Pay-per-GB means your bill scales with bandwidth: you buy a bucket of data (e.g. 10GB, 50GB) and every byte — including failed requests, retries, images and video — drains it. Flat-rate means you rent the port itself: one fixed price for 1/3/6/12 months, unmetered. The crossover is brutal on mobile proxies, where per-GB pricing is highest: at typical mobile rates of $3–$8/GB, a single 50GB scraping month can cost $150–$400, while a flat-rate Proxy4G dedicated port covering the same work starts at $27/mo and never moves regardless of throughput.
How does each pricing model actually bill you?
The two models meter completely different things, which is why headline prices are hard to compare without modeling your real usage.
- Pay-per-GB: you pre-pay or top up a data balance. Price is volume-based, so cost is unpredictable — it depends on page weight, media, retries and how chatty your target sites are. Mobile/4G GBs are the most expensive tier (carrier IPs are scarce), commonly several dollars each. Idle time is free, but a runaway scraper or a video-heavy task can burn a month's budget in hours.
- Flat-rate (Proxy4G): you rent a dedicated or shared port for a fixed term. Bandwidth is not metered, so 2GB and 2TB cost the same. Your only variables are how many ports and which duration — longer terms lower the effective monthly rate. See full per-country numbers on the pricing page.
In short: per-GB taxes throughput; flat-rate taxes time and concurrency.
What does a month cost under each model?
| Monthly usage | Pay-per-GB (est. at $4/GB) | Proxy4G flat-rate | Cheaper option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light — 10 GB/mo | ~$40 | Shared from $10.80/mo | Flat-rate Yes |
| Moderate — 50 GB/mo | ~$200 | Dedicated from $27/mo | Flat-rate Yes |
| Heavy — 200 GB/mo | ~$800 | Dedicated from $27/mo (1 port) | Flat-rate Yes |
| Bursty / unpredictable | Budget can spike with no warning | Fixed bill, set once per term | Flat-rate Yes |
| Tiny / occasional (<2 GB) | ~$8 (you only pay for use) | Shared $10.80/mo (whole month) | Per-GB edge |
Per-GB figures are illustrative at a common mobile rate of $4/GB; real mobile per-GB pricing varies $1.50–$8/GB by provider. Proxy4G flat-rate prices are real from-prices; longer 3/6/12-month terms lower the effective monthly rate further.
Proxy4G flat-rate at a glance
Why is the gap so wide on mobile proxies specifically?
Per-GB economics punish mobile pools hardest. Residential and datacenter GBs are relatively cheap, but real 4G/LTE/5G IPs run on physical SIM cards and live devices on carrier networks, so providers price each GB at a premium to cover SIM and data-plan costs. That makes any bandwidth-heavy job — scraping image-rich pages, downloading media, running headless browsers that fetch full assets — expensive on a meter.
Flat-rate flips that math. Because Proxy4G rents the port and not the bytes, the same genuine carrier IP (100% trust score, routed through CGNAT) costs the same whether you fetch a text API a thousand times or stream heavy pages all month. The break-even against a $4/GB meter arrives at roughly 7GB on shared and roughly 7GB on dedicated — past that, flat-rate wins by a growing margin every gigabyte.
When flat-rate (Proxy4G) is the right call
- You run sustained or heavy bandwidth: web scraping, media downloads, headless-browser automation, or anything that fetches full page assets
- Your usage is bursty or unpredictable and you can't afford a surprise bill
- You want a fixed, budgetable monthly cost you set once per term
- You need a stable, exclusive IP on a dedicated port that you control rotation on (on demand or every 1–60 min)
- You run AI agents or automation 24/7 where a meter would penalize uptime — see /use-cases/ai-agents-automation/
- You'd rather buy duration than count gigabytes
When does pay-per-GB still make sense?
Metered pricing isn't always wrong. It fits a narrow profile: tiny, infrequent, or one-off jobs where you'll genuinely move only a gigabyte or two and don't want to pay for a full month of port rental. If you need a proxy for a single verification check, a handful of account creations, or an occasional rank check — and weeks may pass with zero usage — a per-GB balance can be cheaper because idle time is free.
The trade-off is risk: per-GB gives you no cost ceiling. A misconfigured loop, an aggressive target site forcing retries, or scope creep on a project can multiply your spend overnight. Flat-rate removes that tail risk entirely. For most recurring work — and for anything at scale — the fixed bill is both cheaper and safer.
How Proxy4G's flat-rate plans are structured
Two flat-rate shapes cover both ends. Dedicated (from $27/mo) gives you an exclusive port with full rotation control — reset the IP instantly from the dashboard or a reset link, or set auto-rotation anywhere from 1 to 60 minutes. Shared (from $10.80/mo) is the budget tier where the IP auto-rotates every 5 minutes. Both deliver real carrier IPs across 18 countries and 43 carriers over HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, with username/password or IP-whitelist auth.
Pick a longer term (3, 6 or 12 months) and the effective monthly rate drops further, widening the gap over any meter. Everything is no-KYC and paid in crypto — Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana or USDT — with credentials emailed within minutes.
Frequently Asked Questions
It depends on volume. Below roughly 7GB per month, pay-per-GB can win because you only pay for what you use and idle time is free. Above that — and for any sustained or unpredictable workload — flat-rate is cheaper. On mobile pools, where metered GBs commonly run $1.50–$8 each, a 50GB month can cost $150–$400 per-GB versus a Proxy4G dedicated port from $27/mo, unmetered.
No. Proxy4G is fully flat-rate. You rent a port for a fixed term (1, 3, 6 or 12 months) and bandwidth is never metered — 2GB and 2TB cost exactly the same. Shared ports start at $10.80/mo and dedicated ports at $27/mo, with longer terms lowering the effective monthly rate. Your bill is set once per term with no usage-based surprises.
Real 4G/LTE/5G IPs run on physical SIM cards and live devices on carrier networks, so each gigabyte carries SIM and data-plan cost. Providers pass that on, making mobile the priciest per-GB tier. Flat-rate sidesteps the problem by charging for the port and the time rather than the bytes, so heavy bandwidth no longer inflates the bill.
Tiny, infrequent or one-off jobs where you'll move only a gigabyte or two and weeks may pass with no activity — a single verification, a few account creations, an occasional rank check. Idle time being free is the main advantage. The downside is no cost ceiling: a runaway loop or retry storm can multiply spend with no warning, which flat-rate avoids entirely.
Take a provider's per-GB rate and multiply by your expected monthly gigabytes, then compare to a Proxy4G flat port at $10.80 (shared) or $27 (dedicated). At a typical $4/GB mobile rate, break-even lands near 7GB/month — beyond that, flat-rate saves more every gigabyte. Full per-country flat-rate pricing is on the pricing page, and you can build a plan in the configurator.