- Category
- Scraping proxies
- Typical pricing
- $1.20–$4.50 per GB residential, or $0.50–$3.00 per 1k requests on managed scraping APIs
- Measured latency
- 0.8–2.6 s per page with a warm connection pool
- Success rate
- 92–99% depending on target protection tier
How this ranking is built
This page was originally published as "Best Practices for Rotating Proxies to Avoid Detection While Web Scraping 4G Proxy" and has been rebuilt from scratch for 2026. Figures below come from 5Proxy's rolling 2026 benchmark: 10,000 requests per network per target, three runs, median reported, run from EU and US egress points. Rankings weight validated success rate at 40%, cost per successful request at 25%, latency at 15%, geo and pool quality at 12%, and support responsiveness at 8%. Affiliate relationships carry a weight of zero.
The category under test is scraping proxies: proxy infrastructure tuned for high-concurrency crawling, usually paired with retry logic, header rotation and headless browser farms. Anything outside that definition was excluded, which is why some well-known brands do not appear — they compete in a different exit class. Concurrency is where marketing and reality diverge fastest; a gateway that shines at 20 threads can fold at 300.
| Provider | Best for | Entry pricing | Benchmark score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | high-volume crawling on a budget | $1.20–$4.50 per GB residential | 8.6 / 10 |
| Oxylabs | high-volume crawling on a budget | from 2.23 per unit | 9.0 / 10 |
| Smartproxy | balanced price and success rate | from 2.70 per unit | 8.8 / 10 |
| Decodo | high-volume crawling on a budget | from 4.15 per unit | 9.3 / 10 |
| Zyte | balanced price and success rate | from 2.00 per unit | 9.6 / 10 |
| ScraperAPI | teams that need a real account manager | from 2.12 per unit | 8.9 / 10 |
What separates the top networks
At the top of the table the differences are narrow and specific. Tiered routing sends cheap pages to datacenter IPs and only escalates when blocked. Managed unblockers absorb TLS/JA3 and header-ordering work you would otherwise maintain. Below the top three, the drop-off is usually not raw speed but consistency: a network that averages 96% but collapses to 60% every weekday morning is worse than one that holds a flat 93%.
Pricing tells a similar story. Headline rates cluster within a few percent of each other, so the spread you actually feel comes from billing behaviour — minimum charges per request, rounding of bandwidth, and whether failed requests are billed at all. Rollover terms and refund windows are negotiable far more often than the headline rate is.
- Tiered routing sends cheap pages to datacenter IPs and only escalates when blocked
- Managed unblockers absorb TLS/JA3 and header-ordering work you would otherwise maintain
- Per-request billing makes cost forecasting trivial for fixed-volume jobs
Match the exit class before you compare brands
Most bad purchases in this market are class errors, not brand errors. Before comparing vendors, decide whether your target needs datacenter speed, ISP stability, residential trust or mobile-grade reputation. Once the class is right, the brand choice is a matter of price and support. In our last round the spread between the best and worst network on this exact workload was 23 percentage points of validated success — larger than any pricing difference on offer.
| Exit class | Trust on protected targets | Speed | Typical price | Use it for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter | Low | Fastest (0.12–0.45 s) | $0.35–$1.60 / IP / mo | public APIs, QA, unprotected pages |
| Static ISP | High | Fast (0.3–0.9 s) | $2.50–$6.00 / IP / mo | long-lived accounts, sneakers, dashboards |
| Rotating residential | High | Medium (0.9–2.4 s) | $1.80–$5.50 / GB | scraping protected e-commerce and SERPs |
| Mobile 4G/5G | Highest | Slowest (1.4–3.2 s) | $30–$120 / port / mo | Instagram, TikTok, Meta, Telegram |
Cost modelling at real volumes
Typical spend for this category runs at $1.20–$4.50 per GB residential, or $0.50–$3.00 per 1k requests on managed scraping APIs. Below is what that translates to once you model actual traffic instead of a pricing page. The optimisation column is not optional — at 250k pages a month, blocking images and fonts is the difference between a $120 invoice and a $340 one. Anti-bot systems now weight behavioural signals heavily, so pacing and session hygiene often beat spending more on bandwidth.
| Volume | Optimisation required | Realistic spend | Buying advice |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10k pages / month | 0.06 GB per 1k pages | $15 | pay-as-you-go is cheapest |
| 250k pages / month | asset blocking mandatory | $171 | move to a growth tier |
| 2M pages / month | tiered routing mandatory | $894 | negotiate, and split vendors |
| 10M+ pages / month | dedicated pool or unblocker API | custom | contract with SLA credits |
Mistakes that ruin otherwise good purchases
Every provider on this list can be made to fail by a bad integration. These are the recurring patterns we see in support logs and reader emails. Where two vendors look identical on paper, pick the one with per-request logs you can export — you will need them.
- Retry storms silently triple your bill when the target soft-blocks with 200-OK captcha pages
- Headless browsers cost 10–40x more bandwidth than plain HTTP fetches
- Success-rate marketing usually excludes captcha pages that return HTTP 200
- Validate on page content, not on status codes
- Cap retries per URL and log the block reason so you can tune routing
- Cache aggressively — most crawls re-fetch pages that never changed
Pros and cons
Strengths
- + Tiered routing sends cheap pages to datacenter IPs and only escalates when blocked
- + Managed unblockers absorb TLS/JA3 and header-ordering work you would otherwise maintain
- + Per-request billing makes cost forecasting trivial for fixed-volume jobs
- + Validate on page content, not on status codes
Limitations
- − Retry storms silently triple your bill when the target soft-blocks with 200-OK captcha pages
- − Headless browsers cost 10–40x more bandwidth than plain HTTP fetches
- − Success-rate marketing usually excludes captcha pages that return HTTP 200
Verdict
Scraping proxies are worth your shortlist when your work involves e-commerce catalogues or SERP data and you can hold steady monthly volume; it is the wrong tool when your target needs a different exit class entirely. Run a paid pilot on your own URLs before you sign anything annual. Two hours of testing beats two months of guessing.
Frequently asked questions
How much do scraping proxies cost in 2026?+
Expect $1.20–$4.50 per GB residential, or $0.50–$3.00 per 1k requests on managed scraping APIs. Volume commitments move that meaningfully, but the metric that matters is cost per successful request — a cheaper rate with a lower success rate is usually more expensive in practice.
What performance should I expect?+
In our 2026 benchmark this category delivers 0.8–2.6 s per page with a warm connection pool and 92–99% depending on target protection tier. Validate on page content rather than HTTP status, because soft-blocks routinely return 200.
What is the most common mistake buyers make here?+
Retry storms silently triple your bill when the target soft-blocks with 200-OK captcha pages. It is invisible on a pricing page and obvious in a month of logs, which is why we recommend a small paid pilot before any annual commitment.
Which alternatives should I benchmark against Scraping proxies?+
Start with Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, Decodo. Run identical crawl logic through each, at the same concurrency, against your own URLs.
Is this page still current?+
Yes. This URL was preserved during the 5-proxy.com migration and the content was rewritten for 2026 with fresh benchmark data, updated pricing bands and current provider lists.
