On an unmetered plan nobody counts your gigabytes. You pay per IP per month, or per period, and heavy traffic does not raise the bill. It is common on dedicated static proxies, where one customer has the address to themselves, and rare on residential networks, where the vendor's own costs scale with traffic.
Unmetered is not unlimited
Something still caps what you can move:
- Port speed. A line limited to 100 Mbit/s cannot carry more than about 32 TB in a 30-day month running flat out, and far less in practice.
- Connections. A limit on concurrent connections or threads caps throughput just as firmly as a data cap.
- Fair use. Terms may let the vendor throttle or suspend traffic they consider abusive, which is worth reading before you plan a heavy job.
Ask for each of these in writing, and test with your real workload during a trial.
When it pays
Unmetered wins when you move a lot of data through a few addresses: headless browsers loading full pages, media-heavy targets, long-running account sessions. Per-GB billing wins when you need many addresses but little traffic through each. Estimate your gigabytes per IP per month, then compare both models at that figure.
On ProxyHive
Dedicated ISP and datacenter IPs have no bandwidth cap. Shared IPs include 1 GB of traffic per IP, with more bought per GB, and residential is billed per GB. Dedicated vs shared proxies compares the plans, and bandwidth billing explains the per-GB side.