Single residential IP workflows—sticky sessions for logins and checkouts; for pool guides and Apify config, use the residential-proxies tag (canonical).
Bright Data charges by bandwidth (GB) for proxies and by request for managed APIs — no single subscription unlocks everything. Residential proxies start at ~$8.40/GB pay-as-you-go and fall to ~$3.00/GB on a committed plan. Web Unlocker runs ~$3 per 1,000 successful responses. The SERP API starts at ~$0.75–$1.50 per 1,000 queries.
This guide covers every product's 2026 pricing, when volume discounts kick in, and which tier to pick for your budget.
⚠️ Pricing last verified March 2026. Check the official Bright Data pricing page before making decisions — rates and plan structures change frequently.
Bright Data or Oxylabs? Fortune 500 teams use both, each claims a huge residential pool (70M+ IPs and up), and neither is cheap — so the fit actually matters. Pick wrong and you either fight blocks and latency or pay for a stack you never fully use.
Below: pool depth and proxy types, what each vendor bundles for scraping, how pricing and trials compare, compliance in plain terms, and when we’d lean one way or the other.
Frequently asked questions
Frequently Asked Questions
A residential proxy routes your requests through IP addresses assigned by real ISPs to home broadband customers. Target sites see a genuine household connection instead of a datacenter subnet, making blocks much harder. They are essential for scraping retail, travel, ticketing, and social media sites with aggressive bot detection.
Residential proxies are slower (15-200ms latency vs 5-20ms), more expensive per GB, and smaller in pool size but dramatically harder to detect. Datacenter proxies are fast and cheap but easily fingerprinted. Use datacenter for benign, low-sensitivity targets; residential for sites with active bot management or IP reputation checks.
Legitimate providers like Bright Data obtain IPs via SDK integrations with apps whose users explicitly opt in and receive compensation or premium features. Evaluate providers by reviewing their opt-in disclosure, user removal mechanisms, and compliance with data protection laws before purchasing residential bandwidth.
Pool size depends on how many unique IPs you need per time window. For daily e-commerce price checks on 50,000 SKUs with a 5-requests-per-IP daily limit, you need 10,000+ IPs. Providers sell pool size as part of plan tiers. Apify Proxy residential pools include millions of IPs with automatic rotation.
