A dedicated mobile line or a per-GB residential pool: which one fits your work

If you have been quoted a per-gigabyte price for mobile residential proxies and a flat monthly price for a dedicated line, you are really looking at two different services that happen to share a name. This page explains the difference in plain terms, shows where the costs cross over using ProxyMobile's own prices, and walks through one ordinary month on a single line. It also lists the situations where paying per gigabyte is the sensible choice, because for some light or international jobs it genuinely is.

Two services behind one label

With a per-GB residential pool, you connect to a gateway and the provider forwards each request, or a short sticky session, through one of many consumer devices that happen to be online. Those devices are usually ordinary phones whose owners agreed to share their connection through an app. You do not know which handset will carry the next request, and you pay for every gigabyte that passes through.

With ProxyMobile you rent one device. It is a real 4G or 5G USB modem, router or Android phone with its own AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon SIM, sitting in the US metro you selected, and it is assigned to you alone. The IP address stays the same until you decide to change it. You can rotate by opening a rotation link, calling the API or switching to per-request mode, as often as you like, with no waiting period between changes.

The practical difference is who holds the connection. A pool lends you a slice of many strangers' devices. A dedicated line gives you one device that behaves the same way every day.

Where the costs cross

ProxyMobile charges $70 a month for a 4G line and $85 for 5G, with 15 GB per day included. For comparison we use a public US per-GB mobile residential price list from September 2026: $20 per GB, 2 GB for $40, and 25 GB for $300, or $12 per GB on that larger package.

Divide $70 by $20 and the break-even is 3.5 GB a month. Against the $12 package rate it is about 5.8 GB. On 5G, $85 crosses over at about 4.25 GB at the pay-as-you-go rate and about 7.1 GB at the package rate. Put simply, once a line moves more than a few gigabytes in a month, the flat price is the lower bill.

The per-GB column below uses whichever option on that list is cheaper for the volume shown, and the 60 GB row assumes whole packages, since a fraction of one cannot be bought. The dedicated column never changes, which is the whole point of a flat plan: a busy month costs the same as a quiet one.

One line through an ordinary month

Take a small online seller who manages their own marketplace storefront, the matching ad account and a customer inbox from one computer, and who wants all of that to come from a consistent US mobile connection in Chicago. They rent one 4G line there, on the carrier they picked at checkout, keep the IP sticky, and rotate only when they choose to, perhaps once a week.

A typical day for them is a morning of listing edits with product photos, an hour in the ad dashboard and some video previews. They find it comes to roughly 400 MB, so about 12 GB over a month. On a per-GB pool that would be around $240 at $20 per GB, and the address underneath them would keep changing between devices. On the dedicated line it is $70, the address is the one they saw yesterday, and they use only a small part of the 15 GB available each day.

The seller could have spent a few dollars on a pool if their month had looked like the first row of the table. It did not, so the line is both cheaper and steadier for them.

When per-GB is the better choice

It would not be honest to say a dedicated line suits everyone. A per-GB pool is usually the better buy in the situations listed here.

For everything else, particularly steady work from one place, long-lived logins and anything data-heavy, the dedicated line tends to cost less and behave more predictably.

• You move well under 3.5 GB a month, for example a handful of logins or small page checks.
• You need IP addresses outside the United States. ProxyMobile lines are in eight US metros and nowhere else.
• You need one quick test and will not come back. A pool charge for a couple of hundred megabytes can be lower than even a $5 day on our 4G line.
• You need a very large number of different addresses at exactly the same moment rather than one steady connection.

What 15 GB per day means in practice

Each ProxyMobile plan includes 15 GB of data per day on the line. Over a 30-day month that is about 450 GB, far above the break-even volume and more than most single-user workloads need. The allowance applies day by day, so a job that needs 40 GB in a single day is better split across more than one line.

Speed is the other part of the picture. A 4G line usually runs at 20 to 45 Mbps and a 5G line at 50 Mbps or more, depending on local signal. Both work over HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, and UDP is available through SOCKS5 for tools that need it. Mobile addresses are shared by many ordinary phones through carrier-grade NAT, so websites tend to judge mobile visitors by how they behave rather than by the address alone, which suits calm, consistent use of one line.

Trying a line before choosing

If you are not sure which side of the break-even you fall on, measure it. A 4G day costs $5 and a week costs $30. Run your normal work through the line, then read the data counter in the dashboard. Multiply the week by four and compare it with 3.5 GB. If you land well below, a per-GB pool may be the cheaper home for your traffic. If you land above, the monthly plan saves money from the first month.

Moving the line to another of our US metros later is free and done from the dashboard. You can pay by card, PayPal, Zelle, bank wire or crypto, and support answers around the clock by email or through the Telegram bot.

Questions about per-GB pricing