Best Proxies for Apify Users in 2026 (Price Tables)

If you run scrapers on Apify, proxies are the one cost line that surprises people. The Actors themselves are cheap — a Web Scraper run costs pennies in compute — but the bandwidth that carries your requests through residential IPs is billed per gigabyte, and a heavy crawl can burn through gigabytes fast. This guide compares the proxy options that work with Apify: the built-in pool first, then the four external providers worth knowing, with vendor-published residential prices, trial terms, and exact setup notes for each.

One honesty note, stated up front because it governs every number below: all prices are vendor-published list prices retrieved on 2026-09-09, marked with ~ where providers tier by volume. Proxy vendors reprice several times a year, so verify the current figure on the provider’s pricing page before you budget. Nothing here is a speed test or a measured bypass-rate benchmark — we did not run head-to-head blocking experiments, and any post that claims precise tested block rates without showing its methodology is guessing.

Verdict

Most Apify users should never buy external proxies. Apify’s built-in pool — datacenter IPs by default with residential available per run — handles popular targets like Google Maps, Amazon, and business directories at volumes up to hundreds of thousands of pages per month. Start there, and only shop for outside proxies when you hit one of three walls: your target bans datacenter IPs outright (Instagram and LinkedIn at scale), you need IPs in a specific country or city, or your monthly residential bandwidth passes roughly 50 GB and a volume plan elsewhere undercuts Apify’s flat ~$8/GB.

When you do buy, the short list is:

• Bright Data — the largest residential network (70M+ IPs). Best fit when your target runs enterprise bot defenses and budget is secondary.
• Oxylabs — premium network with strong EU/US coverage and responsive support. Best fit for businesses that want a managed relationship rather than self-serve.
• Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) — the value pick. Best fit for small-to-mid workloads where pay-as-you-go residential undercuts the premium vendors.
• IPRoyal — the budget entry. Best fit for side projects and low-volume jobs where the smallest plan must stay under $10–15/month.

Read the table for prices, the middle section for when to skip all of this, and the setup notes for the five-minute wiring in each case.

Proxy Comparison Table: Residential Price per GB, Trial, and Apify Fit

Table data: vendor-published list prices retrieved 2026-09-09. Figures marked ~ vary by plan size, commitment, and region. Always confirm on the provider’s pricing page before budgeting; none of the figures above are measured test results.

Three patterns jump out of the table. First, premium residential bandwidth clusters around $8/GB — Apify, Bright Data, and Oxylabs all land within a dollar of each other at entry level, so the decision between them is about network size and support, not sticker price. Second, the value tier (Decodo, IPRoyal) cuts that roughly in half on committed plans, which only matters once you push real volume — at 1 GB/month the difference is a few dollars. Third, every provider speaks the same protocol (HTTP/S proxy with username/password authentication), which is exactly why all of them plug into Apify’s custom proxy field with no special integration.

For context on the platform these proxies attach to, see the Apify pricing guide and the head-to-head Apify vs Bright Data comparison.

When You Don’t Need External Proxies: Apify’s Pool Suffices

External proxy articles love to sell you bandwidth. Here is the counter-case, because for most readers it is the correct answer.

Apify Proxy is already a real proxy network. It combines datacenter IPs with residential proxies and rotates them automatically per request or per session. Maintained Actors set sensible defaults — session pools, retries, backoff — so a beginner running the Instagram Scraper or the general Web Scraper gets rotation behavior that would take a day to hand-roll, with zero configuration. Browse the scraper library and every listing runs on this pool out of the box.

You can stay on the built-in pool when:

• You scrape under ~50 GB of residential bandwidth per month. Below that, the per-GB savings of a value provider amount to tens of dollars — less than an hour of engineering time spent wiring and monitoring external credentials.
• Your targets are mainstream sites with maintained Actors — Google Maps, Amazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp, job boards. Actor authors tune proxy rotation and headers against exactly these sites, and the built-in pool is what they test with.
• Your targets tolerate datacenter IPs. Most content sites, documentation pages, blogs, news outlets, and smaller e-commerce stores do. Datacenter traffic inside Apify runs is effectively free next to residential rates, so every page you fetch without residential IPs is money kept. The anti-blocking playbook in how to scrape without getting blocked covers session management and rate limits that matter far more than IP ownership at this scale.
• You value zero operational overhead. External proxies mean credential rotation, endpoint monitoring, a second invoice, and debugging a new failure mode (“is the block the target, the Actor, or my proxy sub-account?”). The built-in pool keeps exactly one vendor in the loop.

Buy external proxies when your logs show IP-attributed blocks (HTTP 403/429 waves correlated with specific exit IPs), when you need geo-targeting down to a city or ASN the shared pool cannot promise, or when your finance sheet shows residential bandwidth as your dominant Apify line item for three months running. That last test is the honest one: if proxy spend is not your biggest line, optimizing it is premature.

Setup Notes per Top Pick

Every option below connects through the same Actor input field, so learn the pattern once. In any Actor’s input JSON, proxy behavior lives under proxyConfiguration: either "useApifyProxy": true for the built-in pool, or a proxyUrls array carrying your provider credentials. The full field reference is in the Apify Proxy documentation.

1. Apify Proxy (built-in, the default)

No account, no credentials, no setup. In the Actor input, open the proxy section and enable residential IPs only for the runs that need them — residential bandwidth bills at ~$8/GB while datacenter traffic stays cheap, so per-run control is how you keep costs down. For session stickiness (login flows, multi-page funnels), set a named session pool so consecutive requests reuse the same exit IP. If a run starts getting blocked, the first lever is longer per-session delays and lower concurrency in the Actor input, not new proxies — most blocks at small scale are rate problems, per the blocking guide.

2. Bright Data

Create a residential zone in the Bright Data dashboard, which issues a host:port:username:password quartet (default port 22225 for rotating residential). In the Actor input, switch proxy mode to custom and paste a single URL of the form http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT. Because Bright Data rotates the exit IP per request by default, pair it with Apify session pools when the target requires sticky sessions — otherwise logins and carts will drop mid-run. Budget note: Bright Data meters full page weight including images and scripts, so enable the Actor’s ad-blocking and resource-exclusion options to shrink billable GB. Start from the Apify listing to pick the Actor first, then attach Bright Data only to the runs that prove they need it.

3. Oxylabs

Generate residential proxy credentials under your Oxylabs sub-account; endpoints follow the user:PASS@pr.oxylabs.io:7777 pattern with country targeting encoded as username parameters (e.g. user-cc-US). Paste the constructed URL into the Actor’s custom proxy field exactly like Bright Data. Oxylabs offers onboarding support for scoping a first plan by target and volume, which makes it the friendliest pick for a team buying proxies for the first time. Same metering warning applies: strip images, video, and fonts in the Actor’s blocking options before blaming the per-GB rate.

4. Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)

Create an endpoint in the Decodo dashboard (host gate.decodo.com, rotating port), then use the user:PASS@gate.decodo.com:PORT URL in the Actor input. Decodo’s rotating endpoint changes IP per request; append session parameters to the username when you need stickiness, mirroring the Bright Data pattern. This is the value pick for a reason: on typical Apify volumes (1–20 GB/month) its pay-as-you-go residential rate is the lowest bill of the four externals, and the dashboard exposes live bandwidth usage so the cost example below can be checked against reality mid-month.

5. IPRoyal

Order the smallest pay-as-you-go residential bundle, build the geo.iproyal.com:12321 credential URL from the dashboard, and paste it into the Actor input. IPRoyal traffic never expires, which makes it the only sane choice for sporadic jobs — a quarterly competitive scan should not require a monthly subscription. Expect a smaller IP pool than the premium vendors: fine for low-volume and hobby workloads, and the right moment to upgrade is when you see IP-reuse blocks at concurrency above ~10 parallel requests.

Credential hygiene for all four externals: proxy passwords in Actor inputs are visible to anyone with run access, so store them as encrypted Actor secrets or environment variables rather than pasting them into shared input JSON, and rotate credentials when a team member leaves. Sign up for Apify here if you do not have an account yet — the $5 monthly free credit covers the test runs for every setup above.

Cost Calculator Example: 5,000 Instagram Posts

Let us price a concrete job: extracting 5,000 Instagram posts (caption, likes, timestamp, author) with the Instagram Scraper. Instagram blocks datacenter IPs aggressively, so residential bandwidth is mandatory — this is exactly the workload external proxies exist for.

Step 1 — Estimate bandwidth. A profile/post page fetched with images blocked weighs roughly 60 KB of HTML and API responses (vendor docs and Actor dataset sizes cluster in the 40–80 KB range; we use 60 KB as a planning midpoint, not a measured constant):

5,000 pages × 60 KB ÷ 1,000,000 ≈ 0.3 GB

Step 2 — Multiply by each provider’s residential rate:

Step 3 — Add compute. Actor compute for 5,000 lightweight pages runs roughly 30–60 minutes at 1–2 GB RAM — about $1–2 on any Apify plan, and inside the free tier for a first test. Total job cost lands between $2.50 and $4.50 regardless of provider.

The lesson generalizes: at small scale every provider costs pocket change and the built-in pool wins on simplicity. Scale the same job to 500,000 pages (30 GB) and the table spreads — ~$240 on Apify or Bright Data PAYG versus ~$150 on a Decodo mid-tier plan — which is precisely the volume where switching providers pays for the setup hour. Re-run this three-step math with your own page counts quarterly; proxy pricing drifts and your volumes drift faster.

Related Resources

• Apify pricing guide 2026
• Apify vs Bright Data
• How to scrape without getting blocked
• Browse ready-made scrapers
• Web Scraper Actor · Instagram Scraper Actor