The question we hear most is which proxies to buy. We answer with a question of our own: what will you use them for? Almost everything depends on the task. Residential and mobile proxies look alike, but they behave differently, cost differently and fail in different situations. Here is how they work and how to choose.
Where the IP addresses come from
A residential IP is what an internet provider assigns to a regular home connection: a router in a flat, a laptop, a smart TV. To a website, a request from such an address looks like a person browsing from home over Wi-Fi.
A mobile proxy goes online through a cellular carrier over 3G, 4G or 5G. Carriers ran out of IPv4 addresses long ago, so they use CGNAT: one public IP is shared by hundreds of subscribers at once, sometimes thousands. The website sees one address, and behind it there is a whole neighbourhood of smartphones.
That is why a large platform gains little from banning a mobile IP: along with one offender it would cut off many ordinary users. Anti-fraud systems take this into account and treat mobile addresses more gently. They block them less often, show captchas less often and stop showing them sooner.
Side by side
| Residential | Mobile | |
|---|---|---|
| IP source | Home internet providers | Cellular carriers, 3G/4G/5G |
| How websites treat them | Well | Most leniently |
| Geography | 195+ countries, city targeting | Fewer countries to choose from |
| Speed | Usually steadier | Depends on the device and cell load |
| Our price | $3 per GB | $4 per GB |
A dollar per gigabyte looks small while volumes are small. A scraper that pulls 200 GB a month costs $200 more on mobile proxies, and a mobile IP usually brings nothing to that kind of job.
When residential is enough
Residential proxies fit tasks that need many requests, wide geography and stable speed:
- scraping catalogs, prices and reviews in online shops and marketplaces;
- collecting search results by city: for SEO monitoring, precise geo matters more than how lenient the platform is;
- checking how a website or an ad looks from another country;
- monitoring service availability from different regions.
In none of these tasks do you log into an account. The platform only judges whether the traffic looks human, and a residential IP is enough for that. If a script keeps hitting captchas, the cause is usually not the proxy type but requests that are too frequent or headers that give the script away.
When mobile is worth the extra dollar
Mobile proxies pay off when you act on behalf of an account and every block costs money or time:
- ad accounts and business accounts on social networks;
- several profiles in an antidetect browser;
- platforms that check the IP strictly at sign-up and login;
- apps for a mobile audience, where a request from a carrier IP looks more natural than one from home Wi-Fi.
These tasks use little traffic. Opening an ad account, adjusting a campaign and answering messages takes tens of megabytes, not gigabytes. Even at $4 per GB that is cheaper than losing a single account.
How to choose
- Do you log into accounts through the proxy? Then you most likely need mobile.
- Do you need precise geography, down to the city? Residential has more options.
- Do you use more than 20 to 30 GB a month? Start with residential and add mobile only where you really run into blocks.
- Not sure? Buy a little traffic of both types and run the same task on each. The results will show where you get fewer captchas and blocks.
You pay for traffic, with no subscription, and purchased gigabytes never expire. So such a test costs exactly as much traffic as you spend on it: top up, create proxies of both types and compare them on your own task.
Residential: $3 per GB, mobile: $4 per GB. Pay for traffic, no subscription, gigabytes never expire.
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