A residential proxy's exit is a real consumer connection: a home broadband line, reached through a device whose owner has agreed to share it, usually through an app or SDK. An ASN lookup names a consumer ISP, and the traffic looks like it comes from an ordinary household, which is the point.
What you get, and what it costs
- Trust. Sites that challenge hosting addresses tend to let consumer addresses through, which suits strict retail, travel and search targets.
- Rotation. Residential networks are nearly always sold as a pool behind a backconnect gateway, with a new exit per request or connection.
- Per-GB pricing. Bandwidth is the vendor's main cost, so you pay per gigabyte rather than per IP. See bandwidth billing.
- Variable speed. Each exit is someone's home connection, so latency and uptime vary from one request to the next.
Ask any vendor how its residential IPs are sourced and whether the device owners consented.
Common confusion
Residential and ISP proxies are both registered to consumer carriers, but they are different products. Residential exits are consumer devices and rotate; ISP proxies are servers with carrier-registered addresses and stay fixed. Choose residential for volume across many addresses, ISP for one address that must stay the same.
On ProxyHive
Residential is a rotating pool billed per GB, from $5.50/GB for one gigabyte, and the traffic never expires. It has no location selection today: if you need a specific country, use a static ISP or datacenter IP. See residential proxies, and what is a residential proxy for the full explainer.