Flat-rate dedicated mobile lines vs per-GB mobile residential: a buyer's guide for teams

Procurement teams comparing mobile proxy offers usually meet two pricing shapes. One vendor sells traffic by the gigabyte from a shared pool of consumer devices; the other, which is how GlobalProxies works, rents you a whole device with its own US carrier SIM for a fixed daily, weekly or monthly fee. Neither model is always cheaper. The answer depends on how many gigabytes your projects move, how many countries you need and whether your workflows care which IP they leave from. This guide lays out the arithmetic with our own list prices, a realistic agency scenario and the cases where paying per gigabyte is simply the better call.

What each invoice is really paying for

A per-GB mobile residential plan charges for bytes moved through a gateway. Behind that gateway sits a pool of consumer phones and tablets, frequently enrolled through an SDK bundled inside a free app, and each request or short sticky window is handed to whichever peer is online. You never choose the handset, you rarely choose the carrier, and the exit address can change between one page load and the next unless you pin a session for a few minutes.

A GlobalProxies line is a physical 4G or 5G modem, router or Android phone in one of our US metros, carrying an AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon SIM, and nobody else is assigned to it while it is yours. You pick the hardware, carrier and metro at checkout. The address stays put until you rotate it, either from a rotation link, through the API or in per-request mode, and rotations are unlimited with no cooldown. The fee is flat: $150 a month on 4G or $200 a month on 5G, with 15 GB of traffic included every day.

So the two invoices buy different things. Per-GB buys reach across a very large, loosely controlled pool. Flat-rate buys control over one known device. Price is the second question; fit is the first.

Break-even on the GlobalProxies price list

The reference point we use is a public US per-GB mobile residential list from September 2026: $20 per GB on pay-as-you-go, 2 GB for $40, or a 25 GB package for $300, which works out to $12 per GB. Divide our monthly price by those rates and you get the break-even volume.

For a 4G line, $150 divided by $20 is 7.5 GB a month. Against the $12 package rate it is 12.5 GB. For a 5G line at $200 the equivalent points are 10 GB and roughly 16.7 GB. Below those volumes a pool costs less; above them the flat line pulls ahead, and the gap widens with every additional gigabyte because our fee does not move.

The 25 GB package only helps once you actually consume most of it, which is why the 1, 5 and 10 GB rows still show the full package price in that column. A team that moves 100 GB a month would pay between $1,200 and $2,000 on the pool against $150 for a single 4G line, and one line carries that load comfortably inside its daily allowance.

Scenario: a five-client agency running US checks

Picture a digital agency with five retail clients. Each client wants its ads, landing pages and localized search results reviewed from a real US mobile connection several times a day, and two of them want the same checks repeated from Los Angeles and Houston because their offers differ by region. The team also keeps a logged-in session for each client's ad account open during working hours, which is where a steady IP helps: the platform sees the same carrier address in the same city week after week instead of a new consumer device on every visit.

The agency measured its traffic in a trial week and saw about 1 GB per client per working day once video creatives and full page renders were counted. Across 22 working days that is roughly 110 GB a month. On the pay-as-you-go pool that would be about $2,200; on 25 GB packages it would take five packages, $1,500, with some traffic left over. The agency instead runs three GlobalProxies 4G lines, one each in New York, Los Angeles and Houston, for $450 a month, and moves lines between metros from the dashboard at no charge when a client campaign shifts region.

Just as important for an agency, the bill is known in advance. Finance approves $450, not an estimate that swings with how many video ads a client uploaded that month. Each line also has its own username and password, so access can be split by region or by account team.

Where a per-GB pool honestly wins

We would rather you buy the right thing than the wrong line. Per-GB billing is the better purchase in several common situations, and we tell prospects so when we see them.

If any of the points below describes your project, a per-GB pool will likely cost less. If your team moves more than roughly 7.5 GB a month through US mobile IPs, needs a stable address for account work, or wants to choose the carrier and city, the flat line is usually the stronger buy.

• Your whole project moves a few hundred megabytes a month, such as a weekly screenshot of a handful of US pages.
• You need exits in many countries. Our lines sit in eight US metros only: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, North Carolina and Boston.
• You want a single spot check. Even our shortest plan, a $10 day on 4G, costs as much as half a gigabyte on a pool.
• Your workload needs thousands of distinct addresses at the same instant, which a single device cannot provide by design.

Planning capacity around 15 GB a day

Every GlobalProxies plan includes 15 GB of traffic per day on each line. It is a daily allowance, so plan around it: a line used every day of a 30-day month can move about 450 GB in total, and unusually heavy days are best spread across two lines rather than stacked on one. For most agency and B2B workloads, from ad verification to localized QA, a single line rarely approaches that figure.

Speed matters for planning as well. 4G lines usually deliver 20 to 45 Mbps and 5G lines 50 Mbps or more, depending on signal at the site. Both support HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, with UDP over SOCKS5 when you need it. Because a mobile address is shared through carrier-grade NAT by many ordinary phones, platforms tend to weigh behavior more heavily than the address itself, so for account-based work a steady, well-behaved line is worth more than one that changes constantly.

Short terms for pilots, monthly terms for production

Teams rarely need to commit before they have data. A 4G day costs $10 and a week costs $60, which is enough to route a real project through a line and read the traffic counter in the dashboard. If the week shows you moving under a few gigabytes, a pool may serve you better and you have lost very little finding out. If it shows tens of gigabytes, the monthly plan at $150 fixes your spend at a known figure.

Payment works the way finance departments expect: card through Stripe checkout, PayPal, Zelle, bank wire, or Bitcoin, USDT and Ethereum. Support is available around the clock by email and through our Telegram bot.

Questions about per-GB pricing