One Chicago Line at a Flat Price, or Traffic by the Gigabyte?

If you need a mobile or residential address in Chicago, there are two ways to pay for it. You can buy traffic from a pool and pay for every gigabyte that passes through, or you can rent one dedicated line in our Chicago rack and pay a flat price for the time, with no meter at all. Both are legitimate products and each is the right answer for somebody. This page sets them side by side with our own prices and the kind of per-gigabyte figures that pool sellers publish, so you can do the sum for your own workload before you spend anything.

What each product actually is

A per-gigabyte pool is a large set of addresses, mobile or residential, usually gathered from apps installed on other people's phones and computers, or from carrier arrangements, and sold through one gateway. You point your software at the gateway, ask for a Chicago address, and the pool hands you one for the request or the session. You pay for the bytes. You never know which device you were on, several other customers may have used the same address an hour earlier, and the address can vanish mid-session when the phone it lived on goes to sleep. Pools are built for breadth: many addresses, many cities, little commitment.

A Chicago Proxies line is the opposite shape. It is one real carrier SIM, from AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, inside one modem, router or Android phone that we own and run in our rack in Chicago. For the hours, days, weeks or months you have paid for, that device carries your traffic and nobody else's. The address comes from the carrier's Chicago-area pool, exactly as it would for a phone on the L, and you decide when it changes: it stays for as long as the carrier keeps the session, or you ask for a new one from the dashboard, a rotation link, the API or a timer. Data is unlimited for proxy work, with a fair use rule against bulk file transfer, and the price does not move no matter how much you use.

The prices on each side

Our prices are the simple part. A 4G line is $2 for the first two hours, $5 for a day, $28 for a week and $65 for a month. A 5G line is $3 for two hours, $6 a day, $31 a week and $75 a month. Hourly purchases never renew on their own, and the hours you have paid count toward the day plan if you decide to keep the line. Whether you move one megabyte or three hundred gigabytes in that month, the number on the invoice is the same.

Per-gigabyte pricing for mobile and residential pools is harder to state because every seller has its own tiers, but the published figures tend to fall roughly between ten and twenty-five dollars per gigabyte for mobile traffic, with residential pools somewhat lower and small starter packs toward the top of the range. We use those two ends, ten and twenty-five dollars, in the arithmetic below. Your seller's exact rate will differ; the shape of the comparison will not.

The arithmetic

Take the monthly 4G line at $65. At twenty-five dollars a gigabyte, the same money buys a little over two and a half gigabytes of metered mobile traffic. At ten dollars a gigabyte it buys six and a half. So the point where the flat line becomes cheaper than the pool is somewhere between two and a half and six and a half gigabytes a month, depending on which rate you are paying. Past that point every extra gigabyte on the dedicated line costs nothing more, while every extra gigabyte in the pool costs the full rate again.

Now the weekly line at $28. Twenty-five dollars a gigabyte makes that about one gigabyte of pool traffic; ten dollars makes it just under three. And the daily line at $5 is the equivalent of about a fifth of a gigabyte at the high rate or half a gigabyte at the low one. The pattern is the same at every term: if you move less than a handful of gigabytes in the period, the pool can be cheaper; if you move more, the dedicated line is cheaper and the gap widens with every gigabyte.

The 5G line shifts the lines slightly. At $75 a month the break-even sits between three and seven and a half gigabytes. In exchange you get speeds of 50 Mbps and above on a good tower instead of the 20 to 45 Mbps typical of 4G, which matters only if your work is bandwidth-bound; most account and verification work is not.

Side by side

The table below shows what our flat prices buy at the two ends of the published per-gigabyte range. The gigabyte figures are the amount of metered mobile traffic the same dollars would buy from a pool; they are rounded to the nearest tenth and they are a guide, not a quote from any particular seller.

What the price does not show

Money is only the first difference. The second is who else was on the address. In a pool, the Chicago address you receive has been used by other customers of the same pool, for whatever they were doing, and will be used by others after you. On a dedicated line the SIM is yours alone from the day you start, so the only history the address carries is the carrier's own subscribers and your own work. For anything where an account must be seen coming from the same place over and over, that is the whole game.

The third difference is control of change. A pool decides when your address changes, and the answer is often mid-session when the underlying device drops. Our line changes only when the carrier resets a session, which is rare and which we are honest about on each carrier page, or when you ask. You can hold an address for a day of work and then rotate on your way out, or set a timer so the line turns over every twenty minutes. Nobody else's traffic can trigger a change on your device because nobody else's traffic is on it.

The fourth is predictability. A per-gigabyte bill rises with every page you load, every image a browser pulls and every retry a script makes; teams that run antidetect browsers through a pool often find that the images and scripts on modern pages eat the budget long before the work is done. A flat line is a fixed cost you can put in a spreadsheet in January and forget. That is also why we are relaxed about data: the fair use rule is there to keep the consumer SIM alive, not to meter you.

When the pool is the better buy

We sell dedicated lines, so you should treat our view with that in mind, but there are honest cases for the pool. If you need addresses in dozens of cities at once, a pool is the only practical way to get them; our line gives you Chicago, and a free move to one of our other US cities, not fifty cities at once. If each request must come from a different address and you make thousands of requests an hour, a pool's breadth beats one line rotating as fast as a modem can re-attach. And if your total traffic is well under a couple of gigabytes a month and you need it for one afternoon, the metered price for that small amount can come in under even our two-hour plan.

Everything else, which in our experience is most account work, local price and listing checks, ad and storefront verification from a Chicago address, social media management, testing and research, is cheaper and steadier on a line of your own. The honest test is to add up last month's traffic, multiply it by your seller's rate, and put it next to $65. Then weigh the shared-history and mid-session-change questions, which no rate card captures.

Trying it without committing

The cheapest way to settle the question is the hourly plan: $2 buys two hours on a 4G Chicago line, activated the moment you pay, and if you keep it running the hours count toward a day. Run your real workload through it, watch the address and the speed in the dashboard, and compare the result with what you get from your pool. If the line does the job, upgrade to a week or a month and the meter stops mattering. If it does not, you are out the price of a coffee in the Loop.

Questions about per-GB pricing