Two products that barely resemble each other
Proxy-Seller is one of the best-known vendors in the per-IP half of this market: you buy specific addresses — IPv4, IPv6, ISP or mobile — in a chosen country, they are yours for the month, and nobody else uses them. Delivery is immediate and the price is per address.
The residential per-GB half works on the opposite principle. You buy traffic, not addresses. Your requests exit through a large pool of real consumer connections that changes constantly, and you are billed for the data you move. There is no “your IP” because that is the point.
Both are legitimate. Neither substitutes for the other, and the search term “which proxy provider is best” cannot be answered until you know which of these you are shopping for.
The comparison that matters
| Dedicated, per IP per month | Rotating residential, per GB | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Specific addresses, yours alone | Traffic through a shared pool |
| Does the IP change? | No — that is the product | Yes, per request or per session |
| Traffic limits | Usually unmetered on the IP | You pay for every gigabyte |
| Right for | Accounts, long logins, marketplaces, anything that must recognise you | Scraping, price monitoring, mass checks, one-off requests |
| Wrong for | Volume scraping — one address gets rate-limited fast | Account work — the address changes under you |
| Cost shape | Fixed monthly, predictable | Variable, scales with usage |
| Cost when idle | You still pay for the month | Nothing, if traffic does not expire |
| Reputation risk | Yours alone — you control what it touches | Shared history; some addresses arrive already burned |
The two expensive mistakes
Buying dedicated IPs for scraping. A single address hitting one site thousands of times looks exactly like what it is. You get rate-limited, then blocked, then you buy more addresses and repeat the process at higher cost. Rotation is not a luxury feature here — it is the mechanism that makes the work possible.
Buying rotating residential for account work. You log in, the platform records the address, and your next request arrives from a different country. Every security system on the internet treats that as a compromised account. People experience this, conclude that “residential proxies get you banned”, and draw the wrong lesson: they needed a sticky session or a dedicated address, not a different pool.
| What you are doing | What to buy |
|---|---|
| Running marketplace or social accounts | Dedicated static ISP, one IP per account |
| Scraping product data at volume | Rotating residential, per GB |
| Antidetect browser profiles | One dedicated or sticky IP per profile — see the antidetect guide |
| Price and availability checks by country | Rotating residential with country targeting |
| The strictest platforms, where nothing survives | Mobile, on a dedicated port |
| Software that cannot send credentials | Dedicated IP with whitelist authentication |
| Just testing whether any of this helps | A few dollars of per-GB traffic. Never a monthly commitment |
Working out which is cheaper for you
Do this before you buy, on the back of an envelope. A dedicated IP costs a few dollars a month with unmetered traffic. Rotating residential costs from around $0.65 per gigabyte with nothing charged when you are idle.
So the crossover is about volume per identity. If one workflow needs to look like one consistent person and moves a lot of data, a dedicated address wins easily — unmetered beats per-gigabyte the moment usage is heavy. If you need fifty different exit points and only a few hundred megabytes through each, fifty monthly IPs is an absurd way to buy what a couple of dollars of rotating traffic delivers.
The trap in per-IP pricing is idle cost: an address you provisioned for a project that paused still bills every month. The trap in per-GB pricing is expiry — traffic that dies at a monthly reset turns pay-as-you-go into a subscription. Check that specific term before you commit either way.
Most real setups use both
Once a project matures, the split usually settles the same way. Dedicated static IPs carry the accounts — one per identity, never shared, never rotated. Rotating residential does the research, the scraping and the geo-checking. Mobile is held in reserve for the two or three platforms where nothing else survives.
Running that across separate vendors means separate accounts, balances and invoices for each. Running it from one balance across fifteen networks means moving between them is a dropdown, including switching pools when one has a bad week — which every pool does. Full type-by-type breakdown is in the residential proxy guide, and provider tiers are compared on the provider comparison.