Bright Data lists residential proxies at $8.00 per GB pay-as-you-go, and its $2.50/GB rate requires a
On the number that decides your bill, QuantumProxies wins by the widest margin of any comparison we publish. Bright Data has the bigger catalogue. It also has the most expensive entry price in our entire pricing index.
| What you actually pay | QuantumProxies Residential Basic | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price per GB | .00 / GB | $8.00 / GB |
| Minimum to start | $5 (5 GB, no subscription) | $8 (1 GB, pay-as-you-go rate) |
| Pay-as-you-go without a plan | Yes | Yes |
| Cheapest advertised rate | $0.80 / GB | $2.50 / GB |
| What that cheapest rate requires | A 1 TB purchase ($800). No monthly contract. | a ,999/month commitment |
Competitor prices verified 2026-07-29. Bright Data figures are advertised list prices from its public pricing page, recorded in our residential proxy pricing index on the verification date shown above; promotional discounts are excluded from the pay-as-you-go column because they are temporary and conditional. QuantumProxies figures are from our live plan catalogue. All prices in USD, excluding VAT.
Bright Data is the largest and most heavily marketed proxy network in the industry, and it prices accordingly. At $8.00 per gigabyte pay-as-you-go it is the most expensive entry rate among the ten providers in our pricing index — eight times what the cheapest tier of the market charges. That gap is why "bright data alternative" is one of the highest-volume comparison queries in this category, and why the answer for most teams is simply a cheaper gigabyte.
Bright Data does offer pay-as-you-go, which is more than some competitors manage, and it lists at $8.00 per gigabyte. Our Residential Basic is
Bright Data periodically runs an introductory discount on pay-as-you-go traffic. We deliberately exclude promotional pricing from the comparison column, on both sides, because an introductory rate expires and the list price is what you renew at. Our
Bright Data runs the largest residential network in the market and the broadest product catalogue around it: web unlockers, scraping browsers, prebuilt dataset marketplaces, SERP infrastructure and enterprise compliance tooling. If you need several of those under one contract with one vendor relationship, that breadth is a real advantage and we do not have an equivalent to all of it.
The catalogue is bundled into the entry price. If what you actually need is rotating residential bandwidth pointed at a handful of targets — which is what most teams searching for an alternative need — you are paying an eightfold premium for products you will never enable. Buying the narrow thing you need from a provider that specialises in it is not a downgrade; it is the same gigabyte without the surcharge.
Where our catalogue does overlap, it is not an afterthought. We publish a Scraper API with ready-made collectors, a SERP API, an Extract API, and an MCP server so agents can call the whole thing directly — which is what people are looking for when they search for a Bright Data MCP alternative. All of it bills from the same balance as your proxies, with no separate plan.
Real ISP-assigned residential addresses across 200+ countries, rotating and sticky sessions, HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 included on every plan, and country-level targeting. The entry order is $5 for 5 GB. There is no subscription, no renewal, and no minimum term — you buy bandwidth and it is yours to use within the plan's validity window.
Our rate falls with size: 500 GB costs $450, or $0.90 per GB, and 1 TB costs $800, or $0.80 per GB. That $0.80 is below the $2.50 Bright Data advertises as its cheapest published rate, and unlocking it means buying a terabyte once rather than committing to
Card and PayPal work, and so do Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, Monero and roughly 300 other cryptocurrencies, with automatic activation on confirmation and no KYC. Crypto and account-balance payments carry no VAT, while card, PayPal and Stripe add 22% — so the payment method you pick is itself worth about eighteen percent of the total.
Not one that works at scale. Free proxy pools are shared and heavily blocked. The practical alternative is a low entry price rather than no price: QuantumProxies Residential Basic starts at $5 for 5 GB, which is
Open-source tools such as Scrapy or Crawlee replace the scraping framework, not the proxy network — you still need residential IP addresses to route requests through. QuantumProxies supplies the network, and works with any open-source scraper over HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5.
Yes. QuantumProxies publishes an MCP server that exposes our search, scrape, crawl and collector tools directly to AI agents and assistants, billed from the same account balance as your proxies. It is installable from npm and needs no separate plan.
Eight times cheaper at the entry point:
Yes. As recorded in our pricing index on the verification date shown on this page, Bright Data's $2.50 per GB tier requires a
QuantumProxies runs a web unlocker as a forward proxy on the same account, alongside a Scraper API with ready-made collectors for common targets. Both bill per use from your existing balance rather than as a separate subscription.
Yes, for anyone buying residential bandwidth rather than an enterprise data platform. Bright Data's scale and catalogue are real, and if you need the whole platform under one contract it is a defensible choice. But if you need gigabytes, you are choosing between