Which proxy do you actually need? A decision guide by use case
Stop choosing proxies by price or by what a forum said. Match the pool to the target: here is the pick for scraping, price monitoring, sneakers, social accounts, ad verification, SEO and app testing, with the reasoning.
Most wasted proxy money comes from buying the wrong pool for the job. Residential traffic spent on a target that does not check IP type is money down the drain; datacenter traffic thrown at a sneaker site is a fast way to get every IP blocked. This guide goes use case by use case and tells you which Nyxon pool to start with, why, and what to switch to if it does not work.
Web scraping, general
Start with: Residential Budget, $0.20 per GB.
For catalogue sites, directories, news, real-estate listings and most e-commerce, a rotating residential IP with country targeting is enough. Rotate per request, keep your concurrency reasonable, and set realistic headers. The budget pool is shared and country-targeted only, which is exactly what bulk scraping needs.
Switch to premium residential ($1.20 per GB) if you need city or state targeting, or if the target starts challenging the shared pool. Drop down to datacenter ($0.36 per GB) if you test the target from a datacenter IP and it does not care; many APIs and smaller sites do not.
Price monitoring and market research
Start with: Residential Budget for volume, premium residential for accuracy-critical targets.
Retail pricing is often geo-dependent, so you need exits in the right country and sometimes the right city. Amazon, Walmart and the big marketplaces do check IP type and behaviour, so this is residential territory. Keep sessions short and rotate; you are reading pages, not logging in.
Tip: state-level targeting matters for US tax-inclusive pricing and regional availability. Add -state-tx to the username on the premium pool.
Sneakers, ticketing and limited drops
Start with: ISP proxies for the accounts, residential for the checkout traffic.
Drops are a two-part problem. Accounts need a stable identity for weeks, which is what static ISP IPs are for: one IP per account, residential-classified, never changing. The actual drop traffic needs many clean residential exits that have not been hammering the same site all day. Do not use datacenter anywhere near a footwear or ticketing site; they are blocked on sight.
Social media and account management
Start with: Mobile 4G/5G, $1.25 per GB, or ISP for long-lived accounts.
Social platforms are the strictest targets on the internet and they weight IP type heavily. Mobile IPs get the loosest treatment because blocking one blocks thousands of real phones. Use one mobile session per account, hold it sticky (up to 24 hours), and match the platform's mobile app or a mobile browser profile. For accounts that must live on the same IP for months, dedicated ISP ($3 per IP per 30 days) is cheaper than mobile traffic.
Do not rotate residential IPs under a logged-in social account. Every IP change looks like a session hijack.
Ad verification and affiliate compliance
Start with: Premium residential with city targeting, mobile for in-app ads.
You are trying to see exactly what a real user in a specific place sees, so the exit must be genuinely local and genuinely residential. City targeting is the whole point here; the budget pool's country-only targeting is not precise enough. For mobile ad placements, use the mobile pool from the matching country.
SEO and SERP tracking
Start with: Residential Budget with country targeting; premium with city targeting for local SEO.
Search engines rate-limit aggressively per IP and personalise by location. Rotate every request, target the country of the market you track, and keep each IP to a handful of queries. For local pack and "near me" tracking you need city-level exits, so use the premium pool.
Mobile app testing and QA
Start with: Mobile 4G/5G from the carrier country you are testing.
App backends often behave differently on carrier networks versus Wi-Fi, and some features are carrier-gated. A real 4G/5G exit is the only faithful way to test that. For plain geo-testing of a website, residential with city targeting is cheaper and sufficient.
Brand protection and counterfeit monitoring
Start with: Premium residential, rotating, multiple countries.
Marketplaces show cleaner listings to anything that smells like an automated auditor. Residential exits across the countries you sell in, rotating per request, get you the real catalogue. Keep a few sticky sessions for drilling into seller pages.
High-volume, low-sensitivity workloads
Start with: Datacenter, $0.36 per GB, or IPv6 datacenter at $0.10 per GB.
Public APIs, your own infrastructure, load testing, downloading open datasets, checking link health: none of this needs a residential identity. Datacenter is faster, unmetered in concurrency, and the cheapest thing on the menu. IPv6 datacenter is cheaper still if the target is reachable over IPv6, which most large sites are.
The decision in one paragraph
Test the target from a datacenter IP first. If it works, use datacenter. If it does not, use residential: budget for bulk reading, premium for precise geo. If the target is a social network, a mobile app API or something that keeps challenging residential exits, use mobile. If the job is keeping the same identity alive for weeks, use ISP. And whatever you pick, keep one pool per target rather than mixing, so you can see which one is actually earning its keep.
Every Nyxon account gets a free residential trial, top-ups start at $1, and credit never expires, so trying two pools against the same target costs almost nothing. That is a better way to decide than any guide, including this one.