Flat-Rate Dedicated Lines or Per-GB Pools: Which Fits a Team

Teams buying proxies in quantity face a structural choice before any question of price: a set of dedicated lines, each a flat monthly figure with its own device and address, or a pool bought by the gigabyte that hands out addresses from a shared crowd on request. Both are legitimate products and both have a place. This page compares them from the point of view of a team or agency running several clients or many accounts, where the questions are separation, predictability and how much administration each model creates.

What each model actually sells

A dedicated line is a physical thing: one carrier SIM in one device in one metro, assigned to one customer for a term. You hold the device's address, you decide when it rotates, and nobody else sends traffic through it. The price is flat per line per term; data is unmetered. A per-GB pool is a right to pull addresses from a large shared set, billed on the bytes you move. Addresses are shared with other customers of the pool over time and sometimes at the same time; you request a sticky session for a few minutes or a new address per request, and the provider decides what you get from where.

For a team the first difference is already visible: with lines, the unit you manage is the line and it maps to a client or a seat; with a pool, the unit you manage is a budget of gigabytes and the mapping to clients has to be done in your own tooling.

Separation between clients

An agency's first duty is that one client's work never touches another's. Dedicated lines give that structurally: client A's accounts exit through client A's line, client B's through client B's, and the two never share a SIM, a device or an address at the same time. A pool gives it only statistically: two clients drawing from the same pool can be handed the same address minutes apart, and the pool's other customers are on those addresses too. For many jobs that is fine; for account work where consistency and non-overlap matter, it is the reason teams buy lines.

Lines also carry their own credentials, so offboarding a staff member is a per-line reset. A pool usually has one set of credentials per account or per sub-user, which is coarser.

Predictability of cost

A line costs the same whether it moves a hundred megabytes or a terabyte in a month: on our list, $64 a month for a 4G line and $74 for a 5G line, with daily and weekly terms for shorter needs. The fleet's monthly cost is the number of lines times the list price, known in advance and the same figure you can put on a client invoice. A per-GB pool costs whatever the month's traffic turns out to be, which is low for light sampling and high for anything involving video, large pages or many accounts. Teams that have been surprised by a pool invoice are usually the ones who moved to lines.

There is no special rate for many lines; the twentieth line is the list price. Predictability is the pitch, not a lower figure.

Side by side

The table puts the two models next to each other on the properties a team cares about.

Address control and geolocation

With a line you choose the carrier and the metro and you know what the address will read as: the state reliably on all carriers, the metro itself most consistently on T-Mobile, a regional hub sometimes on Verizon, and the Boston AT&T line reading as New York. Rotation is yours to trigger and a new address is the same carrier and metro. With a pool you can target a country, state or city and the provider picks an address that matches its database, which may be a home connection, a mobile address or something in between; you cannot hold a particular address beyond the session window.

A team verifying campaigns per metro wants the former. A team sampling prices in two hundred cities wants the latter, and no fleet of lines will do that job.

Administration for a team

Lines are rows in a dashboard, each with a label, credentials, a rotation link, a renewal date and a move button. The administrative model is a spreadsheet of lines against clients, which most teams already keep. Pools are an API key and a dashboard of gigabytes consumed; administration is in your own code or in a profile browser's proxy list, with session strings encoding country and stickiness. Teams with developers find pools easy to automate; teams with account managers find lines easier to hand around.

Support differs too: a line problem is a specific device we can look at; a pool problem is a statistical complaint about addresses you no longer hold.

Using both

Many teams end up with a fleet of lines for their clients' account work and campaign verification, plus a per-GB residential pool for wide, light sampling. That is a sensible split and we sell both: dedicated lines are the main product on this site, and residential and mobile pool data by the gigabyte are available in the same dashboard for jobs that need breadth rather than a fixed line. The question is not which model is better but which part of the team's work each should carry.

Questions about per-GB pricing