for steady daily load on a site that is not geo-sensitive, a fixed monthly price is usually cheaper than a traffic package. For occasional tasks with high sensitivity to IP origin, paying only for the gigabytes actually transferred works out cheaper.
Why does a residential product card not show a specific IP address up front?
Residential and mobile pools are formed from live devices in real time, so a specific address is only issued the moment a session is requested, not reserved in advance the way a dedicated datacenter IP is.
All four channels and both billing models with current prices are collected in the proxy section: the product card itself shows which billing format applies to which channel.