Unlimited vs per-GB residential proxies: the break-even maths

A worked break-even between per-GB and unlimited residential proxies, with formulas to estimate your daily GB and the hidden costs that change the answer.

ZenProxy team · 8 November 2026 · 9 min read

Unlimited vs per-GB residential proxies: the break-even maths

In short: Per-GB is cheaper unless you move a lot of data on every day of the plan. At our prices on 8 November 2026, Residential Lite costs from $0.36 per GB at volume and Unlimited Residential from $80.15 per day on its longest plans, so unlimited only wins above about 223 GB a day, every day: an average of about 21 Mbps around the clock. Below that, buy gigabytes. If your target accepts datacenter IPs, Rotating Datacenter has unlimited data from $2.33 a day and beats both.

How each model charges

Per-GB plans charge for the data that passes through the proxy. Residential Lite sells any amount from 1 GB: 1 GB costs $0.49, the rate falls to $0.36 per GB at volume, and the data stays usable for 180 days.

Unlimited Residential charges for speed and time instead. You pick one of nine speeds, from 200 Mbps to 1 Gbps, and a length: 1 day, 1 week, 30 days or 60 days. You don't pay per GB, and it supports SOCKS5 as well as HTTP.

	Residential Lite	Unlimited Residential	Rotating Datacenter
You pay for	Data transferred	Speed and time	Time
Price (8 November 2026)	1 GB $0.49; from $0.36/GB at volume	1-day plan from $379.00; from $80.15/day on the longest plans	1-day plan from $3.49; from $2.33/day on the longest plans
Data	What you buy, usable for 180 days	Unlimited	Unlimited
Plan lengths	Any amount from 1 GB, no fixed length	1 day, 1 week, 30 or 60 days	1 day, 1 week or 30 days
Targeting	Country (200+); US state and city; Canadian province	See the plans page	US or Europe endpoint, no country choice
IP type	Residential	Residential	Datacenter

Prices change, so check the current ones on the plans page before you decide. To compare per-GB rates with other providers, see residential proxy prices compared.

Speed sets a ceiling, not a promise. One megabit per second, sustained for 24 hours, moves 10.8 GB. So 200 Mbps can carry about 2,160 GB a day at full speed and 1 Gbps about 10,800 GB. Real use is lower, because targets respond at different speeds.

Step 1: estimate your GB per day

GB per day = requests per day × KB per request × (1 + retry rate) ÷ 1,000,000

KB per request is everything one request pulls over the wire. For a plain HTTP client, that's the response body (compressed, if the server compresses it) plus headers. For a headless browser, it's every script, stylesheet, image and font the page loads.
Retry rate is the share of extra requests spent on retries: 0.15 for 15%.
We use 1,000,000 KB per GB. If a meter counts in 1,024-based units, the figures shift by about 7%.

Measure, don't guess. curl reports the bytes as they arrived, before decompression:

curl -s -o /dev/null --compressed \
  -x "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT" \
  -w '%{size_header} header bytes, %{size_download} body bytes\n' \
  "https://example.com/some/page"

Measure a sample of real pages, not one, and include the redirects and retries your client makes.

Four example workloads. The sizes are examples for the arithmetic, not measurements of any site:

Workload	Requests a day	KB each	Retries	GB a day
Price checks, HTML only	20,000	120	15%	2.76
A JSON endpoint	500,000	8	5%	4.2
Headless browser, everything loaded	100,000	2,500	10%	275
The same crawl, images, fonts and media blocked	100,000	700	10%	77

Step 2: find your break-even

break-even GB per day = Unlimited price per day ÷ your price per GB

With our 8 November 2026 prices:

Longest Unlimited plans: $80.15 ÷ $0.36 = 222.6 GB a day. Over a 60-day plan (about $4,809), that's roughly 13,360 GB before unlimited pays off.
1-day plan: $379.00 ÷ $0.36 = 1,052.8 GB in that one day.
1-week and 30-day plans: take the per-day price from the plans page and divide by your rate.

Use the rate you would actually pay. $0.36 is the volume rate; smaller orders cost more per GB, up to $0.49, which lowers the break-even to $80.15 ÷ $0.49 = 163.6 GB a day. Check the plans page for the rate at the amount you'd buy.

In throughput terms, 222.6 GB a day is an average of about 20.6 Mbps, all day, every day. 1,052.8 GB in a day is about 97.5 Mbps for 24 hours straight.

Applied to the four workloads, at $0.36 per GB:

Workload	GB a day	Lite per day	Unlimited per day	Cheaper
Price checks	2.76	$0.99	from $80.15	Lite
JSON endpoint	4.2	$1.51	from $80.15	Lite
Headless, everything	275	$99.00	from $80.15	Unlimited, if it runs every day
Headless, heavy files blocked	77	$27.72	from $80.15	Lite

The last two rows are the same crawl. Blocking images, fonts and media turns unlimited from the cheaper option into the dearer one.

Idle days count too. An unlimited day costs the same whether your job runs or not. If the crawl runs 5 days a week, each working day on the longest plans costs $80.15 × 7 ÷ 5 = $112.21, and the break-even rises to 311.7 GB per working day. The 275 GB crawl is then cheaper on Lite, at $99.00 a working day, and unused Lite data stays usable for 180 days.

Hidden costs that change the answer

Retries and failed requests

On per-GB plans, small failed requests use almost nothing, but a large blocked page still uses data, and every retry downloads again. If retries add 30% more requests of the same size, they add about 30% to your data. Cap retries, back off, and fix the cause instead of paying to download block pages.

Images, fonts and video

These are often most of a rendered page's weight. A plain HTTP client doesn't fetch them; a browser does unless you block them.

Headless browsers

A browser loads every subresource, including scripts from other domains, and each fresh browser context starts with an empty cache. Measure a real page with the script below before you price anything.

Connection overhead

On a rotating line, each new connection gets a new IP and its own TLS handshake. For small JSON responses, that overhead can be a noticeable share of each request. If you don't need a new IP every time, a sticky line with keep-alive reuses one connection.

On unlimited: idle hours and the speed cap

You pay for every hour of the plan. A job that runs 8 hours a day uses a third of what you paid for, and the speed you chose caps your busiest hour.

How to cut your GB

Block images, fonts and media in the browser. With Playwright:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

BLOCKED = {"image", "font", "media"}
total = {"bytes": 0}

def block_heavy(route):
    if route.request.resource_type in BLOCKED:
        route.abort()
    else:
        route.continue_()

def count(request):
    sizes = request.sizes()
    total["bytes"] += sizes["responseHeadersSize"] + sizes["responseBodySize"]

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(proxy={
        "server": "http://HOST:PORT",
        "username": "USERNAME",
        "password": "PASSWORD",
    })
    page = browser.new_page()
    page.route("**/*", block_heavy)
    page.on("requestfinished", count)
    page.goto("https://example.com/", wait_until="load")
    print(f"{total['bytes'] / 1000:.0f} KB received")
    browser.close()

Install it with pip install playwright and playwright install chromium. Playwright reports the response body size as encoded, which is what crossed the wire. Comment out the page.route line to compare a run without blocking. Our Playwright guide covers proxy set-up.

Use the data behind the page. Many pages load their content from a JSON endpoint, and requesting it directly is usually a fraction of the rendered page. Sitemaps, feeds and official APIs are lighter still. Stay within each site's terms.
Ask for compression. Python's requests asks for gzip and deflate by default, adds Brotli (br) when the brotli or brotlicffi package is installed, and decodes the response for you. Check the Content-Encoding response header to see what the server used, and only advertise encodings your client can decode.
Don't download what hasn't changed. Send If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since. If the page hasn't changed, the server answers 304 Not Modified instead of sending it again. Schedule checks by how often pages actually change.
Keep other traffic off the proxy. Your own APIs, LLM calls and package downloads don't need a residential IP.
Fail fast. Short timeouts and a retry cap stop one slow or blocking target from eating your data.

When Rotating Datacenter is the cheaper fit

Rotating Datacenter also comes with unlimited data, at a fraction of the price: a 1-day plan from $3.49, and from $2.33 a day on the longest (30-day) plans (8 November 2026). You send everything to one endpoint, over HTTP or SOCKS5 on the same port, and choose rotating IPs or a sticky session set by a session ID.

Against Residential Lite at $0.36 per GB, the break-even is $2.33 ÷ $0.36 = 6.5 GB a day on the 30-day plan, or $3.49 ÷ $0.36 = 9.7 GB on a 1-day plan. Against Unlimited Residential, it's $2.33 a day against $80.15.

The catch is the IP type. Some sites block or challenge IPs that belong to hosting companies, and you choose only a US or Europe endpoint, with no country or city targeting. So test first: run a sample of your real job on a 1-day plan and check the success rate. If it holds, Rotating Datacenter is the cheapest of the three for a heavy job. If you see blocks or CAPTCHAs, move to residential and use the maths above.

A quick way to decide

Test whether your target works on datacenter IPs. If it does, use Rotating Datacenter.
If not, measure KB per request and work out your GB per day.
Below about 223 GB a day, or if the job doesn't run every day, buy Residential Lite by the GB.
Above it, every day for weeks, choose Unlimited Residential. For the speed, multiply the GB you move in your busiest hour by 2.22 to get Mbps. The slowest tier, 200 Mbps, carries up to 90 GB an hour at full speed.

Questions people ask

Are unlimited residential proxies really unlimited?

On our Unlimited Residential plans you pay for speed and time, not per GB. The limit is the speed you buy: at full speed, 200 Mbps can move about 2,160 GB in a day and 1 Gbps about 10,800 GB.

How much data can 1 Mbps move in a day?

10.8 GB, if it runs flat out for 24 hours. Divide your GB per day by 10.8 for the average speed you need, then size for your busiest hour rather than the average.

Do failed requests count towards my GB?

On per-GB plans, data that passes through the proxy counts, whether the request succeeds or not. Small failed requests use almost nothing; blocked pages and retries use as much as normal pages. On Unlimited, failures cost time and bandwidth instead of money.

Is the $0.36 per GB rate available on any order?

No. It's the volume rate. 1 GB costs $0.49, and the rate drops as you buy more (8 November 2026). Check the plans page for the price of the amount you'd buy.

Can I switch from per-GB to unlimited later?

Yes. Lite data stays usable for 180 days, so you can start by the GB and move to Unlimited when the numbers say so, without losing the gigabytes you've already bought.

Sources

#residential#pricing#unlimited#bandwidth