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Price at a glance
PacketStream price list · as of October 2026
- Residential bandwidth
- $1.00 / GB [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Rotating vs sticky
- Same price
- Minimum purchase
- $50 [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Subscription
- None
- Balance expiry
- Never [VERIFIED 2026-10-17]
- Volume pricing
- Same rate at every volume; contact sales for large purchases
- Search API
- $0.0025 / successful search
- Fetch API
- $0.0025 / fetch returning content
- MCP tool calls
- $0.0025 / successful call
- Reseller minimum
- $500
- Refunds
- Remaining balance, within 24 h of purchase
Bandwidth is metered at PacketStream’s gateway and deducted from a prepaid balance. The official pricing page puts it plainly: “Buy $50 of bandwidth and use it over a year if that is how long it takes. Nothing renews, nothing expires.” The terms of service add that purchased balance “does not expire merely because time passes”. The $1/GB rate has not changed since at least 2021, according to archived copies of the site.
What PacketStream does not have is a price ladder. Most providers sell residential traffic in tiers — Decodo from $4/GB down to $2, Oxylabs $6 down to $2.50, Webshare $3.50 down to $1.40 — so the rate you get depends on how much you commit. PacketStream charges the same $1.00 for the first gigabyte and the thousandth, and there are no per-feature multipliers for targeting or sessions.
What you actually pay
Because of the $50 minimum, your first purchase is never less than $50. After that the maths is linear. The table shows the upfront spend for a given need, assuming you buy exactly what you need above the minimum.
| You need | You pay | Effective $/GB used | Left on balance |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | $50 | $50.00 | 49 GB, never expires |
| 10 GB | $50 | $5.00 | 40 GB, never expires |
| 50 GB | $50 | $1.00 | — |
| 100 GB | $100 | $1.00 | — |
| 500 GB | $500 | $1.00 | — |
| 1 TB | $1,000 | $1.00 | — |
| 5 TB | $5,000 | $1.00 | — |
Because the leftover balance never expires, the effective rate converges on $1.00 for anyone who keeps using proxies: nothing is lost between jobs. Plan-based billing works differently elsewhere — Oxylabs plans reset every month, Decodo plan traffic does not roll over, and SOAX credits expire after 60 days.
For volume pricing above these levels, contact sales (sales@packetstream.io).
Cost per 1,000 pages
Residential proxies are billed by bandwidth, so cost per page depends on page weight. The arithmetic is
KB per page × pages ÷ 1,000,000 × $/GB (decimal units). Page weights are based on the
HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2025: median home
page 2,862 KB on desktop and 2,559 KB on mobile; the HTML document alone about 20–22 KB.
| Page weight | PacketStream $1.00/GB | Evomi Core PAYG $0.99/GB | 2026 median entry $4.00/GB | Bright Data / Apify list $8.00/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 22 KB Bare HTML document (Web Almanac median ~20–22 KB) | $0.02 | $0.02 | $0.09 | $0.18 |
| 100 KB HTML-only fetch with some inline assets | $0.10 | $0.10 | $0.40 | $0.80 |
| 500 KB Browser render with images, fonts and media blocked | $0.50 | $0.50 | $2.00 | $4.00 |
| 2 MB Full browser render (median home page ~2.6–2.9 MB) | $2.00 | $1.98 | $8.00 | $16.00 |
Two things move these numbers more than the provider does. Blocking assets (images, fonts, media) in Playwright or Crawlee is the main lever: a 2 MB full render costs about 20 times a 100 KB HTML-only fetch. Retries add cost on failed requests; at the 2026 market median success rate of 74.43% on protected targets, retries can multiply bandwidth by up to about 1.34× (an upper bound, since failed requests often transfer less).
At 100 KB per page, one million pages costs about $100 in PacketStream bandwidth, against $400 at the median entry rate.
Bandwidth cost calculator
Estimate monthly bandwidth and cost. Change the rate to compare another provider’s quote.
API pricing & SERP costs
The Search API, Fetch API and MCP server cost $0.0025 per successful call — $2.50 per 1,000 — for every request type and option, from the same prepaid balance. Billing rules from the official docs:
- Failed requests are free: validation errors, rate limits, balance errors and upstream failures.
- A successful search that returns zero results is billed, because the search ran.
- For Fetch, every error is free, including the target site’s own errors, timeouts and rate limits.
- Each part of a long page read with
start_indexis a separate, billed fetch. - A batch search (up to 10 items) is billed per successful item.
- Rare exception: a
500 internal_errorcan follow a charge that went through. Your balance is authoritative.
| Service | Per 1,000 | Billing model |
|---|---|---|
| PacketStream Search API | $2.50 | Prepaid, never expires; no subscription; failures free |
| Bright Data SERP API | $1.50 | Pay-as-you-go, pay only for success; 5K free records/month; Scale $499/mo then $1.30 |
| ScraperAPI Hobby | ≈ $12.25 | Subscription; Google = 25 credits |
| Apify Google SERP proxy | $2.50 → $1.70 | Platform plans |
| Oxylabs Web API (Google) | $1.00 → $0.50 | Subscription only, from $30/mo |
PacketStream’s $2.50 per 1,000 is about a fifth of ScraperAPI Hobby’s effective Google rate and matches Apify’s entry SERP price, with no subscription: searches come out of the same never-expiring balance as the proxies, and failed requests are free. For 10,000 searches a month, that is $25 of balance.
Fetch costs the same $0.0025 per page that returns content, with no subscription, clean Markdown output and every error free. If you would rather run your own client, the $1/GB proxies make plain HTML very cheap to collect: 1,000 pages at 100 KB is $0.10 of bandwidth. Full details: PacketStream Search, Fetch & MCP.
Entry prices vs competitors
| Provider | Entry $/GB | Lowest published $/GB | Minimum | Expiry |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PacketStream | $1.00 | $1.00 (no tiers) | $50 | Never |
| Evomi Core | $0.99 PAYG from 15 GB | $0.79 PAYG (1 TB+); $0.49 on the $49/100 GB plan | ~$14.85 | Never (PAYG) |
| Webshare | $3.50 | $1.40 monthly / $0.98 yearly (3 TB) | 1 GB | Monthly plans |
| Rayobyte Premium | $3.50 | $0.70 (1–5 TB) | 1 GB | n/v |
| Decodo | $4.00 PAYG | $2.00 (Enterprise) | $11.25 (3 GB plan) | PAYG 12 months |
| SOAX | $5.00 (Tier-1 country) | from $0.85 (Enterprise) | None | 60 days |
| Oxylabs | $6.00 | $2.50 (1 TB+) | $30/mo | Monthly |
| IPRoyal | $7.35 | $1.84 PAYG / $1.75 sub (10 TB+) | 1 GB | Never |
| Bright Data | $8.00 list | $5.00 list (Scale plan) | None on PAYG | n/v |
n/v = not verified on the official page. Bright Data offers $4/GB for three months with promo code RESIGB50 and matches first deposits up to $500. Rayobyte’s separate “Scale” product is not comparable per GB and is excluded.
PacketStream’s single rate is a quarter of the 2026 median entry price ($4.00/GB) and about half the median at 1 TB ($1.94/GB), and the published rate is the same whether you top up $50 or $5,000. Head-to-heads: vs Evomi, vs Webshare, vs Decodo.
Refunds, trial credits & payment
Refunds
You can request a refund of the remaining balance by contacting support within 24 hours of purchase. Eligibility is subject to applicable law, payment settlement and how much balance remains.
Free trial credits
You can request free trial credits. They are discretionary: a person reviews your use case first.
Payment methods
Credit or debit card (processed by Stripe) and PayPal. Bank transfer is available by approval for larger purchases. All prices are in US dollars.
Reseller pricing
PacketStream also sells to resellers who white-label the network: $1.00/GB wholesale with a $500 minimum purchase, access by approval. The Reseller API creates sub-users (a $0.10 creation fee each), moves balance between them, pulls 90 days of usage and resets keys.
Is it good value?
On price, PacketStream is very good value: a flat $1.00/GB is a quarter of the 2026 median entry price and about half the median at 1 TB ($1.94), with no subscription and nothing expiring. That is why bandwidth price and billing terms are both rated Strong in our ratings.
The same balance also pays for the Search, Fetch and MCP tools, so one top-up covers proxies and agent tooling.