A Buyer’s Guide to the Best Residential Proxies: ProxyEmpire, Oxylabs, Bright Data, Decodo, SOAX, Residential Pricing and Official Plans

Buying residential proxies used to mean committing to a plan and hoping it worked. Today, most well-known providers offer some way to try before you buy, whether that's a free trial, a starter credit or a small paid test, and that shift makes it much easier for first-time buyers to choose well. This guide explains the five providers below in plain language, starting with how you can test each one and what their official plans cost afterward. If you're new to proxies, a residential proxy simply sends your traffic through a home internet connection, so websites see an ordinary visitor rather than a server.

Quick picks

• ProxyEmpire: a small paid test spanning two networks
• Decodo: a no-cost residential trial
• Bright Data: a card-free trial on a very large network

Each Provider, Explained Simply

#1 ProxyEmpire

A good trial should answer three questions: do the IPs work on your target sites, do they appear in the right locations, and do you need residential or mobile? ProxyEmpire's $1.97 trial is built to answer all three. The allowance spans both rotating networks, so you can try postcode-level filters on residential, carrier filters on mobile, and find out which network your target sites accept.

The trial doesn't turn into a subscription, so there's nothing to cancel. If it goes well, you can keep buying without a contract, at three fifty a residential gigabyte and four fifty for mobile, or choose a monthly residential tier from 7 GB for $20. Gigabytes you don't use never expire, so you can buy a little more than you need without wasting money. The same account also offers static ISP, datacenter and dedicated mobile proxies if your needs grow.

Because ProxyEmpire doesn't offer refunds, the trial is your safety net. The company says the small fee keeps out abusers, and live chat is staffed around the clock if setup questions come up.

#2 Oxylabs

Oxylabs gives new users a $5 credit to spend on any product. That's enough for a small test, though you'll need a subscription afterward, because there's no pay-as-you-go option on its pricing pages.

Its subscription is shared across all products, so the same monthly budget can pay for proxies or for its scraping API. Residential costs $6 per GB on the smallest tier and falls as you use more.

Residential plans include unlimited concurrent sessions, free geo targeting and 3 proxy users, and mobile IPs come from real devices in more than 140 countries. If you plan to use both proxies and a scraping API, the shared subscription can be good value; if you only need proxies, the entry rate is higher than elsewhere on this list.

#3 Bright Data

Bright Data lets you trial the network without entering a card and will match your first top-up, up to $500. Its network is very large, at 400M+ monthly residential IPs in 195 countries, which helps if you need IPs in less common locations.

An identity check, sometimes by video, comes before residential access. Committed traffic left unused at the end of a month is lost, so start with pay as you go if your usage is uncertain.

Targeting by country, state, city, ZIP and ASN is free, and you can set daily spending limits to avoid surprises. For larger organizations, the company lists ISO 27001, SOC 2, SOC 3 and CSA STAR Level 1, which can help with internal approvals.

#4 Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)

Decodo's free trial is a simple way to test residential traffic without paying anything up front. The trial opens the whole pool, more than 115 million IPs, with postcode and ASN filters included.

Set a reminder: unless you cancel, the trial becomes the plan you chose. A first order can be returned within two weeks, as long as less than a fifth of the traffic is gone and you skipped the trial.

You can pay by card, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay or crypto, and Chrome and Firefox extensions make it easy to switch locations while you browse. Note that the Wallet and a subscription can't be used at the same time.

#5 SOAX

SOAX's free Sandbox account lets you explore the dashboard, but you'll need credits before any proxy traffic flows. That makes it more of a product tour than a network test, but it's a useful way to see how packages and analytics work before you pay.

Once you buy, residential and mobile cost the same, and the price depends on which country you target. You can set traffic caps and other limits on each package to control spending.

You can also choose how IPs change: with every request, after a number of requests, on a timer or when a request fails. Upgrades take effect straight away, while downgrades apply at the next billing cycle, and startups can ask about discounted plans.

Official Pricing After the Trial

After the test, here's what each provider's official residential pricing looks like.

ProxyEmpire offers a flexible starting point: $3.50 per GB with no commitment, monthly tiers from 7 GB for $20 to 1,000 GB for $1,500, and custom 1 TB+ volumes from $0.75 per GB. Unused GB never expire.

Decodo's monthly plans start at 3 GB for $11.25 and fall to $2.75 per GB at 100 GB, with enterprise pricing down to $2 per GB at 1 TB. Its Wallet sells single gigabytes at $4.

Bright Data charges $4 per GB on pay as you go with its code for three months, or monthly plans from $499 for 141 GB, with larger plans at $999 and $1,999. Oxylabs starts at $6 per GB inside a $30 subscription. SOAX varies by country tier.

When comparing, look at the plan you'll actually buy and what happens to unused traffic, not just the lowest rate on the page. A low rate on gigabytes that expire can cost more than a higher rate on gigabytes you keep.

Final Verdict

For first-time buyers, ProxyEmpire is the strongest overall choice: its $1.97 trial tests both residential and mobile, never turns into a subscription, and leads into pay-as-you-go GB that never expire. If you'd rather test residential traffic for free, Decodo is the best alternative.