Residential proxies for AI agents — pay-per-use, no monthly minimum
TL;DRResidential proxies are exit IPs assigned to real consumer ISPs, not datacenters. Most consumer-facing websites and login flows now block datacenter ranges. AI agents that need to interact with these sites buy residential exits. Agent402 Stock provides 200+ regions of sticky residential sessions at $0.30 per gigabyte, settled in USDC via x402, with no monthly commitment and no contract.
What a residential proxy actually is
A residential proxy routes the agent's traffic through an IP address that belongs to a real consumer broadband subscriber — Comcast, AT&T, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom. From the target website's perspective the request looks like it came from a normal household. Datacenter IPs (AWS, GCP, Hetzner) are easily identified by ASN and rejected at the WAF.
Pools are built by either compensating consumers to share their bandwidth (Bright Data, IPRoyal model) or by contracting with ISPs directly (Decodo). Agent402 Stock aggregates from all three.
Why pay-per-use beats subscription pools
Bright Data, Smartproxy, and Oxylabs all sell residential proxies on a monthly contract — typical entry tier is $300-500 per month with a fixed bandwidth cap. That economics works for human-led teams running scrapers 24/7. It does not work for an agent that runs once a day and needs five megabytes of traffic.
Pay-per-GB at $0.30 lets an agent budget proxy spend the same way it budgets LLM tokens. A typical signup flow uses 1-2 MB, so the proxy cost per task lands around $0.0003-$0.0006. Twenty thousand registrations cost about $6 — cheaper than the monthly minimum on every traditional vendor.
Sticky vs rotating
Agent402 Stock sessions are sticky by default. The same exit IP is held for the duration of the session token (typically up to 30 minutes), which is what login and signup flows need — the IP must stay constant across the OTP, captcha, and final form submission.
Rotating IPs are available for raw scraping use cases via the rotate parameter. Each request gets a fresh exit, useful when the target rate-limits per IP.
Geo, ASN, and carrier targeting
Targeting is done with HTTP headers — X-Country, X-City, X-ASN. The pool returns the closest match and the response includes the actual exit metadata so the agent can verify. If the agent needs an SMS that matches the proxy's country, use the Identity Bundle endpoint instead — the four resources come pre-coordinated.
Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
Residential pools are not a magic bypass. Modern WAFs combine IP reputation with browser fingerprint, TLS JA3, and behavioural timing. A residential proxy in front of a headless Chromium with default fingerprint is still trivially blocked. Pair the proxy with the Stealth Browser endpoint, which ships pre-configured fingerprint randomisation and CDP-level controls.
Frequently asked
Do you charge for failed requests?
Bandwidth is metered on the bytes that traversed the pool, regardless of HTTP status. A 503 from the target still consumes bytes. We bill at $0.30 per actual GB transferred and the meter is auditable from the response headers.
Can I get a specific country and city?
Yes. Set X-Country and X-City headers when you call /v1/proxy/session. We support 200+ regions across NA, EU, APAC, and LATAM. ASN-pinned exits are available in the US and UK.
What happens if the IP gets blocked mid-session?
The session URL returns an error and the agent calls /v1/proxy/session again to get a fresh exit. There is no penalty fee — you only pay for the bytes you used on the failing exit.