Most "alternative" pages are marketing with a table bolted on. These are not. Each one puts our Residential Basic rate next to a named competitor on the two numbers that decide the bill — what you pay to start, and what the cheapest advertised rate actually requires — sourced from their own public pricing pages, with the date we checked.
| Provider | Entry price per GB | Cheapest advertised rate | Minimum to start |
|---|---|---|---|
| QuantumProxies — Residential Basic | .00 | $0.80 | $5 (5 GB, no subscription) |
| Oxylabs | $6.00 | $2.50 | $30/mo (5GB starter); $2.50 tier requires $2500/mo |
| Bright Data | $8.00 | $2.50 | none (PAYG) / 999-mo for $2.50 tier |
| Decodo | $3.75 | $2.75 | 1.25/mo (3GB) |
| Webshare | $7.00 | .40 | none |
Competitor prices verified 2026-07-29. Competitor figures are advertised list prices from each provider's public pricing page, recorded in our residential proxy pricing index. Entry price is the effective per-GB rate of the smallest purchase each provider offers. All prices in USD, excluding VAT.
We publish a monthly residential proxy pricing index that scrapes each provider's public pricing page and normalises everything to US dollars per gigabyte. These comparison pages are that index applied one competitor at a time, with the context a table alone cannot carry: which advertised rate is reachable, which needs a five-figure commitment, and what it costs to simply start.
Every provider in this market advertises a headline "from" rate, and almost none of them mean it for a new account. The rate you actually pay on day one is set by the smallest thing they will sell you: a pay-as-you-go gigabyte, or the cheapest monthly plan if pay-as-you-go is not offered at all. That is the number these pages lead with, because it is the number that lands on your first invoice.
The second number worth checking is what the advertised floor costs to unlock. Across the providers compared here, the cheapest rates sit behind commitments ranging from a monthly subscription to $2,500 a month. Ours sits behind a 1 TB purchase at $800 with no contract attached. A per-GB rate you cannot reach is a marketing number, not a price.
Competitor figures come from our residential proxy pricing index, collected from each provider's own public pricing page with the same extraction infrastructure that powers our Extract API, and re-verified monthly. Our own figures come from the live plan catalogue behind our checkout. Every page shows the verification date. We name competitors and we do not link to them, and we do not restate claims we have not checked ourselves.
Bright Data and Oxylabs run larger networks with broader enterprise tooling than ours. Decodo backs its plans with a refund window we do not offer. Webshare gives away a free tier we do not match. Each page states these plainly, because a comparison that concedes nothing is not a comparison — and because the argument survives them: none of those advantages changes what a gigabyte costs you.
Oxylabs, Bright Data, Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) and Webshare. They were chosen from live Google search data in August 2026 as the four provider names with real, active "alternative" search demand in this market.
From our residential proxy pricing index, which scrapes each provider's public pricing page and re-verifies monthly. Each comparison page carries the verification date, and the full index lists a source page for every provider in it.
We name them, which is what a comparison requires, but we do not send our own visitors to a competitor's checkout. The pricing index records where each figure came from so anyone can verify it independently.
These pages compare on cost and commercial terms, which is where the differences are largest and easiest to verify. Pool size, success rate and geo-targeting claims are not directly comparable between vendors without independent testing, so we do not pretend to rank them.