Choosing among four product lines
Billing unit, targeting granularity and fit for dynamic residential, static residential, unlimited residential and datacenter.
The four lines don't differ by "which is better" — they differ by billing unit and whether the IP is fixed. Decide whether your workload is traffic-heavy or connection-heavy, and whether you need an IP that never changes. The rest follows.
At a glance
| Billing unit | Fixed IP | Targeting | Session options | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dynamic residential | GB | No, sticky per session | Country / state / city / ASN | session + time |
| Static residential | IP × 30 days | Yes, for the lease | Country | None; the IP is already fixed |
| Unlimited residential | Ports or account-wide bandwidth × validity period | No | Configurable exit country | Set by the plan |
| Datacenter | IP × 7/30/90 days | Yes, for the lease | Country | None; the IP is already fixed |
Pick by workload shape
Scraping, price comparison, SERP collection → dynamic residential
Small payloads, many requests, frequent IP changes and fine-grained geography. Per-gigabyte pricing is cheapest here because you consume request count, not bandwidth.
Account warming, social media operations, "this account must always use this IP" → static residential
Target sites treat IP changes as a risk signal. Static residential gives you a fixed residential IP for a 30-day lease, with no session expiry to think about.
Large downloads, video streams, sustained high bandwidth → unlimited residential
Priced by day/week/month and bandwidth tier, not metered by gigabyte. If your workload will move hundreds of gigabytes, per-GB pricing gets out of hand.
You don't care about residential attribution, only stability and speed → datacenter
Lowest price and best latency, but the ASN belongs to a hosting provider, which strict anti-bot systems detect more easily. Good for API calls, internal service egress, and scraping where residential attribution isn't required.
How the billing models actually differ
Dynamic residential balance: purchases accumulate into the account's traffic pool. In the current implementation there is no code-level automatic expiry or forfeiture — the balance does not zero out with time.
Dynamic residential quotes: a quote is valid for 5 minutes by default, shortened further if a promotion ends or the product is delisted sooner. An expired quote has to be re-requested.
Static residential lease: fixed at 30 days. The expiry comes from whichever lease the resource is actually issued with; when no explicit lease is returned, it is the issue time plus 30 days.
Datacenter lease: 7 / 30 / 90 days. Renewal extends the existing IP's expiry rather than issuing a new one, so renew to keep an IP — don't release and rebuy.
Unpaid orders: expire after 30 minutes by default and stock is returned. Stripe checkout links are kept for 30 days.
Targeting granularity is not equal
Dynamic residential is the only line with fine-grained targeting, down to the city, or to a specific operator's ASN:
USERNAME-country-US-state-California-city-Los%20Angeles
USERNAME-country-US-asn-7922
Static residential and datacenter are purchased by country only. You buy a specific IP out of a country pool; whichever city it lands in is where it stays, and you cannot change it per request.
Can you mix them
Yes, and it's common. One account can hold balances and resources across several lines, with each proxy sub-account bound to one product. Typical combinations:
- Dynamic residential for discovery and scraping, then static residential for follow-up actions on a hit
- Datacenter for internal services and monitoring, residential for outbound scraping
For how to split and isolate traffic across sub-accounts, see Proxy sub-accounts.