Match the proxy type to the job
Most switching decisions start with the wrong question. Before comparing prices, decide which kind of IP your work needs.
- Residential proxies use real home connections and suit sites that block server IPs or change content by location.
- Mobile proxies use 4G/5G carrier IPs, billed per gigabyte or as a dedicated port by the day.
- Datacenter proxies are the fast, low-cost choice for sites that accept server IPs.
- Static residential ISP IPs and static IPs stay the same for days or months, for accounts that need a fixed address.
The residential vs datacenter comparison covers the trade-offs in more detail. Many teams use two types and split traffic by how hard each target is.
Compare pricing the way you will actually use it
Headline per-GB rates are a poor guide on their own. What decides cost is how you are billed and whether unused traffic is lost.
- Pay per GB, no expiry. Nefo residential runs from $0.90/GB at 5 GB to $0.53/GB at 10 TB, and the bandwidth never expires, so a quiet month costs nothing extra.
- Monthly plans. A fixed allowance is efficient when you use all of it every month, and wasteful when usage is irregular.
- Per-IP rentals. Buying addresses by the day or month suits steady, low-traffic identities more than bursty collection.
- Per-request credits. Managed scraping APIs price the difficulty of each fetch, which is a different unit from bandwidth.
Full rates are on the pricing page. Also check refund terms: Nefo refunds unused rotating residential and datacenter bandwidth within 7 days, as set out in the refund policy.
Check targeting, sessions and protocols
These three settings decide whether a provider works with your tooling.
- Targeting. Nefo residential covers 227 countries and territories, 22,417 cities and 14,252 ISPs/ASNs, set with username tokens such as
-country-usand-city-losangeles. - Sessions. Rotating gives a new IP per request. Sticky sessions hold one IP from 1 minute up to 24 hours, which matters for logins and checkouts.
- Protocols and authentication. HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, with UDP over SOCKS5 on Pool 1, and username/password or IP allowlist authentication.
If your tools expect SOCKS5, or a fixed concurrency port, confirm that first. It is the most common reason people look for an alternative.
Know what a proxy provider does not do
A proxy network supplies IPs. It does not solve CAPTCHAs, render JavaScript or parse pages. Several providers on this list sell managed scraping APIs or unblockers on top of their proxies, and if you rely on those, replacing the proxy layer alone means rebuilding that work yourself. Nefo sells the network layer only, and the comparison pages say so plainly for each provider.
Acceptable use matters too. Nefo is for lawful work such as public data collection, price and ad verification, SEO monitoring and QA; see the acceptable use policy.
Test before you commit
The most reliable comparison is your own targets. Buy the smallest package, 5 GB for $4.50, point one job at it beside your current provider, and compare success rate, retries and gigabytes used per thousand successful requests. Credentials are free, and bandwidth never expires, so an inconclusive test costs only the traffic you sent. Browse use cases for the setups people run most, then open the comparison for your current provider below.
Frequently asked questions
Pick the proxy type for your job first, then compare billing, targeting depth, session length and what the provider does not cover. Test with a small purchase on your own targets. Nefo starts at 5 GB for $4.50 and the bandwidth never expires. See pricing.
Check your protocol needs such as SOCKS5, how you authenticate, how targeting is written in the username, how long sticky sessions must last and whether you rely on a managed API. Run the old and new providers in parallel on identical targets before cancelling anything.
It is when usage is irregular. Prepaid bandwidth that never expires costs nothing in a quiet month, while a monthly allowance resets whether or not you used it. If you consume a fixed allowance every month, a plan can be efficient. Compare using real volume, not headline rates.
Yes. Nefo proxies use standard HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 with username and password or an IP allowlist, so a copy of a job can point at Nefo with a configuration change. Many teams split traffic by target difficulty between two providers.
Rotating residential from $0.53/GB at 10 TB, mobile from $3.90/GB, datacenter from $0.29/GB at 10 TB, a 24-hour dedicated residential IP at $0.09, static residential ISP IPs and static datacenter IPs, all on one balance.