Is unlimited or pay-per-GB cheaper for residential proxies?
It depends on how much traffic you move and how evenly you move it. Unlimited residential proxies cost the same whatever you transfer, up to what the plan speed can carry, so they win for steady, heavy traffic. Traffic packs cost more per GB at small sizes but nothing when you are idle, so they win for light or occasional work.
On TrueProxies prices from September 29, 2026, the line sits near 124 GB a month for a 10 Mbps plan: below it a traffic pack costs less, above it the $121.13 monthly plan does. For a job that fits in one hour, the line is about 2.5 GB. The rest of this article shows where those numbers come from, what unlimited does and does not cover, and how to check your own workload in the proxy cost calculator.
What unlimited residential proxies mean
An unlimited plan charges a fixed price for a plan speed and a duration, with no per-GB billing. Providers also call this unmetered residential proxies or unlimited bandwidth proxies; the model is the same. At TrueProxies, Residential IPv4 Unlimited has hourly plans from 10 to 100 Mbps and daily, weekly and monthly plans from 10 Mbps to 1 Gbps, from $4.08 for one hour on a separate 16M+ worldwide residential IPv4 pool.
Speed is the billing variable. You choose how fast traffic may move and for how long. The selected Mbps rate limits throughput even though transferred data is not metered, so a tier is chosen by measuring target response time, request size and concurrency, not by guessing gigabytes.
Duration is the other variable. Compare the full price of the duration that covers your job instead of multiplying the headline hourly rate: 720 hours of the 10 Mbps hourly plan would cost $2,937.60, while the monthly plan is $121.13. Access ends with the purchased duration; a renewal raises an invoice, and nothing is charged automatically.
- Best for always-on crawlers and recurring monitoring jobs.
- Easier to budget for the purchased duration because transferred gigabytes do not change its price.
- Useful when multiple teams or automations share the same residential pool.
The catch: fair use, connection caps and throttling
Most unlimited residential plans on the market carry a limit somewhere else: a fair-use clause that throttles or suspends heavy accounts, a cap on concurrent connections or threads, a per-port price, or a pool that is really static ISP or datacenter addresses. Read the terms before comparing prices, because a plan that throttles at 30% utilization is not the plan the price table describes.
TrueProxies publishes its limits on the product page instead of in a fair-use clause: the plan speed caps how fast traffic moves, each plan allows up to 3,000 concurrent connections with no per-thread or per-port billing, targeting is country-level, hourly and daily plans are non-refundable, and the acceptable use policy restricts what you do through the proxies, not how many gigabytes you move. Nothing counts down while you work.
The honest limit is physics. Plan speed decides the most data a plan can move, and real residential throughput sits below it because destinations respond slowly, requests are retried and connections sit idle. That is why the next table matters more than the word unlimited.
How much data each speed moves
10 Mbps is 1.25 megabytes per second, using the SI prefixes defined by NIST (mega = 10^6, giga = 10^9). One Mbps for an hour is 0.45 GB, so a speed tier's ceiling is Mbps × 0.45 per hour. At 100% use, a plan carries:
| Plan speed | Per hour | Per day | Per 30 days | Cost per GB on the daily plan | Cost per GB on the monthly plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Mbps | 4.5 GB | 108 GB | 3,240 GB | $0.068 ($7.35) | $0.037 ($121.13) |
| 25 Mbps | 11.25 GB | 270 GB | 8,100 GB | $0.046 ($12.30) | $0.025 ($202.71) |
| 50 Mbps | 22.5 GB | 540 GB | 16,200 GB | $0.038 ($20.28) | $0.021 ($334.22) |
| 100 Mbps | 45 GB | 1,080 GB | 32,400 GB | $0.032 ($34.84) | $0.018 ($574.18) |
Treat the cost per GB as a floor, not a quote: it assumes the plan runs flat out for the whole duration. A crawler that averages 30% of its plan speed pays about three times these figures per GB, which is still under the $0.60/GB that the largest TrueProxies traffic pack reaches, and under the 2026 market-average per-GB rates the calculator benchmarks against.
How the billing models differ
Per-GB billing ties cost directly to transferred traffic. At TrueProxies you buy it as traffic packs on Residential IPv4 GB-based, and each pack lasts 30 days from activation. That suits testing a workflow, launching a proof of concept, or workloads that run in bursts rather than all day, and it is the only product with city, region and ASN targeting.
Unlimited plans price capacity through a speed tier and a duration rather than measured gigabytes. The trade-off is a fixed throughput ceiling instead of a variable usage bill. Both products support HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 and sticky or rotating sessions, but they use separate pools with different location controls, so retest your targets after switching.
| Factor | Unlimited | Per-GB |
|---|---|---|
| Billing variable | Plan speed and duration | Transferred gigabytes |
| Light or intermittent use | Compare the shortest duration price | Usually cheaper; cost follows actual transfer |
| Continuous use | Transfer is unlimited within the speed cap | Cost rises with every gigabyte |
| Capacity planning | Needs a throughput estimate | Needs a data-transfer estimate |
| Targeting | Country | Country, city, region, ASN |
| Starting price | $4.08 for 1 hour at 10 Mbps | $1.64 for 1 GB |
Break-even at three workloads
Three common jobs, priced on the TrueProxies catalog from September 29, 2026. The traffic pack is the smallest single pack that covers the month; the unlimited plan is the slowest tier that can carry the traffic in the time available. Check current prices before you decide.
| Workload | Traffic per month | Traffic pack | Unlimited plan | Cheaper on these prices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEO rank tracking: a few thousand result pages a day, spread across the day | About 20 GB | $26.83 (24 GB pack) | $121.13 (10 Mbps monthly) | Traffic pack, by about $94 |
| E-commerce price monitoring: catalog crawls every few hours | About 300 GB, steady | $259.57 (300 GB pack) | $121.13 (10 Mbps monthly, which carries up to 3,240 GB) | Unlimited, by about $138 |
| AI training data collection: continuous page fetching | About 1,000 GB, steady | $810.50 (1,000 GB pack) | $121.13 at 10 Mbps, or $202.71 at 25 Mbps for headroom | Unlimited, by $600 or more |
Two more break-even lines are worth memorizing. The 10 Mbps daily plan ($7.35) beats the 1 GB pack rate ($1.64/GB) above about 4.5 GB in a day and the lowest pack rate ($0.60/GB, reached at 5,000 GB) above about 12 GB in a day. One hour at 10 Mbps ($4.08) beats $1.64/GB above about 2.5 GB in that hour but never beats the 5,000 GB pack's rate, so hourly plans are for short bursts, not bulk; the hourly residential proxies page works the hour-versus-day cases through.
Price is not the only difference. If you need ASN targeting, only GB-based offers it, and that decides the question before price does. And the quoted traffic is an assumption: a measured ad verification workflow that fetches media-heavy pages can move ten times the data of a rank tracker with the same request count, which is why the recommendation below starts with a measurement.
Speed tier, per port or per thread: three kinds of unlimited
Unlimited proxies are sold three ways, and the search results mix them up. Speed-tier plans (TrueProxies, and a few other residential providers) sell Mbps for a duration; every connection shares the speed. Per-port plans sell a number of proxy ports, each with unlimited traffic but often a low per-port speed and a fixed IP behind it, which suits static ISP proxies more than rotating residential pools. Per-thread plans charge for concurrent connections instead of traffic, so the bill rises with parallelism, not gigabytes.
The cost comparison changes with the model. A per-thread plan looks cheap for a single slow crawler and expensive for a fast one; a per-port plan looks cheap until you need rotation across many exits. A speed-tier plan is the only one where the price stays put as you add threads, which is why the calculation in this article only needs two inputs: gigabytes and hours.
Who benefits most from unlimited proxies
Continuous web scraping. A catalog crawler running every day can burn through paid traffic faster than teams expect, especially when retries and anti-bot defenses raise the request count. Once the crawl is continuous, unlimited pricing usually wins.
SEO monitoring at scale. Rank checks are lightweight, so most SEO teams stay on traffic packs. Unlimited starts to pay when the check list grows into the hundreds of thousands of keywords a day or when the same plan also feeds a content crawler.
Ad verification and brand protection. Repeated media-heavy checks transfer substantial data, so measure one representative run before comparing billing models. Market research and brand protection often start on GB-based plans and move to unlimited when the job becomes always-on.
Testing and development. Frequent iterations suit a short fixed-duration plan, an hour or a day, while occasional low-transfer tests remain cheaper per GB.
When per-GB wins
Traffic packs cost less whenever the plan speed you would pay for sits mostly idle: daily or weekly rank checks, a new project with unknown traffic, a proof of concept, or any job under roughly 124 GB a month at 10 Mbps. They also win outright when the job needs city, region or ASN targeting, and when a small pack covers a short job that does not fill an hour, such as 3 GB for $4.37 against $4.08 for an hour you would use a fraction of.
Per-GB also wins on bursty schedules. Ten jobs a month that each move 5 GB in five minutes cost one 50 GB pack, while the same jobs on hourly plans cost ten hours at $4.08 each. The calculator handles this case by rounding each run up to whole hours, days or weeks, which is the honest way to price a speed-tier plan.
How to decide without guessing
- Run your workflow for a week on a traffic pack, or for an hour on the free trial: 1 hour of Residential IPv4 Unlimited at 10 Mbps with unlimited traffic, started with a verified email.
- Record total bandwidth, retry rates and concurrency peaks.
- Project that usage across a full month.
- Compare the projected pack spend against the slowest unlimited plan that can carry the peak, in the proxy cost calculator.
- Switch once the production workload is stable, and retest your targets on the new pool.
The guide to sizing your plan speed shows how to turn a measured batch into the speed you need. If you are still deciding between proxy classes as well as pricing, read our comparison of residential and datacenter proxies next.
Frequently asked questions
Are unlimited residential proxies really unlimited?
The data is. The limits are the plan speed, the connection cap (3,000 per plan at TrueProxies), the targeting depth and the acceptable use policy. Check whether a provider adds a fair-use clause; TrueProxies publishes its limits on the product page instead.
How much data can I use on a 10 Mbps unlimited plan?
Up to 4.5 GB an hour, 108 GB a day or 3,240 GB in 30 days at a constant 10 Mbps. Actual throughput depends on target response times and your scraper's concurrency, so measure before you size.
Is a monthly unlimited plan cheaper than traffic packs?
Above about 124 GB a month at 10 Mbps, yes, on September 29, 2026 prices. Below that, the 100 GB pack or smaller costs less. Faster tiers move the line up in proportion to their price.
Do unmetered residential proxies charge per port or per thread?
Some providers do. TrueProxies charges one price per speed tier and duration, with up to 3,000 concurrent connections included and no per-port or per-thread fees.
Can I switch from per-GB to unlimited later?
Yes. Many teams validate traffic patterns on a traffic pack first, then move to unlimited. The products use separate pools, so retest your countries and targets after switching.
What changed in this update?
September 30, 2026: merged the earlier post on unlimited versus metered pricing into this one, added the limits section, the data-per-speed table with cost per GB, three worked workloads and the per-port versus per-thread comparison. September 29, 2026: added a direct answer, a break-even table from current prices, traffic pack validity and the targeting difference between the two products.