Residential proxies

Residential proxies are IPs of real home users issued by their ISPs (Comcast in the US, Vodafone in the EU, BT in the UK). These IPs look to anti-bot systems like ordinary home connections, which yields a high trust score compared with datacenter IPs.

Residential sits in the "sweet spot" between cheap datacenter and pricey mobile: ~$1.40-$10 per GB depending on the provider.

IP pool size is the headline metric for a residential provider. The bigger the pool, the lower the chance that your specific IP is on the target's blacklist. The 2026 top-3:

• Bright Data — 150M+ IPs, the largest on the market
• Decodo — 125M+ IPs, high success rate (99.5%)
• Oxylabs — 100M+ IPs, strong enterprise service

Smaller pools (5-10M) are budget providers: DataImpulse, Geonode, HydraProxy. Enough for most jobs, but on Cloudflare-protected sites their ban-rate may be above average.

The most common question — how ethical is it to use residential proxies if real people sit behind them?

The top providers (Bright Data, Decodo, Oxylabs) use a compensated peering model: partners with popular VPN apps, free software and mobile games offer users an opt-in to share part of their traffic in exchange for free access to the service.

Less ethical providers sometimes buy pools from SDKs installed covertly (botnet-style). That happened with 911.re in 2022, which was eventually shut down. So when picking residential — check the provider's reputation and look at our compliance section.