Geonode vs LunaProxy: Which Proxy Provider Wins in 2026?

A comparison article written by one of the companies in the comparison is worth exactly as much as its disclosure, so here is ours in full.

We are Geonode. We sell residential, datacenter, ISP and mobile proxies. LunaProxy is a competitor. Anything we say about them should be read with that in mind, and anything we say about ourselves should be read with more suspicion still.

Which makes the honest opening slightly awkward: we were not able to confirm LunaProxy's current pricing from the vendor's own pages while writing this. Figures circulate in third-party reviews — roughly $0.65 to $0.77 per gigabyte for residential traffic is the range most often cited — but we have a firm rule about not quoting prices we have not seen on the vendor's own site, and we are not going to break it in an article where breaking it would happen to favour us.

So go and check their pricing page directly, and treat any figure you read about them in a third-party comparison, including the range above, as something to confirm at source rather than rely on.

What we can do usefully is three things. Give you the numbers that are verified, from our own published pricing and from IPRoyal's live page as a second independent point of comparison. Explain why the per-gigabyte rate everyone compares is not the number that decides your bill. And set out the checks worth running against any proxy vendor before you send them money — which is the part that would have been the most useful section of this article regardless of what we found.

What LunaProxy Is

A proxy provider in the value segment of the residential market, and it is worth understanding what that segment is before comparing anyone in it.

The Product Category

LunaProxy is positioned as a low-cost, high-volume residential proxy network, with the standard product spread: rotating residential billed by bandwidth, static residential or ISP addresses billed per address, datacenter, and unlimited plans billed by time rather than traffic.

That is the same shape as our own catalogue, IPRoyal's, and most of the market. The category has largely converged on these four products, and the differences between vendors are in pool composition, geographic depth, success rate on hard targets, terms, and support — not in what is being sold.

The Value Segment

Published residential rates across the market currently span roughly $0.65 to $7.00 per gigabyte at entry level. That is close to an elevenfold spread for a product described in near-identical language on every website.

LunaProxy sits at the low end. So do we. The correct reaction to a low headline rate is not enthusiasm — it is the question of what is different, and the honest answers are usually some combination of pool size, geographic depth, how tired the addresses are, support responsiveness, and compliance documentation.

That applies to us as much as to anyone. Our entry rate is $0.79/GB and we would rather you interrogated that than admired it.

The Unlimited Model

One genuine structural difference worth understanding, because both LunaProxy and we offer a version of it.

Most residential proxies bill by bandwidth. Unlimited plans bill by time — a fixed amount per day or per month, whatever you transfer. Ours is $1,800 a month; the model is offered daily by some vendors.

This inverts the economics for heavy users. At $0.79/GB, an unlimited month costs the same as roughly 2.3 TB of metered traffic, so above that volume the unlimited plan is cheaper and below it the metered one is. If you are moving serious bandwidth, work out which side of your own crossover point you sit on — it is the single largest saving available in this market and almost nobody calculates it.

What We Could Not Verify

A short section, because the honest version is short.

The Position

We confirm pricing from the vendor's own pages for every provider we write about. We were not able to do that for LunaProxy in time for publication, so we are not quoting their rates anywhere in this article.

Third-party review sites cite figures in the region of $0.65–$0.77 per gigabyte for residential traffic, with static residential around $3 per IP per week and unlimited plans priced by the day. We have not confirmed any of that at source and we are not presenting it as fact. Their own pricing page is the place to check.

Why We Are Saying So Rather Than Quietly Filling the Gap

Because the alternative is what most comparison articles do: take the numbers from affiliate review sites and present them as researched. Those sites are typically paid on referrals. A competitor quoting a rival's price from a page that earns a commission on sign-ups is not a comparison anyone should trust, and we would rather have a gap in the table than a number we cannot stand behind.

The Useful Lesson Underneath It

Verify pricing at the source before you buy, from any provider including us. Rates in this market change frequently, promotional pricing is displayed as though it were standard, and review sites go stale quickly while continuing to rank.

The broader version of that discipline — what to establish about a vendor before sending them money, given that proxy services are almost always prepaid — has its own section further down, and it is the practical takeaway of this article.

The Verified Numbers

What we can state from source. All figures from the vendors' own live pricing pages at the time of writing, and all subject to change — check before buying.

	Geonode	IPRoyal	LunaProxy
Residential entry	$0.79/GB	$7.00/GB (1 GB)	unverified
Residential at volume	$0.50/GB at 100 GB, $0.27/GB at 1 TB	$1.75/GB from 10 TB	unverified
Datacenter	$0.14/GB, billed by traffic	Per IP	unverified
ISP / static	$1.25/IP	Available	unverified
Unlimited residential	$1,800/month	—	unverified
Free allowance	1 TB for new accounts	—	unverified
Traffic expiry	Standard monthly terms	Does not expire	unverified

Reading the Table

Our entry rate is the lowest of the two verified providers and that is not the interesting column. The interesting column is the last one.

IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic is a genuine structural advantage that we do not match, and it is worth more than the headline rate for a large class of users. Their residential pricing FAQ states the proxies work for as long as you use up the traffic — buy 30 GB, use it across a year, nothing is lost.

Most of this market, including us, works on monthly terms where unused allowance expires at the billing date. For steady monthly usage that is fine and the cheaper rate wins comfortably. For bursty or seasonal usage it is not: 30 GB of non-expiring traffic at $7.00/GB costs $210 in total, while a metered monthly plan sized for your peak week and mostly unused for the other three costs more than that across a year, even at a fraction of the rate.

So the honest recommendation, from a vendor at the cheap end of the table: work out your usage shape before your usage volume. If your consumption is lumpy and annual rather than steady and monthly, a higher rate on non-expiring traffic may genuinely cost you less than we would, and we would rather you knew that than churned in three months.

The datacenter row is where our pricing is unusual. Most of the market bills datacenter proxies per IP; we bill by traffic at $0.14/GB. Neither model is better in the abstract — per-IP wins when you push a lot of data through few addresses, per-GB wins when you need many addresses and move little through each. Divide your monthly gigabytes by the number of distinct addresses you need, and that ratio picks the model.

Why Per-GB Price Is the Wrong Headline

The section that changes the conclusion, and it is the reason a table like the one above is less useful than it looks.

Every comparison in this market ranks providers by dollars per gigabyte, because it is the number on the pricing page. It is not the number that determines what you spend.

The Arithmetic

Two providers, same target.

Provider A: $1.00/GB, succeeds on 50% of requests. Provider B: $2.50/GB, succeeds on 95%.

A looks 60% cheaper. But a failed request consumes paid bandwidth exactly like a successful one — the connection was made, the block page or challenge came back, you were billed. Collecting 1,000 successful pages needs about 2,000 attempts from A and about 1,053 from B.

At 500 KB per page, A costs roughly $1.00 per 1,000 successes and B roughly $1.32. The 60% gap has collapsed to 24%.

Drop A's success rate to 30% and it needs 3,333 attempts, costing $1.67 per 1,000 successes against B's $1.32. The cheaper provider is now the more expensive one, and neither pricing page contained the information that would have told you.

Why Nobody Can Quote You This

Success rate is target-specific. A network that performs superbly against one marketplace may do poorly against another, and both change when a target updates its detection. No provider can honestly tell you their success rate on your workload, ours included, and any that quotes a single figure is quoting one measured against targets they chose.

This is why published benchmarks are directional at best, and why the test described later matters more than every table in this article.

What It Does Not Mean

Price is not irrelevant. Once two providers both work acceptably on your target, the cheaper one is straightforwardly better and you should take it.

The point is the sequence: establish that it works, then compare price. Reversing that order is how people end up migrating three times in six months, and it is the single most common expensive mistake in this market.

Terms That Move the Bill More Than the Rate

Four contract terms that regularly matter more than a difference of a dollar per gigabyte, and none of which appear in comparison tables.

1. Does Unused Traffic Expire?

Covered above and worth repeating because it is the largest of the four. Most subscriptions expire unused gigabytes monthly. IPRoyal states theirs do not.

For lumpy workloads this single term can outweigh a fourfold difference in rate. Establish your usage shape first.

2. Is the Displayed Price Promotional?

Several providers in this market display heavily discounted rates as the default view, sometimes with the regular price shown alongside and sometimes not. Discounts are legitimate; a comparison built from them ranks vendors by who is running the deepest sale this week, which is not a durable property.

Ask two questions explicitly: what does this cost at renewal, and is this rate contractual or promotional. A vendor who answers clearly has told you something useful about how they will treat you later.

3. What Counts as Billable Traffic?

Failed requests, retries, connection overhead, redirects. Most providers bill all of it, which is the direct link back to the success-rate arithmetic above. Some bill only successful requests on certain products. On a difficult target this can move effective costs substantially.

4. What Are the Minimums and the Refund Terms?

Minimum top-up, minimum commitment, whether unused balance is refundable, and what happens if the service does not work for you. Proxy services are prepaid, which means you are extending credit to the vendor, not the other way round.

The One That Is Not About Money

How the network was sourced. Residential proxies route through real consumer connections, and how consent was obtained from the people whose connections those are is a fair question to put to any provider in this market, including us. A vendor who cannot answer it clearly has told you something. For anyone operating under a compliance regime, this is the first question rather than the last.

Questions to Ask Before You Pre-Pay

Proxy services are almost universally prepaid. That makes vendor reliability a financial question as well as a technical one, and it is worth a few minutes before the first payment rather than after.

The Reachability Checks

Does the site load, consistently, over a few days? A single failed load means nothing. A pattern is worth noticing.

Is there a status page, and does it show real history? A status page that has never recorded an incident is either a very good service or a decorative one.

Does support answer before you are a customer? Send a specific technical question — not "do you have UK proxies" but something requiring a real answer, like how sticky sessions behave when an address drops mid-session. The quality and speed of the reply is the best available predictor of what happens when something breaks at two in the morning.

Is there a company behind it? A registered entity, an address, named people. Absence is not proof of anything, and presence is a meaningful signal in a market with real churn.

The Commercial Checks

Start with the smallest possible commitment. Free tier, trial, or minimum top-up. Never begin with an annual plan, whatever the discount — the discount is priced to compensate for the risk you are taking on.

Confirm the refund position in writing before paying, not after.

Check whether traffic expires, in writing.

Check the renewal rate, in writing.

The Test Purchase

Buy the minimum. Run your real workload. Measure. Only then commit to volume.

The discount on a large prepayment is rarely worth the exposure until you have established that the service does what you need on your specific targets — which, as the previous section argued, is something no pricing page can tell you.

This advice costs us money. Our own 1 TB free allowance for new accounts exists precisely so this step is possible without a purchase, and we would rather you used it thoroughly than committed early on a rate.

The Test That Settles It

An afternoon of this beats every comparison article on this subject, this one included.

Step One: Check Whether You Need Residential at All

Before comparing residential providers, run a few hundred requests against your real target through a datacenter proxy. If you are succeeding above roughly 95%, your target does not check address origin and you have just cut your proxy budget by most of an order of magnitude.

An enormous quantity of the web — documentation, public APIs, forums, small and mid-sized sites, most government and academic pages — does not check. Residential is the default purchase in this industry largely because it is the default recommendation.

This step costs almost nothing at $0.14/GB and it is skipped constantly.

Step Two: Set Up Two or Three Candidates in Parallel

Use free tiers and minimum purchases. Same target list, same volume, same concurrency, same time of day — that last one matters more than people expect, because residential pool composition shifts with when real users are online.

Step Three: Record Four Numbers Per Provider

Successful responses, defined as containing the content you actually wanted.
Bandwidth consumed, including failures.
Median and 95th-percentile latency.
Geographic accuracy — spot-check that requests genuinely appear from where you asked.

Step Four: Divide

Bandwidth consumed × price per GB, divided by successful responses. That is your cost per successful request, and it is the only figure that compares providers meaningfully.

The Trap in Counting Successes

Count by checking for content you expect, not by checking for HTTP 200.

The characteristic failure in this field is a plausible page with the wrong contents — a challenge page, a soft block, a regional variant, an empty result set that looks like a legitimately empty result set. A success counter that trusts the status code will report excellent numbers while collecting nothing, and that error survives for a remarkably long time before anyone notices.

When Neither of Us Is Right

Against our own interest, and it covers more readers than it should.

Your target does not check address origin. Test datacenter first. The saving is most of an order of magnitude and a large share of the web genuinely does not care.

You are making a handful of requests. Rate limiting responds to volume and pattern. Fifty requests across a day look like a person. Buying proxies for a small job solves a problem you do not have.

You control the target. Load-testing your own service, monitoring your own endpoints. Route directly and measure reality rather than reality plus a proxy hop.

You need a persistent identity. Account work, anything with a login. Rotating residential is actively wrong — an account appearing from a new city each session looks worse than one that never moved. Static ISP addresses are the product, from us or anyone.

Your usage is lumpy and annual. Non-expiring traffic at a higher rate may cost less in total than our cheaper metered plan. IPRoyal offers that and we do not.

You need enterprise compliance documentation and a named account manager. The providers at the top of the price range are built for that. We are not going to win that comparison and would rather say so.

The problem is not your address. Missing headers, absent cookies, a fingerprint that gives away automation, a request rate no human would produce. All produce blocks that look identical to address-based blocks, and none are fixed by better proxies.

The page is rendered by JavaScript. No proxy turns an empty shell into content. You need a headless browser.

The data is available another way. An official API, a bulk download, a public dataset. Checking takes ten minutes and frequently ends the project before it starts.

You have not read the terms. Automated collection is often contrary to a site's terms of service, and personal data carries obligations regardless of how it was collected. Proxies change what a site can observe; they do not change what you agreed to.

Wrapping Up

We set out to compare two providers and can only responsibly report verified numbers for one of them, so the honest summary is a method rather than a verdict.

On LunaProxy: we could not confirm their pricing at source in time for publication, and we are not going to fill that gap with numbers from affiliate review pages. Check their own pages, confirm the figures there, and start with the smallest commitment available — advice we would give about any prepaid service including ours.

On the comparison people actually want: the per-gigabyte rate is the wrong headline. Failed requests consume paid bandwidth exactly like successful ones, so a low rate against a target where you succeed half the time is not the bargain it appears to be, and at sufficiently poor success rates the ranking genuinely inverts. Nobody can quote you that figure because it depends entirely on what you are fetching. You can measure it in an afternoon.

On the terms: check whether unused traffic expires before you check the rate. IPRoyal's non-expiring traffic at $7.00/GB genuinely beats a cheaper expiring plan — including ours — for anyone whose usage is seasonal rather than steady. That is a real advantage we do not match and it seemed worth saying in an article with our name on it.

And before any of it, spend ten minutes finding out whether you need residential proxies at all. Datacenter at $0.14/GB works on a large share of the web, and testing it first is the highest-return action in this entire process.

We publish among the lowest rates in this market and we are still telling you to test datacenter first, to check expiry terms, to start with a minimum purchase, and to consider a competitor if your usage is lumpy. That is not modesty. A customer who bought the wrong product costs everyone more than the sale was worth.

Geonode vs LunaProxy: Full Comparison