Buying

Do mobile proxies have unlimited bandwidth?

Usually not, most mobile proxies are sold by the gigabyte. White Cloak dedicated proxies are the exception: bandwidth is unlimited, and you pay for time on a dedicated device rather than for the traffic you push through it.

The two ways mobile proxies are priced

By the gigabyte. You buy a data allowance and spend it. This is the standard model for large rotating pools, because the provider is dividing one line between many customers and has to meter who used what.

By time. You rent a device for a day, a week or a month and use it as hard as you like. This only works when the line is dedicated to one customer, there's nobody else's usage to account for, so there's nothing to meter.

What metered pricing does to your work

The real cost of per-gigabyte pricing isn't the bill, it's the way you start behaving. People on metered plans block images to save data, avoid anything with video, cut sessions short, and quietly stop doing the thing they bought the proxy for. That's a problem on two fronts: it caps your work, and it makes your traffic look nothing like a person on a phone, which is the entire reason a mobile IP is valuable.

A proxy you're rationing is a proxy you aren't using properly.

What unlimited does and doesn't mean

  • It means no data cap and no overage. Nothing is counted, so nothing runs out mid-task and no surprise line item appears later.
  • It means the price is the price. A month costs what the plan costs whether you move a little traffic or a lot.
  • It doesn't mean infinite speed. This is a real handset on a real carrier network, throughput is whatever the network gives that device at that moment, exactly as it would be for any phone.
  • It doesn't remove the need to behave sensibly. Volume that no human could produce still looks like volume no human could produce, whoever is paying for the data.

Which model suits you

If you genuinely need a few hundred megabytes a month from a mobile IP, a metered line costs less, and we sell one: pay by the gigabyte puts you on a shared handset with the bandwidth priced per GB instead of per day. The moment your work is continuous, running browser profiles all day, verifying how ads render across a campaign, testing a mobile build end to end, a time-priced dedicated line is both cheaper and simpler, because you stop doing arithmetic about it entirely. The quickest way to find out which side of that line you're on is to point a day of real traffic at one, is there a free trial for mobile proxies explains the 24-hour test.

Plans run from a single day up to a month, on the carrier you choose, and all of them carry the same 24-hour refund guarantee. If you want to understand why a mobile IP behaves differently from a datacenter one in the first place, what is a 5G mobile proxy explains it in plain English.

Unlimited bandwidth on a dedicated 5G line, priced by the day, week or month.

See plans and pricing

Updated

More questions answered on the mobile proxy answers index, or read the longer mobile proxy guides.