The three proxy classes trade speed for trust, and picking the wrong class is the most common way teams overpay.

Datacenter proxies are IPs registered to hosting companies. They are fast and cheap, but sites can often tell an IP belongs to a cloud provider, so hard targets may challenge or block them regardless of behavior.

Residential proxies route your traffic through consumer ISP connections. They blend in with ordinary visitors, which makes them slower and pricier, and their real value depends on the provider’s pool quality: subnet diversity and how honestly the advertised pool size maps to usable IPs.

Mobile proxies ride carrier networks (3G/4G/5G). Carrier-grade NAT means many users share one external IP, so these IPs carry unusually high trust. They are the most expensive class and the slowest, but for targets that treat mobile traffic leniently they are often the only class that works.

Match the class to the target’s tolerance, not to the price list. The class-by-class comparison at Proxy Compare lines up published pool claims, stated rotation terms and authentication methods side by side, quoting each claim verbatim so the trade-off is visible before purchase.