Residential Proxy

A residential proxy is an IP address assigned by a consumer internet service provider to a real home or mobile device, then routed through a proxy network. Because the traffic appears to come from a residential customer rather than a cloud datacenter, anti-bot systems are far less likely to block or challenge it. Residential proxies are the workhorse of large-scale web scraping against sites that aggressively filter datacenter traffic. Pricing is almost always per-gigabyte rather than per-request, because the IP pool is finite and operators charge for bandwidth consumed. Typical rates fall in the $3–15 per GB range depending on volume, geography, and whether you need session persistence. For high-volume scraping that returns small JSON responses, residential proxies can be expensive relative to datacenter alternatives — but for sites that block datacenter ranges outright, they are often the only path to reliable extraction. The supply side raises ethical and legal questions. Most residential proxy networks acquire their IP supply from peer-to-peer apps and free VPNs that route third-party traffic through user devices, often with minimal disclosure. AI builders evaluating residential proxies should ask the provider how the IP pool is sourced, what consent users gave, and what jurisdictions are involved. Many web data tools — including Bright Data, Oxylabs, and Decodo — offer residential proxy products as part of broader scraping platforms.