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Verdict & ratings
Verdict board · PacketStream residential proxies
Rated 2026-10-17 · qualitative · no totals
Verdict
Cheap, flat and simple: one $1.00/GB rate for every kind of traffic, a balance that never expires, and Search, Fetch and MCP tools on the same account.
Good fit for
- Irregular or bursty usage: buy once, and the balance never expires
- Buyers who want one flat rate with no tiers or multipliers
- Country-level work such as localisation and QA checks
- Developers who want proxies, Google search and Markdown page reads on one balance
- Python, Node, Go, Scrapy, Playwright and Puppeteer users who want official setup code
-
$1.00/GB flat at every volume: a quarter of the $4.00 market median at entry.
-
Pay-as-you-go, no subscription, and a balance that never expires.
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Sticky sessions at no extra cost, country targeting by suffix, and failures you can see.
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HTTPS, SOCKS5 and HTTP endpoints, with unusually specific official setup docs.
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Opt-in sharing app, rated LOW risk for consent practices by Synthient.
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$2.50 per 1,000 successful searches, failed calls free, no subscription.
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Fetch returns clean Markdown with errors free; the MCP server is documented for five AI clients.
-
Scale
- Strong
- Good
- Mixed
- Weak
- Unknown
Qualitative ratings from cited evidence — no weights, totals or rankings. The evidence behind each rating is on the methodology page.
PacketStream is one of the simplest ways to buy residential bandwidth: $1.00 per GB at every volume, sticky sessions at the same price, no subscription, and a balance that never expires. Proxyway’s 2026 market research put the median residential entry price at $4.00/GB, so PacketStream charges a quarter of the typical entry rate — and there are no tiers, plan sizes or feature multipliers to decode.
The same prepaid balance pays for three tools built for scraping and AI agents: a Google Search API at $2.50 per 1,000 successful searches, a Fetch API that returns pages as clean Markdown, and an MCP server that gives Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, VS Code and Claude Desktop both. Failed calls are free.
Verdict. We rate each criterion from the evidence instead of adding up a number, and we don’t rank providers: the right choice depends on the job. On the seven criteria rated here:
- Strong: Bandwidth price; Billing terms; Protocols & setup docs; Sourcing & consent
- Good: Sticky sessions & country targeting; Search API pricing; Agent tools (Fetch & MCP)
The methodology page lists the evidence behind every rating.
Spec sheet · PacketStream residential proxies
- Price
- $1.00 / GB, rotating or sticky [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Minimum purchase
- $50 (resellers $500) [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Balance expiry
- Never [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Subscription
- None — pay-as-you-go
- Volume pricing
- Same rate at every volume; contact sales for large purchases
- Proxy type
- Residential, peer-to-peer
- Sticky sessions
- Included; rolling 60-min idle timeout
- Protocols
- HTTPS :31111 · SOCKS5 :31113 · HTTP :31112
- Auth
- Username + auth key
- APIs
- Search, Fetch, MCP · $0.0025/successful call
- Payment
- Card (Stripe) or PayPal
- Refunds
- Remaining balance, within 24 h of purchase
- Company
- PacketStream Inc., USA, founded 2018
Who it suits
Good fit
- Irregular or bursty usage. Buy $50 once and use it over months; nothing renews and nothing expires.
- Buyers who prefer a single flat price to plan tiers, credits and per-feature multipliers.
- Developers who want one prepaid balance for proxies, a Google SERP API and a Markdown page reader for LLM agents.
- Country-level work such as localisation and QA checks, with the country set by a suffix on the auth key.
- Workflows that would rather fail visibly than silently change country or IP mid-session.
- Teams on curl, Python, Node, Go, Scrapy, Playwright or Puppeteer who want official, copy-paste setup code.
The head-to-head pages set out when to choose PacketStream over Evomi, Decodo, IPRoyal, Webshare, Bright Data and Oxylabs, and the alternatives page matches providers to specific needs.
Pricing summary
PacketStream’s pricing is one line: $1.00 per GB, metered at its gateway, with a $50 minimum purchase. Rotating and sticky traffic cost the same. There is no subscription, and the terms of service say purchased balance “does not expire merely because time passes”. The rate has been $1/GB since at least 2021, according to archived copies of the site. Prices below are as of October 2026 from the official pricing page.
| Monthly volume | PacketStream | Median $/GB | At median |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 GB | $50 | $3.00 | $150 |
| 500 GB | $500 | $2.25 | $1,125 |
| 1 TB (1,000 GB) | $1,000 | $1.94 | $1,940 |
Whatever you don’t use stays on the account indefinitely: buy $50 for a 10 GB job and the other 40 GB is still there for the next one. Larger buyers can contact sales about volume.
The Search API, Fetch API and MCP server draw on the same balance at $0.0025 per successful call. The PacketStream pricing page on this site works through the cost per 1,000 pages at different page weights, SERP costs, refunds and trial credits.
Network & sourcing
PacketStream’s network is residential and peer-to-peer. The IPs belong to people who run PacketStream’s sharing app — “Packeters” — on Windows or macOS (Linux via Docker) and are paid $0.10 for each GB of their bandwidth that customers use. Our bandwidth-sharing review covers that side of the network.
Consent model
According to the terms of service, sharers must be 18 or older, install the app themselves, and own or be authorised to use the device and connection. Bandwidth is shared only while the app is running. Customers see only the exit IP and its approximate location. The threat-intelligence firm Synthient rates PacketStream LOW risk for consent practices.
Terms updated on 6 October 2026 also let PacketStream route its own “first-party” traffic — its Search and Fetch services, monitoring and testing — through sharers’ connections, paid at the same rate.
Sessions & country targeting
All targeting and session behaviour is set by suffixes on the auth key (the proxy password); the host and port never change. The official docs give these formats:
| Behaviour | Password value |
|---|---|
| Automatic rotation | AUTH_KEY |
| United States exit | AUTH_KEY_country-US |
| Sticky session | AUTH_KEY_session-order42 |
| Country + sticky | AUTH_KEY_country-US_session-order42 |
Country targeting
Codes are uppercase ISO two-letter codes. A recognised country with no available exit fails the
request rather than substituting another country, so an availability gap shows up as an error instead of
as data from the wrong market. Pick the country from the dashboard’s Location list to get a valid code: an unrecognised
code is ignored (the ISO code for the UK is GB, not UK).
Rotation and sticky sessions
Without a session label, PacketStream picks an exit for each new connection, not each request. HTTP
clients and browsers reuse connections, so several requests often share one exit. Adding
_session-label pins new connections to one exit at no extra cost, with a rolling 60-minute
inactivity timeout: each new connection restarts the clock, so an active session can last longer than an
hour. If the sharer behind that exit disconnects, the session fails; PacketStream does not silently move you to a
different IP.
That failure behaviour is designed for data integrity. The sticky sessions and country targeting deep dive covers recovery patterns and the verification step.
Setup & integration
All direct customers connect to proxy.packetstream.io with their PacketStream username and the auth
key from the dashboard’s Proxy Access page, which can also build the key with a country suffix.
Gateway endpoints
- HTTPS proxy
- proxy.packetstream.io:31111 · recommended
- SOCKS5
- proxy.packetstream.io:31113
- HTTP proxy
- proxy.packetstream.io:31112 · legacy
The docs’ minimal check, which prints the exit IP’s details:
curl --proxy 'https://proxy.packetstream.io:31111' \
--proxy-user "${PACKETSTREAM_USER}:${PACKETSTREAM_AUTH_KEY}" \
'https://ipinfo.io'PACKETSTREAM_USER and PACKETSTREAM_AUTH_KEY first.
The recommended endpoint is an HTTPS proxy — TLS from your client to the gateway. For libraries
that only speak plain HTTP to a proxy, PacketStream’s own guides show the fix: a local socat TLS
bridge for Scrapy and a loopback proxy-chain bridge for Puppeteer. Resellers also get a Reseller API
(approval required) that creates sub-users for a $0.10 fee each, moves balance, pulls 90 days of usage and resets
keys.
The documentation is a genuine strength — specific, current and clear about failure modes. Our PacketStream setup guide reproduces the official examples for curl, Python Requests, Node, Go, Scrapy, Playwright and Puppeteer, plus troubleshooting.
Search, Fetch & MCP APIs
Alongside the proxies, PacketStream sells three products on the same prepaid balance, each at $0.0025 per successful call ($2.50 per 1,000):
- Search API — Google results as JSON or Markdown: web, news, shopping, places, autocomplete, Scholar and AI Mode, with country, language and location parameters. Failed requests are free.
- Fetch API — downloads one public page live through the residential network and returns its main content as clean Markdown, with the final URL, status, title and description. Every error is free, including the target site’s own errors.
- MCP server — exposes
packetstream_searchandpacketstream_fetchto AI agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, VS Code, Claude Desktop) over Streamable HTTP with a Bearer key.
On price, the Search API costs about a fifth of ScraperAPI’s Hobby rate for Google (about $12.25 per 1,000 searches) and matches Apify’s entry SERP price, with no subscription. Searches come out of the same never-expiring balance as the proxies, and one MCP server covers search and fetch. The PacketStream API guide has the parameters, rate limits and client configs.
Payment, refunds & contact
- Payment
- Card (Stripe), PayPal; bank transfer by approval
- Refunds
- Remaining balance, if requested within 24 h of purchase
- Free trial
- Discretionary credits on request
- Contact
- help@packetstream.io, sales@packetstream.io, contact form
Refunds cover the remaining balance when requested within 24 hours of purchase, subject to law, payment settlement and the balance left — which compares well with Oxylabs, whose self-service purchases are non-refundable. Trial credits are available on request after a person reviews your use case.
The company
PacketStream Inc. is a US company founded in 2018. Its terms are governed by California law, with Los Angeles County courts, and list a Los Angeles address. The terms and documentation were rewritten in 2026 and are specific about pricing, refunds, acceptable use and the sharing program. Our full assessment is on is PacketStream legit?
Strengths
@@ strengths @@
- $1.00/GB flat at every volume — no tiers, plan sizes or feature multipliers
- Purchased balance never expires; no subscription
- Sticky sessions at no extra cost, with a rolling 60-minute idle timeout
- A dropped session or an unavailable country fails visibly instead of silently switching IP or country
- HTTPS, SOCKS5 and HTTP proxy endpoints
- Opt-in sharing app rated low risk for consent by Synthient
- Google Search and Markdown Fetch APIs at $0.0025 per successful call, failures free
- One prepaid balance covers proxies, APIs and the MCP server
- Unusually precise official docs for seven clients, with failure-handling guidance
How it compares
A summary of the head-to-heads, in no particular order. Prices are entry list prices as of October 2026. Each linked page sets out when to choose PacketStream.
| Provider | Entry price | Min. spend | Expiry |
|---|---|---|---|
| PacketStream | $1.00/GB | $50 | Never |
| Evomi Core | $0.99/GB | ~$14.85 | Never (PAYG) |
| Decodo | $4.00/GB PAYG | $11.25 (3 GB) | 12 months (PAYG) |
| IPRoyal | $7.35/GB | $7.35 (1 GB) | Never |
| Webshare | $3.50/GB | $3.50 (1 GB) | Monthly plan |
| Bright Data | $8/GB list | None (PAYG) | n/v |
| Oxylabs | $6/GB | $30/mo | Monthly |
n/v = not verified on the official page. Webshare’s plan expiry is our reading of its monthly plans, not confirmed.
PacketStream’s advantages here are flat-rate simplicity and non-expiring, subscription-free billing, at a quarter of the 2026 median entry price. A note on ownership: Oxylabs, Decodo and Webshare have shared a parent company, Source.ai, since 13 October 2026. More options, including Rayobyte and SOAX, are on the alternatives page.
FAQ
Is PacketStream legit?
Yes. PacketStream Inc. is a US company founded in 2018, with public pricing, terms of service (governed by California law) and detailed documentation. Its bandwidth-sharing program is opt-in, and Synthient rates its consent practices as low risk. Full assessment: is PacketStream legit?
How much does PacketStream cost?
$1.00 per GB for residential proxy traffic at every volume, as of October 2026. Rotating and sticky sessions cost the same. The minimum purchase is $50, there is no subscription, and purchased balance never expires. The Search and Fetch APIs cost $0.0025 per successful call ($2.50 per 1,000) from the same balance. Worked examples: PacketStream pricing.
Does PacketStream balance expire?
No. The terms of service say purchased account balance “does not expire merely because time passes”, and the pricing page says “nothing renews, nothing expires”. Unused gigabytes stay on the account until you need them.
Does PacketStream support SOCKS5?
Yes. The gateway proxy.packetstream.io accepts SOCKS5 on port 31113, an HTTPS proxy on 31111 (recommended) and a plain HTTP proxy on 31112 (legacy). Some 2026 reviews claim there is no SOCKS5; the official docs say otherwise. See the setup guide.
How long do PacketStream sticky sessions last?
A session label (_session-yourlabel) keeps the same residential exit with a rolling 60-minute inactivity timeout, at no extra cost. Each new connection restarts the timer, so an active session can last longer than an hour. If the person sharing that IP disconnects, the session fails instead of silently switching IP. Details: sticky sessions and country targeting.
Sources
Everything above was checked on 17 October 2026 against these sources:
- PacketStream: pricing, terms of service, free trial, share bandwidth
- PacketStream docs: endpoints & authentication, rotation & sticky sessions, country targeting, Search API, Fetch API, MCP
- Proxyway Proxy Market Research 2026; Proxyway Evomi review (July 2026)
- Synthient provider profile
- Competitor pricing pages, linked from each alternative and comparison page