Proxyrack pricing: threads, not gigabytes
Most residential proxy providers meter you on data transferred. Proxyrack is one of the few long-running vendors built around a different axis: its unmetered and private residential products are priced by concurrency — the number of simultaneous threads, or the number of dedicated ports, that you reserve. Bandwidth inside that tier is not metered. It also offers a conventional per-gigabyte residential tier, so both models exist side by side, but the thread-based option is what the company is known for and what most comparisons are really about.
Proxyrack is an Australian company and one of the older names still actively trading in this market. The catalogue is broad by residential-proxy standards: rotating and static datacenter pools, mobile endpoints, a web scraper API and a residential VPN sit alongside the residential tiers. Protocol coverage is wider than most, including SOCKS4 and UDP as well as HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. Geo-targeting is available by country, city and ISP, with both rotating and sticky ports.
Two operational details are worth knowing before you evaluate. Buying is subscription-shaped — plans renew monthly, with a discount for annual commitment, and the trial is paid rather than free. Identity verification (KYC) is carried out after purchase; the company frames this as fraud reduction, which is a reasonable position for a provider of its age and size, but it does mean onboarding is not instant.
What Proxyrack does well
If your workload is heavy, continuous and predictable, the thread model is not a gimmick — it is structurally the cheaper shape. A scraper that pulls the same large volume every day converts an unbounded variable cost into a fixed one. Once you are moving enough data, per-gigabyte billing becomes the thing that hurts, and Proxyrack is one of the few places you can escape it without negotiating an enterprise contract.
- Sustained high-volume scraping where bandwidth, not IP quality, is the dominant cost line
- Teams that want a fixed, forecastable monthly proxy bill rather than a usage-driven one
- Workloads needing datacenter, residential, mobile and a scraper API from a single vendor and single invoice
- Software that requires SOCKS4, which many residential providers do not carry
- Dedicated private ports where you are not sharing a pool with other customers
- Buyers who value a provider with a long trading history and a settled product line
When a thread tier stops fitting the work
The thread model asks you to forecast concurrency in advance, and it charges you whether or not you use it. That is fine for a scraper running around the clock. It is expensive for the far more common pattern: a job that runs for three days a month, a seasonal price-monitoring project, a client engagement that ends, or an engineer who needs a handful of gigabytes to validate an approach before committing to anything. In those cases the monthly floor is the whole cost, and most of it is idle.
There is also a planning tax. Sizing a thread tier means knowing your parallelism ahead of time, and the natural response to hitting the ceiling is to buy the next tier up rather than to tune the scraper. Bandwidth-metered billing inverts that: the meter runs on what you actually moved, so an inefficient crawler shows up as a cost you can profile and fix, and an idle month costs nothing.
None of this makes one model correct. It makes them suited to different duty cycles. The question worth asking is simply whether your traffic is a flat line or a series of spikes.
How Nefo per-GB pricing works
Nefo sells prepaid residential bandwidth. You buy gigabytes, generate as many proxy credentials as you like at no cost, and only traffic passing through them draws down the balance. Flexible plans are non-expiring, so unused bandwidth stays in the account rather than resetting at the end of a billing cycle — a project that pauses for two months resumes on the same balance.
Targeting and session control are set in the username rather than per port, which matters if you run several jobs against different geographies. Country targeting covers 227 countries and territories; the United States is targetable down to state and city, with region and city available in selected other countries; and you can pin a credential to a specific ASN or ISP within a country. Sessions are either rotating, with a new IP per request, or sticky, holding the same IP from one minute to 24 hours.
- Prepaid from 5GB, with no monthly minimum and no concurrency tier to size
- Non-expiring bandwidth on flexible plans — balance carries until it is used
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, all with username and password authentication
- 227 countries and territories, US state and city targeting, and ASN/ISP targeting within a country
- Rotating or sticky sessions, sticky configurable from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Separate 4G/5G mobile product: carrier-modem ports rented by duration rather than by gigabyte
How to switch from Proxyrack to Nefo
Less than you would expect at the integration layer. Both providers authenticate with a username and password over standard HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, so the transport code in your scraper does not change. What changes is the endpoint, the credential string and the way you express geo-targeting and session stickiness — on Nefo those are username tokens such as -country-us and -session-<id>, so a job that used a specific sticky port on Proxyrack becomes a specific username instead.
The bigger adjustment is mental. You stop instrumenting for a thread ceiling and start instrumenting for bytes. Before you migrate anything, log the response sizes your current crawler is already pulling for a day; a compressed HTML product page is usually well under a couple of hundred kilobytes, and multiplying that by your daily page count gives a serviceable first estimate. If your crawler is loading images, fonts and analytics scripts it does not parse, that estimate will be several times higher than it needs to be, and blocking those requests is the single highest-return change you can make before switching billing models.
Run both in parallel for a week. Keep the Proxyrack subscription through one renewal cycle, point a fraction of your traffic at Nefo, and compare success rate and bytes-per-successful-page on the same targets. That gives you a real per-gigabyte number for your own workload rather than a vendor's, and makes the decision arithmetic rather than argument.
When to stay with Proxyrack and when to move
Stay with Proxyrack if you are running continuous high-volume collection where the unmetered thread tier prices out below any per-gigabyte rate, if you need a residential VPN, if you rely on their scraper API, or if your tooling needs SOCKS4. Nefo does sell datacenter proxies and supports UDP over SOCKS5, but does not sell a VPN or a managed scraping API, and does not support SOCKS4. If any of those are load-bearing for you, a move is a downgrade in scope, not an upgrade in price.
Move to Nefo if your usage is intermittent, spiky, or still being sized; if a monthly minimum is the largest line on a bill you barely use; if you need bandwidth that survives a quiet quarter; or if your targeting requirements are specific enough that US state, city and ASN control is the deciding factor. The 5GB entry point exists precisely so that evaluating costs a few dollars ($4.50), rather than a month's subscription.
A reasonable end state for some teams is both: Proxyrack for the always-on production crawler where fixed concurrency pricing wins, Nefo for ad-hoc research, one-off client work, QA and geo-verification where paying a monthly floor for occasional traffic makes no sense.
Frequently asked questions
Not always. For uneven or small workloads, per-GB prepaid ($0.90/GB at 5 GB, $0.53/GB at 10 TB) avoids a monthly minimum. If you keep a thread tier busy continuously, an unmetered plan can price below any per-gigabyte rate, and Proxyrack is then the better fit. See pricing.
Not for rotating residential, which is metered per GB. Two products have no meter: a 24-hour residential IP at $0.09 per IP, and static datacenter IPs from $0.72 a month. See unlimited bandwidth proxies for which products have no data limit.
Partly. Nefo supports HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, plus UDP over SOCKS5 on residential Pool 1 and on datacenter proxies. SOCKS4 is not among the supported protocols. If your software requires SOCKS4, that alone may keep you on Proxyrack.
Measure first. Log the compressed response size of every request your crawler makes for one day, then multiply by expected daily volume. Text-heavy pages are typically well under a couple of hundred kilobytes compressed. Blocking images, fonts and third-party scripts you never parse often halves the estimate.
Yes. Both use username and password authentication over standard protocols, so splitting traffic is a configuration change, not a rewrite. Buy 5 GB, send a slice of production traffic through it, and compare success rate and bytes per successful page over a week before cancelling anything.
No. Bandwidth never expires and stays on your balance until used. That is the main practical difference from a monthly subscription, where an unused month is simply spent.