Your lead-gen pipeline probably didn't break because of the proxy. It broke because someone pointed a scraper at LinkedIn with default headers, or because the enrichment step silently dropped 40 percent of rows, or because nobody checked whether the data was legal to mail. The proxy is the part of the stack people obsess over and the part that's rarely at fault.
That matters for how you buy. Proxies are close to a commodity now, the providers all sell broadly similar residential pools, and the gap between the best and the fifth-best is smaller than the gap between a good scraping setup and a careless one. So this guide spends less time on network size and more on the two questions that actually decide your bill: how much data you really need, and what happens after you collect it.
Seven providers below, priced against their published plans in September 2026. This is desk research from pricing pages and documentation; we haven't run our own benchmarks, and we say so where it matters.
The Short Answer
If you want the recommendation without the reasoning:
Prices checked September 2026 against each provider's published plans.
Our take: most lead-gen teams should start on Decodo pay-as-you-go, and most will never need to leave it.
What Lead Generation Actually Costs in Bandwidth
Here's the calculation almost nobody runs before their first invoice.
Fetch HTML only, skip images, stylesheets and scripts, and a typical company directory or listing page weighs somewhere between 150 and 400 KB. Call it 250 KB as a working average. Now run the numbers on a real campaign:
50,000 pages at 250 KB is about 12.5 GB
Assume a 20 percent retry rate for timeouts, soft blocks and malformed responses, and you're at roughly 15 GB
At Decodo's $7 per GB pay-as-you-go rate, that's about $105
A hundred dollars. For fifty thousand prospect records.
Now compare that to what gets sold. Bright Data's committed residential plan starts at $500 a month, Oxylabs' at $300. Both bring the per-GB rate down considerably, to roughly $5.88 and $4 respectively. Both are excellent value if you use the volume. If your actual need is 15 GB, a $500 commitment means you're paying $33 per GB for the privilege of a discount.
This is the single most common way lead-gen teams waste proxy budget, and it happens because the bandwidth question feels technical so nobody in the room wants to own it.
Real-world tip: run one full campaign on pay-as-you-go and read the usage dashboard before you talk to a sales rep. You'll walk into that conversation knowing your number, which changes the conversation entirely.
The exception is if you're rendering full pages in a headless browser rather than fetching HTML. That pulls images, fonts and scripts, and can multiply bandwidth by five to ten times. If your targets need JavaScript execution, budget accordingly and consider whether a scraping API priced per record makes more sense. Bright Data's Web Scraper API at $1.50 per 1,000 records is a different pricing model that sometimes wins outright.
Which Proxy Type Fits Which Lead-Gen Job
Lead generation isn't one workload. It's at least four, and they have different requirements.
Job
Proxy type
Reasoning
Public directories, registries, job boards
Datacentre
Cheap, fast, rarely challenged. Decodo from $0.50/GB, Bright Data from $0.90/GB
Review sites, maps, aggregators
Residential
Bot management is real here, datacentre ranges get classified
Email and phone verification at volume
Datacentre
You're hitting APIs and MX records, not defended web pages
Account-based prospecting on social
Residential or mobile, plus profile isolation
IP alone won't save you. See below
The mistake is buying one type for everything. Residential proxies cost roughly eight to fifteen times what datacentre costs, and pointing them at a public government registry that would have accepted anything is pure waste.
Our recommendation: segment your sources by how defended they are, run the easy 70 percent over datacentre, and reserve residential for the targets that actually reject you. Most teams can cut their proxy bill by half doing nothing else.
The Five Providers We'd Shortlist
We haven't run head-to-head success-rate benchmarks across all five, so treat the ordering as informed judgement rather than measurement. What follows is based on published pricing, documentation and feature sets.
Bright Data
The biggest network, and the one with the most serious compliance apparatus around how IPs are sourced. That last part matters more than it sounds: if your legal team ever asks where residential IPs come from, Bright Data has an answer ready.
Entry is $8.40 per GB pay-as-you-go, committed plans from $500 a month at around $5.88 per GB, datacentre from $0.90 per GB, and a Web Scraper API at $1.50 per 1,000 records.
Best for: teams where a failed scrape costs more than the proxy does.
Not ideal for: anyone under about 20 GB a month, where the platform's complexity outweighs its advantages.
Oxylabs
Very close to Bright Data on capability, with the sharpest ethical-sourcing documentation in the category. If you sell into regulated industries and your customers audit your supply chain, this is the one that survives the questionnaire.
$8.00 per GB pay-as-you-go, committed from $300 a month at roughly $4 per GB, datacentre from $1.20 per GB.
Best for: enterprises where procurement, not engineering, is the gatekeeper.
Decodo
The value pick, and the one we'd hand to most teams reading this. Pay-as-you-go residential at $7.00 per GB undercuts both enterprise providers, the subscription tier starts at $28 a month and falls to around $3.50 per GB at volume, and datacentre starts at $0.50 per GB. Mobile is available from $12 per GB if you need it.
The dashboard is genuinely usable, which sounds like a small thing until you've spent an afternoon in an enterprise proxy console.
Best for: the 80 percent case. Start here.
IPRoyal
The interesting thing about IPRoyal isn't the $3.50 per GB headline. It's that the credits don't expire. Every other provider on this list rents you monthly volume that vanishes if unused.
If your lead gen is seasonal, project-based, or agency work with gaps between clients, that single policy can make IPRoyal cheaper in practice than a provider with a lower per-GB rate. Static ISP IPs from $2.40 per IP per month are useful for anything needing a stable identity.
Not ideal for: high-volume continuous scraping, where the bigger networks pull ahead on success rate.
SOAX
SOAX earns its place on targeting precision. If you need IPs in a specific city, on a specific mobile carrier, this is the most granular control available. For local lead generation, where results genuinely differ by metro area, that's not a nice-to-have.
The tradeoff is the entry point: $99 a month for the residential starter at roughly $6.60 per GB, rising to $299 for growth at around $4.98 per GB. There's no cheap way in.
Best for: local and geo-specific prospecting. Skip if your targets aren't geographically sensitive.
Account-Based Prospecting Needs More Than a Proxy
If your workflow involves logging into accounts rather than fetching public pages, the proxy is maybe a third of the problem. Browser fingerprint, cookie state and behavioural patterns carry the rest.
That's what anti-detect browsers exist for. Multilogin is the enterprise standard at 4.4, with the permissions and audit trails agencies need. AdsPower is the value option at 4.2 and has a free tier up to five profiles, which is enough to test whether the approach works before spending anything.
Warning: platform terms of service usually prohibit this outright. Getting the technology right doesn't make the activity permitted, and an account ban can take a real sales channel with it. We're describing what the tools do, not recommending you point them at a platform that forbids it.
What Most Proxy Roundups Skip
Here's the uncomfortable part. Proxy roundups compare per-GB pricing because it's easy to tabulate. The expensive risk in lead generation isn't bandwidth. It's what you do with the data afterwards.
A work email address attached to a named person is personal data under GDPR, whether or not you found it on a public page. That brings obligations: a lawful basis for processing, a retention policy, a way to handle deletion requests, and disclosure of where the data came from. Under CCPA and its successors, similar duties apply to California residents.
None of this makes B2B prospecting impossible. Legitimate interest is a workable basis for a lot of it. But the operational cost of doing it properly, the suppression lists, the audit trail, the process for handling objections, dwarfs your proxy bill and almost never appears in a comparison table.
Expert take: if you're spending three hours choosing between $7.00 and $8.40 per GB while having no documented retention policy, you're optimising the wrong line item by two orders of magnitude.
Get proper legal advice for your jurisdiction. This is a software review site, not a law firm.
Hidden Costs That Show Up in Month Two
Four things that aren't on the pricing page:
Retry bandwidth. A 20 percent failure rate means you pay for 120 GB to collect 100 GB. Cheap proxies with worse success rates cost more per successful request even when the per-GB rate looks better.
Failed-request engineering time. Debugging why a scrape works for 400 pages and then stops is expensive in a way that doesn't hit the proxy invoice.
Data decay. B2B contact data goes stale at roughly 25 to 30 percent a year through job changes alone. A list you scraped once is a depreciating asset, so budget for re-verification rather than treating collection as a one-off.
Enrichment stacking. Proxies get you raw pages. Turning those into usable records usually means a verification service and an enrichment API on top, and those are typically priced per record, not per GB. That's frequently the larger bill.
Five Mistakes That Waste Proxy Budget
Buying residential for everything. Segment by how defended each source is.
Committing before you know your volume. Run pay-as-you-go for a quarter first.
Treating rotation as a strategy. If your headers and timing look automated, a fresh IP just gets the same treatment from a different angle.
Ignoring success rate in favour of unit price. The metric that matters is cost per successful record, not cost per GB.
Skipping the small test. Every provider on this list has pay-as-you-go or a trial. Test against your actual targets, because pool quality varies enormously by geography and destination.
How to Choose Without Overbuying
Work through it in this order:
List your sources and rank them by how defended they are. Public registry, or a site with a bot-management vendor in front of it?
Estimate bandwidth. Pages × average page weight × 1.2 for retries. Write the number down.
Buy datacentre for the easy tier, and only test residential where you get rejected.
Run one real campaign on pay-as-you-go. Measure success rate, not just spend.
Only then consider a commitment, with your actual usage number in hand.
Budget the compliance work before you scale, because retrofitting it is worse.
Final Verdict
Start with Decodo at $7.00 per GB pay-as-you-go. It's the best balance of price, performance and a dashboard you won't resent, and most lead-gen teams will never outgrow it.
Move to Bright Data or Oxylabs when success rate starts costing you more than the proxy does, or when procurement needs sourcing documentation. Choose IPRoyal if your work is seasonal and non-expiring credits fit the shape of your year. Choose SOAX if you genuinely need city or carrier-level targeting.
And spend the afternoon you saved on your data retention policy instead. That's the part that will actually cost you money.
Do I need residential proxies for lead generation, or will datacentre do?
It depends entirely on the source. Public company directories, job boards and government registries are usually fine over datacentre IPs, which cost a fraction as much. Social platforms, review sites and anything sitting behind a serious bot-management vendor will classify datacentre ranges quickly. Our advice: start on datacentre for your cheapest sources, and only pay residential rates for the specific targets that actually reject you.
How much bandwidth does a lead-gen scrape actually use?
Far less than most teams buy. If you fetch HTML only and skip images, CSS and scripts, a typical directory or listing page lands somewhere around 150 to 400 KB. At 250 KB average, 50,000 pages is roughly 12.5 GB. Add 20 percent for retries and you're near 15 GB. That's about $105 at Decodo's pay-as-you-go rate, not the $500 monthly commitment a sales rep will steer you toward.
Is scraping public B2B contact data legal?
"Public" and "lawful to process" are different questions, and that distinction is where most lead-gen operations get into trouble. Under GDPR, a work email tied to a named person is still personal data, so you need a lawful basis, a retention policy and a way to honour deletion requests. The scraping step is rarely the expensive part. Storing and mailing the result without a process is. Take actual legal advice for your jurisdiction rather than a blog's word for it.
Why do my requests get blocked even on residential proxies?
Because the IP is one signal among many. TLS fingerprint, header order, navigation timing, cookie handling and request cadence all feed the same classifier. A residential IP driving a headless browser with default settings and no delays still looks like automation. Rotation buys you less than people expect if everything else is shouting.
Should I buy an annual proxy commitment to get the lower per-GB rate?
Not in your first quarter. Committed pricing at Bright Data and Oxylabs does cut the per-GB rate meaningfully, but it assumes you already know your monthly volume. Most teams don't until they've run a few real campaigns, and unused commitment is just a more expensive way to buy less data. Run pay-as-you-go until your usage is boring and predictable, then negotiate.
proxieslead generationprospectingcompliance
How we write.Pricing in this article comes from vendors' published pricing pages, the same source as our tool profiles. We take no payment for placement, and some links earn us a commission — read the methodology.
LK
Lokesh Kapoor
Last reviewed . Prices in this article are taken from each vendor's published pricing page, the same source as the tool profiles in our directory.
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