ISP or residential? How to pick the right network for the job

If you have ever opened our pricing page and stopped at the first decision, this post is for you.

ISP and residential look similar on a feature list. They both route real traffic, they both support long sessions, they both work with the same credential pattern. The bill at the end of the month, and how the addresses behave, is what makes them feel like different products.

Here is the short framework we give customers when they ask.

What the two networks actually are

A residential route uses an address from a real consumer connection. The pool is large, the addresses change often, and the per-request reputation is whatever the underlying user brought to it. These addresses are sourced ethically through our partners, so the pool stays clean and the addresses behave like the real users behind them.

An ISP route uses a real US residential line on a major US carrier, allocated to you and only you. It is a static address that stays yours for the whole term. The pool is a fixed set of dedicated lines, the address is stable, and the reputation is consistent across long sessions because nothing else is sharing it.

Both feel like real users to the destination. The difference is how predictably they behave over time and what they cost.

When residential is the right call

Reach for residential when the work is bursty and broad. Examples we see all the time:

• Marketplace sweeps that need to land on many countries quickly.
• Discovery jobs where the success of any single request matters less than the success of the run as a whole.
• Continuous monitoring where the breadth of the pool matters more than the precision of any one address.

The right product here is Premium Unlimited. It bills flat, the pool is wide, and the workload can run continuously without per-gigabyte anxiety.

When ISP is the right call

Reach for ISP when the same identity needs to hold still. Examples:

• Account management, where a session must return from the same address it started on, run after run.
• Long-lived sessions that need to stay put for hours without the route shifting underneath them.
• Localized checks where you want the same US vantage point every time, and you care about a specific city or ASN.

The right product here is Static ISP. Each line is a dedicated, single-tenant US address that is yours for the term. The moment an IP is assigned to you it leaves every shared pool, so no one else’s traffic ever touches it. Bandwidth is unmetered and concurrent sessions are unlimited, and it bills at one flat monthly price per IP. You get HTTP/HTTPS and SOCKS5 on the same credentials, with US city and ASN targeting. If a line ever drops, we move you to another equivalent stable US line and update the dashboard, so you keep the same number of working IPs.

Two questions: does each request need to come from the same stable address every time, and would you rather pay a flat rate you can predict or pay only for the bandwidth you use? The answers point at one network or the other.

The middle option

Not every precise job needs a dedicated address. When you need deep targeting across many locations but do not want to commit to your own IPs, Platinum is the pay-as-you-go choice. It bills per gigabyte, runs on ISP-quality residential, and offers targeting that goes deeper than country alone. Think of it as the metered middle ground between the wide flat-rate pool and a set of pinned lines that are yours.

When the answer is “both”

Plenty of teams run more than one network side by side. Discovery runs on Premium Unlimited because the pool is wide and the bandwidth is unmetered. Identity-bound work runs on Static ISP because the destination expects the same address to come back every time. And when a precise job is short enough that a dedicated line would sit mostly idle, Platinum covers it per gigabyte.

The dashboard treats them as one account, so you do not need to plumb separate billing relationships. You assign the route at the job level and forget about it. Workers can mix Premium Unlimited for the breadth pass and Static ISP for the identity pass, with the only difference between them being one configuration value.

Common questions

The two we hear most often:

“Can I run everything on Static ISP if I want a fixed monthly bill?” You can, and some teams do. It works because the address is yours, stable, and unmetered, so there is no per-gigabyte meter to watch no matter how much you push through it. The reason most teams still keep some traffic on Premium Unlimited is breadth: a fixed set of dedicated US lines is exactly that, fixed and US-only, so it will not cover a job that needs many countries or a very wide pool at once.

“Can I run everything on residential if each request can tolerate a changing route?” Sometimes. It works when the destination does not care that the address moves between requests. It does not work when a session has to return from the same address for hours, or when the work is tied to one identity that must not shift.

A starting recommendation

If you are unsure where to start, default to the one that matches your bill shape and your need for a stable identity. A team that wants a flat, predictable bill and the same address every run should start on Static ISP and add Premium Unlimited when breadth becomes the constraint. A team that runs wide, continuous crawls should start on Premium Unlimited and add Static ISP when a job needs to hold one identity in place. Reach for Platinum when you need precise targeting across many locations but do not want to commit to dedicated IPs.

Either way, you can change the answer later. The credentials are the same, the dashboard is the same, and switching costs you ten minutes of configuration, not a migration.