Cheapest pay-as-you-go residential proxies in 2026, compared

The short answer

QuanticData is the cheapest pay-as-you-go residential proxy we know of that also publishes its measurements: $1.00 per GB from a $5 pack, $0.90 at 500 GB and $0.80 at 1,000 GB, one-off packs valid up to 360 days, no subscription, no KYC, and 100 MB free with no card. The same pool and prices are sold on our sister brand QuantumProxies.

Two other providers publish a $1.00 entry price: DataImpulse, with a $5 minimum and $0.80 from 1 TB, and PacketStream, with a $50 minimum. Everyone else on this page starts between $3.50 and $8.00 per GB, or sells monthly plans instead of pay as you go.

Pay-as-you-go residential prices per GB, side by side

Entry price is what the smallest real purchase costs per gigabyte, without a monthly plan. Published prices, read from each provider's own pricing page on 8 September 2026; "not published" means the page states no such figure.

Prices, not performance: none of the other networks was tested. Volume tiers under $1 exist at several providers, but they require monthly commitments from $220 to $3,000 a month, which is not pay as you go.

What "pay as you go" hides: minimums, expiry, plans

Three things make a cheap price per GB cost more than it looks. The minimum spend: a $1.00 rate behind a $50 minimum is a $50 decision. The expiry: a monthly plan resets, so the gigabytes you did not use are gone; a one-off pack with a long validity is paid once. The plan behind the headline: "from $0.49/GB" usually means a subscription of hundreds of gigabytes a month.

On QuanticData the smallest pack is $5 for 5 GB, the traffic stays valid up to 360 days, and the per-GB rate drops with the pack size, not with a monthly commitment: $1.00, $0.90 at 500 GB, $0.80 at 1,000 GB.

Cheap is useless if the exit is wrong: what we measured

A residential proxy that exits in the wrong country, or from a hosting network, is expensive at any price. On 13 September 2026 we ran 50 rotating requests in 10 countries on the QuanticData network: 50 of 50 exits were in the requested country, from 41 distinct residential ASNs, and 20 of 20 sticky sessions held. The method and the raw rows are in the tested article.

When a cheap residential proxy is the right buy

Buy the cheapest residential line when the job is volume on sites that care about the origin but not about one fixed identity: price and availability checks, ad verification, SERP and marketplace scraping, geo testing. Pick Residential Premium when you need pool-quality filters, or an ISP proxy when one address has to stay yours for weeks.

How to buy

Create an account with an email address, claim the 100 MB free trial without a card, then buy the $5 pack from the Plans page: card, PayPal, balance or crypto. The endpoint, the username with the country flag and the password are on the Proxies page, with HTTP and SOCKS5 on the same credentials.