# Residential proxy prices: budget per profile, not per GB > Residential proxy prices are quoted per GB and move with plan size and the market. What an operator budgets is gigabytes per profile, times the rate. Source: https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/residential-proxy-prices-rising ## Residential proxy prices, turned into a cost per profile Residential proxy prices are quoted per GB and move with plan size and the market. What an operator budgets is gigabytes per profile, times the rate. ![Price per GB, times gigabytes per profile, beside a screenshot: a proxy provider in Mosaic: one gateway line that mints a separate session for every profile](https://mosaicbrowser.com/covers/residential-proxy-prices-rising.webp) Residential proxy prices are quoted per gigabyte, and the rate moves: with the size of the plan you commit to, with the seller, and with the market as a whole, which has moved in both directions over the years. For anyone running browser profiles, the rate is only half of the sum. The other half is how many gigabytes one profile uses in a month, and that number belongs to you, not to any price survey. ## How residential proxy prices are quoted The shape is close to the same across sellers, even where the figures differ. There is a pay-as-you-go rate for traffic bought without a plan, usually the highest. There are monthly plans that include an allowance of gigabytes at a lower effective rate, which falls further as the allowance grows. And on many plans, traffic you did not use by the end of the period is gone. That last detail changes the sum more than the headline rate does. A plan sized for the busiest month wastes the difference every quiet month. A plan sized for the quiet month pays the pay-as-you-go rate for the overflow. Neither is visible in a comparison table that prints one price per GB. Why the gigabyte is the unit at all, and what it pays for on somebody else's home connection, is in [why residential proxies cost what they cost](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/why-residential-proxies-cost-more). ## The sum per profile Budgeting per profile is one multiplication with three inputs: ``` cost per profile per month = GB per profile per month x your effective rate effective rate = plan price / GB you actually used ``` To keep the arithmetic easy, take a made-up rate of $5 a GB. A profile that uses 400 MB a month costs $2. Forty of them cost $80. If the same profiles start autoplaying video and use 2 GB each, the forty cost $400, and the rate never changed. That is why a price rise and a habit change land on the bill the same way. The rate is the number people watch, and the gigabytes per profile are usually the number that moves more. Mosaic is a desktop app Email yourself the link and open it on your computer. [How it works: Provider minting](https://mosaicbrowser.com/features/proxy-providers) ## What uses the gigabytes in a browser profile A real browser downloads everything a page asks for: images, fonts, scripts, ads, and video if the page plays it. That is why a profile costs more per page than a script fetching the same HTML would, and why two profiles on one plan can differ by a factor of ten. In Mosaic a few things spend traffic that people do not always count: - Warm-up. The robot browses a profile in its own browser, through that profile's own proxy, so the history and cookies it builds are paid for in the same gigabytes as the real work. - Start pages. A profile that opens five dashboards on every launch loads five dashboards on every launch. - The proxy check. A profile does not open until its proxy has answered and tunnelled, so every launch begins with a few small probe requests: where it exits, whether it tunnels, which resolver it uses. They are small next to one page with images, but they are not zero. A dead session is the opposite case. On a sticky residential gateway a session that reaches nothing stays dead for every retry on the same token, and it uses almost no traffic, because nothing loads. It costs time instead. Mosaic asks the seller for a different session rather than retrying the dead one three times; [rotate, don't retry](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/rotate-dont-retry) has the forty-session run where the twenty-ninth was dead. ## Measure one profile before you budget forty The honest way to get the gigabytes-per-profile figure is to measure it. Run one profile alone on the provider for a few working days, doing exactly the job it is for, and read the usage in the seller's dashboard before and after. Divide by the days. That is your number, for that kind of work, and it is worth more than any figure in a blog post, this one included. Then do the same for each kind of profile you run, because a profile that answers customer messages and a profile that reviews video ads are different budgets. ## Where the per-profile cost goes when the rate rises When the rate goes up, there are fewer levers than it seems, and the useful ones are about which profiles need a residential exit at all. 1. A profile meant to browse from your own place does not need a proxy. With no proxy, a Mosaic profile matches this computer's own location, which is the truthful answer for your own business accounts. 2. A profile that must look like it is somewhere else does need an exit there, and pinning the country rather than the address keeps it consistent without paying for a dedicated IP. 3. Warm-up plans and start pages are yours to trim, and both are measured in the same gigabytes. Mosaic's own share of the sum does not grow with the profile count. Pro is $49 a month whether you run ten profiles or a thousand, which at a hundred profiles is 49 cents each ([why we chose one price](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/one-price)). Mosaic sells no proxy traffic, so the proxy bill is the part that scales, and you keep the choice of seller. Paste one gateway line as a [provider](https://mosaicbrowser.com/features/proxy-providers) and every profile mints its own session from it. ## Questions ### How are residential proxy prices quoted? Almost always per gigabyte of traffic. Sellers usually offer a pay-as-you-go rate and monthly plans with a traffic allowance at a lower rate, and the rate falls as the commitment grows. Some plans let unused traffic expire at the end of the period. ### How much does a residential proxy cost per browser profile? The gigabytes one profile uses in a month, times your rate. Nobody can give you the first number for your profiles: a profile that reads dashboards uses a fraction of one that watches video, so measure one profile on its own before you budget forty. ### Does Mosaic charge per profile or per proxy? Neither. Pro is one price however many profiles you make, and Mosaic sells no proxy traffic. You bring your own seller, so the proxy bill is the part of the cost that grows with each profile. ### Does a dead residential session use traffic? Almost none, because nothing loads through it. It costs time instead: a profile that will not open until it gets a session that answers. ## Related [Why residential proxies cost what they cost per GB](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/why-residential-proxies-cost-more): Residential proxies are expensive because every gigabyte crosses somebody's home connection. For a browser profile, count working sessions, not gigabytes. [Four 504s on one session: rotate, don't retry](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/rotate-dont-retry): On a sticky residential proxy a session token is an exit, so retrying it asks a dead exit three more times. Rotate to a fresh session instead. [Provider accounts: one gateway line, one exit per profile](https://mosaicbrowser.com/features/proxy-providers): Paste your proxy seller's gateway line once and Mosaic mints a separate session for every profile, so each one browses from its own exit address. [Residential proxy: an exit on a home internet connection](https://mosaicbrowser.com/glossary/residential-proxy): A residential proxy sends your traffic out through an address an ISP assigned to a home connection, so sites see a household rather than a data center. [Why Mosaic Pro is one price](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/one-price): Anti-detect browser pricing per profile sells a count. Mosaic Pro is $49 a month for any count, because a profile on your own disk costs us nothing. ["Unlimited bandwidth" proxies and where the limit really is](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/unlimited-bandwidth-proxies): An unlimited bandwidth residential proxy still has a limit. It moves to threads, ports, speed or a fair-use clause, and the terms say which one. [The proxy bill is usually bigger than the browser bill](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/proxy-bill-bigger-than-browser): Past a couple of dozen profiles, the exits cost more each month than the anti-detect browser. That is why we price per month, not per profile. [Per-GB vs per-IP proxy pricing for long-lived profiles](https://mosaicbrowser.com/blog/per-gb-vs-per-ip-proxy-pricing): Per GB vs per IP proxy pricing over a year: a light profile is cheaper per GB, a busy one per IP, and the crossover is lifetime gigabytes against months. ## Mosaic, on your own computer The browser this blog is about: its own Chromium, fingerprints from real machines and a proxy exit per profile. Free holds 3 profiles. Pro is $49 a month for any number. Mosaic is a desktop app Email yourself the link and open it on your computer.