Mobile vs residential proxies
Mobile is the strongest option available and costs the most. Its advantage is structural: carrier-grade NAT means one mobile IP is shared by thousands of genuine phone users, so blocking it blocks them too.
Mobile
- Providers selling it
- 3
- Cheapest we hold
- —
- Dearest we hold
- —
Residential
- Providers selling it
- 18
- Cheapest we hold
- $3.88
- Dearest we hold
- $8.40
When mobile is the right call
The target is a mobile-first platform, or residential is already failing. Social apps expect mobile carrier traffic and treat it as the normal case. And because carriers put thousands of real subscribers behind each address, a site that blocks one is blocking a crowd of its own users, a cost most will not pay. That is protection no residential address can offer.
When residential is the right call
Almost every other job. Residential already looks like a real household, covers vastly more countries, and costs meaningfully less per gigabyte. Mobile's advantage is real but narrow, and it is dead weight against a target that never distinguishes a home connection from a phone.
What the vendor blogs leave out
Mobile pools are small and heavily reused. You are sharing not just with real subscribers but with every other customer of that provider pointed at the same carrier, so an address may already be well known to your target before you touch it, and the price is the highest in the market either way.
Questions
Why are mobile proxies harder to block?
Carrier-grade NAT: a mobile network puts thousands of real subscribers behind a single public IP. A site that blocks that address blocks all of them, so blocks are rarer and shorter-lived.
Are mobile proxies worth the price?
For mobile-first platforms, or where residential is measurably failing, often yes. For general scraping it is usually paying a large premium for a property the target does not check.