Two Billing Models, Very Different Outcomes
Residential proxies charge per gigabyte transferred. ISP proxies charge per IP address per month with unlimited bandwidth. Which one costs less depends entirely on your workload shape: how many requests you send, how large each response is, and how many unique IPs you need. This calculator does the math for both models so you can choose with data instead of instinct.
Residential Proxy Economics
Hex Proxies residential plans through our proprietary network price bandwidth at $4.25-$4.75 per GB across 10M+ IPs spanning 150+ countries. Residential billing rewards lightweight, low-volume workloads that need massive IP diversity. A compliance team checking 20,000 pages per month at 50 KB each consumes only about 1 GB -- roughly $4.50 total. But bandwidth scales linearly: 500,000 requests at 100 KB each consumes 47.7 GB, costing around $215 at $4.50/GB.
ISP Proxy Economics
Hex Proxies ISP plans run $2.08-$2.47 per IP per month on owned hardware in Ashburn VA, connected through major carriers including Frontier, Windstream, COX, AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter, and RCN. The price is fixed regardless of how much data you push through each IP. A 200-IP pool at $2.25 each costs $450/month whether you transfer 10 GB or 10 TB. This flat-rate model dominates for high-bandwidth workloads.
The Crossover Point
Every workload has a crossover point where one model becomes cheaper than the other. For the default inputs in this calculator (500,000 requests at 100 KB each), residential costs about $215. The same job using 50 ISP proxies at $2.25 costs $112.50 -- ISP wins. But if you only need 10,000 requests per month from 150 different countries, residential at under $1 total dramatically undercuts the cost of buying IPs in each location.
Beyond Cost: Success Rate and Detection Risk
Price is not the only variable. Residential IPs from our proprietary network rotate through millions of real consumer addresses, making them nearly undetectable on sites that flag datacenter and ISP ranges. ISP proxies from Ashburn VA are registered to legitimate consumer ISPs and pass most detection checks, but the IP pool is smaller. For targets that specifically whitelist residential ASNs, residential proxies may cost more per GB but deliver higher success rates and lower cost per successful request.
Hybrid Strategy Recommendation
The most cost-efficient approach for most teams combines both types. Use Hex Proxies residential proxies for reconnaissance, geo-targeted spot checks, and access to heavily protected sites. Use ISP proxies for sustained, bandwidth-intensive data extraction where the same IPs can scrape for weeks without rotation pressure. This hybrid strategy typically saves 25-40% compared to using a single proxy type exclusively.