Unlimited Residential Proxies Explained: When Bandwidth Pricing Wins

Unlimited residential proxies are residential IPs billed by bandwidth and time instead of by the gigabyte. You pick a speed, from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, and a term of 1, 7 or 30 days, then move as much traffic as that speed allows, with no GB meter. They cost more than small per-GB packs, but much less once you move roughly a terabyte a month or more, especially with heavy pages and headless browsers. Here is how the model works and how to tell whether it pays off for your workload.

How bandwidth-based pricing works#

A per-GB plan meters volume: every byte through the proxy draws down your balance. A bandwidth plan meters capacity: you rent a pipe of a given speed for a given time. The volume you can move is bounded only by speed × time:

Those are theoretical ceilings. Real crawls never run the pipe at full speed around the clock, because of response times, retries and quiet periods. Even at 10% average utilization, though, a 100 Mbps plan moves more than 3 TB a month.

Our unlimited residential plans draw on about 10M residential IPs in 180+ countries and use the same username parameters as the per-GB network for country, city and session control. They add sticky sessions of up to 12 hours, HTTP and SOCKS5 support, an optional UDP add-on and unlimited concurrency. Per-GB residential plans draw on the full pool of 55M+ IPs in 195+ countries.

Cost math: unlimited vs per-GB#

Here is what each option costs at different monthly volumes, using 30-day terms and per-GB packs with 30-day validity:

The break-even point is the plan price divided by the per-GB rate you would otherwise pay. For 100 Mbps at $997.50, per-GB packs cost about the same at roughly 0.9 TB a month; above that, unlimited is cheaper. For 200 Mbps at $1,656.90, the crossover is around 1.4 TB if you combine smaller packs, or 1.7 TB against the 2 TB pack at $0.98/GB. At 10 TB a month, 200 Mbps works out to about $0.17 per GB, against $0.74 on the largest per-GB pack.

The last column shows why monthly volume is rarely the constraint: 10 TB a month averages only 31 Mbps. You buy a higher tier for peaks, not for totals. The 30-day tiers run from $997.50 for 100 Mbps to $3,488.10 for 1 Gbps.

Short terms change the math for one-off jobs. A 100 Mbps day costs $133. If a backfill moves 200 GB in that day, the per-GB alternative is a 250 GB pack at $350. A 7-day 100 Mbps term at $432.25 compares with $682.50 for a 500 GB pack.

When unlimited wins, and when it does not#

Unlimited is the better deal when:

• you move more than about a terabyte a month, steadily;
• pages are heavy: headless browsers rendering full pages, image-rich catalogs, media;
• you collect training data or run recurring full-site crawls where volume is hard to predict;
• you want a fixed budget instead of a balance that drains faster whenever page sizes grow;
• you need sticky sessions longer than 2 hours.

Per-GB residential packs are the better deal when:

• volume is low or irregular, because an unlimited term runs whether or not you use it;
• you need the larger pool, the widest country coverage, or mobile IPs, which share the residential balance;
• you want traffic that does not expire: GB packs can be bought with no-expiry validity.

If you are new to how residential IPs work in the first place, start with what a residential proxy is.

Choosing a speed tier#

Size the tier for your peak throughput. A quick estimate:

required Mbps = concurrent requests × average response size (MB) × 8 ÷ average response time (s)

HTTP client: 300 workers × 0.25 MB × 8 ÷ 1.5 s = 400 Mbps
browsers:    50 browsers × 2 MB × 8 ÷ 5 s     = 160 Mbps

The browser fleet in the second line fits the 200 Mbps tier. Running around the clock, a fleet like that can move tens of terabytes a month. At the lowest per-GB rate of $0.74, every 10 TB costs $7,350, while 200 Mbps for 30 days stays at $1,656.90 however much of the pipe you use.

Measure the inputs on a short run first, because response times through residential peers vary by target and country. If the estimate lands between two tiers, either take the larger tier or cap concurrency to fit the smaller one. Headless browsers move far more data per page than HTTP clients, so estimate them separately; the Puppeteer and Playwright guide shows how to block media and keep pages light.

A daily term is also a cheap way to measure. Run your real workload for a day on 100 Mbps, record the throughput you actually reach, and size the 30-day plan from that number rather than from estimates.

Gateway servers and setup#

Each unlimited plan runs on a dedicated gateway server that you choose at checkout:

• de.unl.proxonym.com in Germany
• use.unl.proxonym.com in the US East
• usw.unl.proxonym.com in the US West

Pick the gateway closest to the machines that run your scrapers. The exit country is still set per request with username parameters; the gateway's location shortens the path between your servers and the network. If most of your exit IPs are in one region, a gateway in that region shortens the rest of the path too.

# Rotating US IPs through the US East gateway (HTTP, port 8000)
curl -x http://use.unl.proxonym.com:8000 -U "USERNAME-country-us:PASSWORD" https://api.ipify.org

# One IP held for up to 12 hours
curl -x http://use.unl.proxonym.com:8000 \
  -U "USERNAME-country-us-session-crawl01-lifetime-720:PASSWORD" https://api.ipify.org

# SOCKS5 on port 1080 (UDP requires the add-on)
curl -x "socks5h://USERNAME-country-us:[email protected]:1080" https://api.ipify.org

Fair use#

Unlimited means no GB meter, not no rules. Usage on unlimited plans is subject to fair use under our acceptable use policy, the same policy that covers every product, and abusive targets are blocked at the network level. Plans never auto-renew, so a term simply ends unless you renew it. Every tier and term is listed on the pricing page.

Key takeaways#

• Unlimited residential plans bill by speed and term, from $133 for 100 Mbps for one day to $3,488.10 for 1 Gbps for 30 days.
• Against per-GB packs, 100 Mbps for 30 days breaks even at roughly 0.9 TB a month, and 200 Mbps at roughly 1.4 to 1.7 TB.
• Size the tier for peak throughput: concurrency × response size × 8 ÷ response time.
• Stay on per-GB packs for low or irregular volume, mobile IPs, the widest coverage or traffic that never expires.
• Choose the gateway nearest your servers, and remember that unmetered still means fair use.