Residential proxy is IPs from real ISP users (Comcast, Verizon, Vodafone, T-Mobile) — routed through devices of people who installed "free VPN" or "browser extension" in exchange for lending their IP. Legal, controversial, works.
Price: $5-15/GB at premium providers (Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy). Sometimes up to $25/GB for sticky sessions and fresh IPs.
Vs datacenter proxy:
- Detection: residential looks like a regular user (1-25% blocked), datacenter easily detected (60-95% blocked on protected sites)
- Price: residential 3-15× more expensive
- Speed: datacenter faster (low latency, dedicated bandwidth)
- Use case: residential for Cloudflare/Akamai/PerimeterX targets, datacenter for unprotected sites
Premium tier (mobile proxy): IPs from carriers (T-Mobile LTE, Vodafone 4G), carrier-grade NAT means thousands of real users share an IP — nearly undetectable, $20-60/GB.
Production scrapers use hybrids — datacenter for cheap targets, residential for protected, mobile for the hardest. See our proxy guide.