IPRoyal vs DataImpulse: Pay-As-You-Go Residential Proxies Compared (2026)

At 50GB, IPRoyal's published residential rate is $4.90 per gigabyte. DataImpulse's is $1. Both sell residential IPs metered by the gigabyte with no monthly contract and no sales call, which puts them in front of the same buyer: a data team whose crawl volume spikes for two weeks and then goes quiet, and whose finance function has declined to sign an annual proxy commitment.

Proxyway reviews both vendors, but separately. Neither review answers the question a burst buyer actually has, which is what the same workload costs on each network and how each one behaves when concurrency goes up. This is that comparison, with every price and limit read from the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-27.

The expiry question, answered up front

The usual framing of this matchup is that one vendor lets unused traffic expire and the other does not. On the evidence available today, that framing is wrong.

IPRoyal's residential documentation states: "Once you purchase your residential proxy traffic - it's yours forever. It never expires, so you can use it whenever you want." DataImpulse's residential page says "Traffic never expires" and, separately, "Unused GBs roll over." Both claims were on the vendors' own sites when we read them on 2026-07-27.

So expiry is not the tiebreaker. Both are safe places to park traffic you will not consume this month, which is the point of buying by the gigabyte. The decision falls back on price shape, targeting surcharges and concurrency, where the two do diverge.

What a gigabyte actually costs

Headline rates on proxy pricing pages are almost always the deepest bulk tier, and both vendors quote that way. The gap between headline and entry price is where budgets go wrong.

DataImpulse lists residential at $1/GB with a $5 entry purchase covering 5GB, falling to $0.80/GB above 1TB. Datacenter is $0.50/GB and mobile $2/GB at the intro tier, with a separate premium residential pool at $5/GB. Its documentation adds that "The minimum top-up for plans is $50," so the $5 figure is an entry point rather than the ongoing floor.

IPRoyal advertises residential "from $1.75/GB" on its pricing page. Its residential product page, on the same day, shows a tier table of $7.00/GB at 1GB, $5.95/GB at 2GB, $5.25/GB at 10GB and $4.90/GB at 50GB, with a 5% subscription discount available. We could not find the volume at which $1.75/GB applies on any public page, so treat it as a bulk rate with an unpublished threshold and get it in writing before you plan around it.

A team buying 50GB is choosing between $4.90/GB and $1/GB on published numbers. That is not a rounding error, and it is the strongest argument anyone has for DataImpulse. The wider mechanics of per-gigabyte billing, including why the metered model persists at all, are covered in our guide to proxy pricing models and in what comes after per-GB pricing.

Where the rate gap closes

DataImpulse's advantage narrows the moment you need targeting below country level.

Its documentation is explicit that country targeting via the cr parameter is included, while state, city, ASN and ZIP targeting are each "billed at double rate." Residential traffic targeted to a US city therefore bills at roughly $2/GB rather than $1/GB. That is still under IPRoyal's published tiers, but the gap goes from five-fold to about two-fold, and any workload that is mostly city or ASN targeted should be budgeted at the doubled rate from the start.

IPRoyal does not appear to surcharge geography the same way. Its documentation lists country, state, city, region and latitude/longitude radius targeting as parameters on the endpoint. It does gate one thing: ISP targeting "requires verification + $1,000+ spending," which is a spend threshold rather than a per-gigabyte multiplier.

Which of these matters depends on what you are collecting. Country-level rotation is fine for most price monitoring; city and ASN precision is table stakes for local search results and regional retail inventory. Our guide to matching proxy type to target walks through where that precision earns its surcharge.

Pool size and what is actually in it

Advertised pool sizes are the least reliable numbers in this market, and both vendors publish generous ones.

IPRoyal's residential page claims "64M+ IPs in 195+ countries," with a US figure of 3,450,886. DataImpulse claims "90M+ Residential IPs" across 195+ countries. Neither figure is independently audited.

Third-party testing suggests the gap between advertised and reachable is large for at least one of them. Proxyway's April 2025 review of DataImpulse reported observing just over 705,000 unique IPs globally during testing, 311,766 of them in the US, against the 90M advertised. Proxyway's IPRoyal review, from the same test cycle, described the pool as "among the smallest" of the providers it covered and cited a 32M advertised figure, lower than the 64M+ IPRoyal publishes today. Those reviews are a snapshot from over a year ago and both vendors have had time to grow, so read them as directional rather than current.

Two things follow. First, unique-IP counts observed in a bounded test are not the same as pool size, so neither number is proof of anything on its own. Second, where residential IPs come from is a live question for both vendors and for the category, which we cover in residential proxy IP sourcing and in the scrutiny the sourcing model is now under. Neither IPRoyal nor DataImpulse publishes an independent sourcing audit.

Concurrency and behaviour under load

DataImpulse's documentation states plainly: "Each plan has a limit of 2000 threads. A thread represents an active connection to a proxy." That is a generous ceiling for most crawls and a hard wall for a fleet that fans out across thousands of workers. It is also the kind of limit you find during a burst rather than during evaluation, which is what makes it worth checking before the invoice rather than after.

IPRoyal advertises "Unlimited simultaneous sessions - No limits and restrictions - use as many connections and scale your operations as needed." Unlimited in a marketing bullet is not the same as unlimited in practice, since upstream targets and gateway capacity impose their own ceilings, but there is no published number to design around.

Raw concurrency is only half the story. Both vendors, by third-party account, degrade on the sites people actually care about. Proxyway's April 2025 tests put IPRoyal at 99.56% success on its synthetic global gateway but 74.63% average success against popular targets, and noted it "struggled with popular targets." The same cycle put DataImpulse at 99.51% on the regular pool and 99.66% on premium, while observing that "even the premium pool failed every fourth Google and every third Instagram request." A synthetic success rate near 100% alongside a real-target rate in the seventies is the normal shape of these results, not an anomaly, and it is why we wrote a guide to reading scraping benchmarks.

The practical read: neither of these is the network you point at a hard target and walk away from. Both are IP supply for a stack you already own, which means your own retry logic, backoff and anti-bot handling do the heavy lifting. Our large-scale crawl architecture guide covers how that responsibility gets split.

Sessions

IPRoyal's sticky session lifetime runs from one second to a documented maximum of seven days, set per request, alongside a randomize mode that assigns a fresh IP per request. DataImpulse supports rotating sessions on ports 823 (HTTP/HTTPS) and 824 (SOCKS5), and sticky sessions on ports 10000 to 20000 with an interval of one to 120 minutes, defaulting to 30.

Seven days versus two hours sounds like a rout, and for a narrow set of workloads it is. Anything that holds an authenticated session, a shopping cart or a multi-step form across a long window benefits from the longer ceiling. For ordinary crawling, where a session lasts as long as one page tree, both ceilings are irrelevant and the two are equivalent. Both support HTTP(S) and SOCKS5.

Product menu beyond raw IPs

IPRoyal sells more than proxies. Its Web Unblocker is priced at $1.00 per 1,000 requests at the entry tier, falling to $0.70 per 1,000 at 100,000 requests, and is marketed as handling "geo-restrictions, CAPTCHAs, Cloudflare protection, and other anti-bot systems" with automatic retries. IPRoyal also lists ISP proxies from $1.80 per proxy, datacenter from $1.39 per proxy, and mobile from $117/month, plus a YouTube-focused video scraper API.

DataImpulse sells IPs. Residential, datacenter, mobile and a premium residential pool, with no rendering layer and no unblocking product of its own. If your stack already includes a headless browser fleet and a retry queue, that is a feature rather than a gap, and you are not paying for machinery you will not use.

The choice between renting IPs and renting an unblocking service is its own decision, worth making before you pick a vendor: see web unblocker vs scraping API. One thing to weigh is that request-priced unblocking and gigabyte-priced proxies fail differently under load. A per-request price is predictable per page; a per-gigabyte price is not, because a heavy page can cost multiples of a light one.

Head to head

Every price and limit in this table comes from the vendor's own pages or documentation as read on 2026-07-27, except the Proxyway scores, which are that publication's own. Proxy pricing moves; check both before you commit.

Pick IPRoyal when

Your workload needs long-lived sticky sessions, or you expect concurrency high enough that a 2,000-thread ceiling is a design constraint rather than trivia. Or you want one vendor covering residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile plus an unblocking API, and you are willing to pay a materially higher per-gigabyte rate for that consolidation. Its non-expiring traffic is real, but it is not exclusive, so do not let that alone carry the decision.

Pick DataImpulse when

The per-gigabyte rate is the binding constraint, your targeting stays at country level, and you already run your own browser fleet and retry logic. At $1/GB against IPRoyal's published tiers, DataImpulse is the cheaper way to buy raw residential capacity for a burst, and the traffic keeps just as well between bursts. Model the doubled rate if your targeting drops to city or ASN.

Who each is wrong for

IPRoyal is the wrong buy for a cost-sensitive team collecting country-level data in bursts. The published tiers are several times DataImpulse's rate, the $1.75/GB headline has no published threshold, and the extra product surface goes unused if you already own your stack.

DataImpulse is the wrong buy for anyone whose crawl fans out past 2,000 concurrent connections, whose sessions must survive longer than two hours, or whose targeting is mostly city or ASN level, where the doubled rate erases most of the price advantage. It is also wrong if you want a managed unblocking layer, because it does not sell one.

Both are the wrong buy for a team whose targets are genuinely defended. The third-party numbers on popular targets are not good for either vendor, and if Google, Instagram or a Cloudflare-fronted retailer is your primary target, the honest comparison is not this one. Look instead at Bright Data and Oxylabs, which we cover in a separate head-to-head, and accept the contract and the price that come with them. If you would rather hedge than commit, running two networks with automatic fallback is a real option, covered in our multi-vendor failover guide. The rest of the field is in the proxy networks category.