When you compare residential proxies across the major providers, the price floor sits around $7–15/GB. We launched our residential proxy product at $3/GB. Customers ask, reasonably, what we cut.

The honest answer is: nothing the customer notices. We cut markup, bundling, and the per-feature upcharges that have crept into enterprise proxy pricing over the last few years. Everything else — the IPs, the countries, the session control, the geo targeting, is fully present.

We're a gateway, not a pool

Most large residential proxy companies operate the IP pool and the customer-facing product. They sell you the pool, and to recover the cost of building it, they layer markups for every premium feature you might want — clean IPs, sticky sessions, geo targeting, mobile carrier exits.

We chose a different shape. We operate the gateway, the metering, the dashboard, the country-routing logic — and we partner with proven residential-IP infrastructure underneath. That separation matters for one reason: we can price each tier against its actual cost-to-serve, not against the markup the IP pool needs to fund itself.

The result is what you see on the pricing page — five tiers, one balance, no surprise fees:

Standard       $3/GB     General scraping, mid-protection sites
CleanProxy™    $5/GB     Account ops, high-trust targets, clean IPs
Geo-Targeted   $6/GB     City + ASN precision
Sticky Clean   $7/GB     Persistent sessions for multi-account work
Mobile         $10/GB    Mobile-only platforms (IG, TikTok, etc)

You pay for the GB you use on the tier you picked for that request. No subscription, no minimum, no overage fees, no monthly reset.

Tier is a routing decision, not a separate product

The five tiers live on the same endpoint, proxy.privatebyte.com:3128, and pull from the same balance. The tier you want is set per request, in the auth password. That means a single client can hit Standard for bulk pages and CleanProxy for the handful of high-trust requests in the same job, without spinning up a second connection or a second account.

curl -x http://api_key:[email protected]:3128 https://target.example/
curl -x http://api_key:[email protected]:3128 https://protected.example/

Country pinning works the same way — append _country-XX to the password, or send an X-Proxy-Country header. Country-level routing is included on every tier at no extra cost — we route any tier to a US, GB, DE, or 190+ other exits for the same per-GB rate.

The Geo-Targeted tier exists for the next level down: city and ASN precision. If you need a Comcast exit in Atlanta or a Vodafone exit in Manchester (not just "any US IP" or "any UK IP"), that's a deeper routing decision that costs more to fulfil, which is why it's its own $6/GB tier instead of an upcharge bolted onto Standard.

Sticky sessions are handled in the gateway, locking you to the same exit IP for 1–30 minutes when you need consistent identity across requests (account warming, checkout flows, multi-page profile work). You opt in on the Sticky Clean tier.

The bonus credit model

We charge per GB, you pay up front. Top-up bonuses are real money given to you:

Top up       You get       Bonus
─────────    ─────────     ──────
$3           $3.00          —
$15          $16.50         +10%
$30          $34.50         +15%
$50          $60.00         +20%
$100         $125.00        +25%

Bulk top-ups smooth our cash flow and let us forward-buy capacity at better rates. Customers who buy in bulk also use the service more efficiently, so support cost per GB drops. We share that back as bonus credit instead of pocketing it.

What we don't promise

Worth being honest about the limits.

  • No SOCKS5. Just HTTP/HTTPS via standard CONNECT. Every mainstream client works — curl, requests, Scrapy, Puppeteer, Playwright, browser extensions — but if your stack only speaks SOCKS, we're not your provider today.
  • No 100% uptime SLA. Our gateway is built to route around individual outages, but nobody in this space serves five-nines on a residential pool. We surface clear status codes so your retry logic can do its job.
  • No anti-bot bypass on hard targets. Cloudflare Turnstile, DataDome, Akamai BMP — raw HTTP proxies don't get past them, ours or anyone's. Pick the right tool for that job.

Start with $1

If you want to test the gateway before you commit, sign up at my.privatebyte.com, open a support ticket asking for the starter bonus, and we credit $1 to your balance — about 330MB at the Standard rate. No card needed to test.