If you scrape at any volume, residential proxies are the line item that determines whether your project is profitable. Here's the actual cost-per-success after running all three for 6 months.
Pricing per GB (residential, pay-as-you-go)
- Bright Data: $15/GB (volume discounts kick in at 100 GB)
- IPRoyal: $7/GB (no minimum)
- SmartProxy: $8.50/GB (volume discount at 100 GB)
IPRoyal is the price leader. Bright Data is twice the price but has 3x the IP pool.
Success rate on Cloudflare-protected sites (10K req test)
- Bright Data: 94%
- SmartProxy: 91%
- IPRoyal: 84%
The 10-point gap matters at scale. If you're paying half the price but eating 10% more retries, you've not saved money.
IP pool size
- Bright Data: 72M residential IPs (largest)
- SmartProxy: 55M
- IPRoyal: 32M
Country coverage
All three cover 195+ countries. Bright Data has the deepest city-level targeting (~750 cities).
Honest recommendation
- Bright Data — when success rate matters more than price (banking, e-commerce, premium sites)
- SmartProxy — best price-to-quality ratio for most scraping (our default)
- IPRoyal — when you're on a tight budget or scraping non-protected sites
We use SmartProxy for 80% of Nexora scraping gigs. Bright Data for clients in finance or e-commerce who need higher reliability.
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