Every unlimited proxy plan meters something else

No unlimited proxy plan removes the meter. It moves. To megabits, to concurrent threads, to ports, or to the number of addresses you rent, and the plan stops being unlimited at whichever of those you hit first. Every unlimited plan we could find, read on 14 August 2026, prices a second resource in place of the gigabyte. Here is what each one actually counts.

What the five are really selling

Three providers sell unlimited rotating residential proxies, and all three cap either speed or concurrency. Webshare's unlimited plans are datacenter and static residential, where the price tracks how many addresses you rent. Prices below were read on 14 August 2026.

Most providers sell no unlimited plan at all. They meter gigabytes and say so, which also means they can charge you a bandwidth overage when you pass the allowance.

The one provider that publishes a number

Webshare is the only one of the five that puts a figure on its own fair usage policy. Its pricing page carries an asterisk reading "*Subject to our Fair Usage Policy". That policy, updated 15 February 2026, states the threshold and what happens past it:

Each Unlimited Bandwidth Plan is guaranteed 10 TB before thottling is enforced. Our proxies operate at full speed of 300-400 Mbps. Once throttled, speeds may drop to 100 Mbps and gradually decrease to as low as 5 Mbps, depending on continued usage.

The typo is Webshare's and we have left it as printed.

Re-read 27 August 2026, and the floor has moved. That sentence now ends "as low as 10 Kbps" where on 14 August it read "as low as 5 Mbps". The 10 TB figure is unchanged. We have kept the quote as first read rather than editing it silently, because the change is the point: a throttled floor five hundred times lower is a different product, and the page is still stamped as the same policy.

The floor after throttling is now 10 Kbps against a stated full speed of 300 to 400 Mbps. That is not a slow lane, it is roughly thirty thousand times slower than the fast state, and it is closer to off than to degraded.

And the allowance is not a flat 10 TB. The same policy carries a calculation the 10 TB sentence does not mention, which we missed on the first read:

For the first $1,000 of subscription plan, users receive 1 TB of guaranteed bandwidth for every $10 spent (Plan price ÷ 10). For any amount above $1,000, users receive 1 TB for every $20 spent.

So the guarantee is the greater of the two. A $2.99 plan gets the flat 10 TB and nothing from the formula. A $2,250 plan gets 100 TB from the first thousand dollars plus 62.5 TB from the rest, roughly 162 TB, which is sixteen times the headline figure. The allowance does scale with price, and the sentence everybody quotes is the floor rather than the whole rule.

The terms of service add that the policy can move:

Webshare reserves the right to unilaterally amend this Fair Usage Policy and its accompanying limits at any time without prior notice

We are not holding that up as sharp practice. Publishing a number at all puts Webshare ahead of the other four here, and a reader can check this one.

Geonode says no cap in the shop and reserves limits in the policy

Geonode's product page for unlimited residential proxies advertises no ceiling and then asks you to choose one:

No bandwidth cap unlimited usage No overage charges 0$ extra fees. Pick your speed tier 200 Mbps 1000 Mbps plans.

Those two sentences sit next to each other on the same page. The data allowance has no cap. The speed tier is the cap, and it is what you are buying: $1,800/mo (read 14 Aug 2026) at 200 Mbps, rising to $3,800/mo (read 14 Aug 2026) at 1000 Mbps.

Geonode's acceptable use policy, section 6.5, is headed "Fair Use and Unlimited Plans" and reserves the right to apply technical limits, fair-use controls, rate limits and concurrency controls to protect the network. It closes:

"Unlimited" does not permit unlawful, abusive, disruptive, harmful, or excessive use.

No figure defines excessive. That is not unusual and it is worth knowing before you plan capacity around the word unlimited.

The break-even, on one vendor's own ladder

Geonode is useful here because it sells both models, so the comparison holds every other variable still. Its metered residential ladder and its unlimited plan were read the same day, from the same vendor, in the same currency.

The unlimited plan lands between the 3 TB and 5 TB rungs. Below about 3 TB a month you are paying for headroom you do not use. Above 5 TB it is already cheaper than the ladder.

The same arithmetic settles a bigger question, and we have run it: whether to buy bytes at all, or to buy requests from a scraping API instead. That one turns on your average page weight.

Now the part the word unlimited hides. A 200 Mbps link running flat out for thirty days moves about 64,800 GB. Breaking even at 3 TB means using roughly 4.6% of that, an average of 9.3 Mbps. So the plan pays off at a duty cycle most scraping jobs never reach, and the theoretical ceiling that makes unlimited sound generous is not the number that decides anything. Your average is.

The policy that could not be read

Storm Proxies returned HTTP 403 to our fetch on 14 August 2026. Its figures in the table above come from a browser capture rather than a plain request, and we label the vendor as blocking automated checking rather than presenting a stale number as current.

Proxy-Seller sells a 4G mobile plan with unlimited data on one dedicated address, and prices it through an on-page configurator that reads $0 until options are chosen. There is no figure on the page to read, so we publish none.

What to check before buying one

Four questions, in the order that saves the most money:

1. What is the second meter? Speed, threads, ports, or addresses. Every plan has one. Find it before you compare prices.
2. Is there a published fair usage number? One of these five publishes one. Ask support for the figure in writing if the site does not carry it.
3. What happens when you cross it? Throttling to 5 Mbps and account suspension are different outcomes, and the policy usually says which.
4. What is your real monthly volume? Compare the unlimited price against the same vendor's metered ladder at that volume. The cost calculator will do that against every metered plan we track. If the vendor does not sell both, compare against the cheapest metered rate you would otherwise buy.

The honest summary is that none of the five is lying and none of them is selling what the word implies. Unlimited is real in the sense that no gigabyte counter will stop you, and the resource you are actually renting, whether that is megabits or threads or ports or addresses, is metered as tightly as bandwidth ever was. Whether that is a good deal depends entirely on which of those four you were going to run out of first.