Proxy pools: what a pool size tells you, and what you actually get from it

A proxy pool is the set of addresses a provider can send your requests out from. Rotating residential, mobile and some datacenter plans give you a gateway into the pool, and each request or session leaves from one of its addresses. The advertised size, often tens of millions of addresses, counts every address the provider has seen over time; at any moment far fewer are online, and fewer still in the country you need. Judge a pool by what it gives you where you buy, and know that some providers sell a smaller, filtered pool at several times the price.

Answer · The live comparison uses prices checked up to Oct 24, 2026; every figure in the text keeps the date it was checked. Decodo shows its prices + VAT, so every Decodo figure on this page is before VAT.

What a pool is

A static proxy is one address you rent. A pool is the opposite: a rotating plan gives you a single host name and port, the gateway, and the provider picks an address from its pool for each request, or keeps one for a session (what is a backconnect proxy). You pay by the gigabyte, not by the address, because you never hold any one of them (per IP or per GB).

Residential and mobile pools are made of other people’s connections: home internet and phone lines whose owners run an app that shares them (ethically sourced residential proxies). An address is in the pool only while its device is on and connected, so the pool you reach changes from hour to hour.

What the advertised size counts

Providers print pool sizes in the tens of millions. Proxyway, a proxy review site, listed them for its Proxy Market Research 2026, with data collected mostly in March and April 2026. The providers we track, of those it listed:

Proxyway then sent 3.6 million requests through each pool over 21 days and counted the distinct addresses that came back. Its finding: “most participants returned over 1.5M proxies during the three weeks of testing, which is impressive in its own right.” That is a large pool, and still a small share of 30 to 175 million. Its own comment on the advertised numbers: “Residential proxy pools continue to inflate.”

What matters more than the size

• The pool in your country. Proxyway’s country-filtered test “notably rearranged the rest” of its ranking: a pool that is large worldwide can be thin in the U.S. or the U.K. Ask for, or test, the count where you will use it (proxy location accuracy).
• How addresses are shared out. Every customer of a pool draws from the same addresses. A site that blocked an address for one customer has blocked it for the next (proxy IP reputation).
• What filtering you can buy. Targeting a city or a network (ASN) narrows the pool to the addresses that match, and some providers charge for it (ASN targeting, what city and ASN targeting costs).
• How long you can keep an address. A sticky session holds one address from the pool for a set time, until its device goes offline (sticky sessions and rotation).

Count the addresses your gateway gives you

You can run a small version of Proxyway’s test on your own plan. This asks your gateway for 50 connections and counts the different addresses that answer:

for i in $(seq 50); do curl -s -x http://USER:PASS@HOST:PORT https://ipinfo.io/ip; echo; done | grep . | sort -u | wc -l

Put in the user name, password, host and port from your provider’s dashboard, with the country you will use set the way its documentation says. On a plan that rotates on every request, a number close to 50 means you get a fresh address nearly every time; a much smaller one means you keep landing on the same few. If it prints 1, the gateway is holding a sticky session: switch it to rotating and run it again. If it prints 0, no request got through: check the user name, password, host and port. The 50 requests use well under a megabyte of your traffic.

Two pools from one provider

Some providers split their residential network into two products and price them apart. The box at the top of this page prices both at 50 GB, from the providers’ own price lists. In their own words:

• Evomi: “Core Residential is our $0.49/GB pool for everyday targets. Premium runs on a curated pool tuned for heavily protected sites, and adds pool selection, ISP targeting and built-in ad blocking” (Evomi).
• DataImpulse: “Premium residential proxies are high-grade IP addresses assigned by Internet Service Providers to real users. These proxies offer cleaner IP reputations, precise geo-targeting, more stable and faster connections” (DataImpulse). Proxyway describes the same product as “the filtered version of the regular product, prioritizing quality over quantity.”

Neither provider publishes how many addresses are in each pool. Try the cheaper pool on your own targets first: if it works, the premium pool buys you nothing you need.