A flat-rate Los Angeles line vs a per-gigabyte mobile pool
Two ways to buy mobile proxy access look similar on a pricing page and behave nothing alike once the work starts. One is a dedicated line: one carrier SIM in one device in our Los Angeles rack, yours alone, for a flat $5 a day, $28 a week or $65 a month on 4G, or $6, $31 and $75 on 5G. The other is a shared pool: a large set of mobile addresses, many of them other people's phones, billed by the gigabyte you pull through them. This page lays the two side by side so you can pick the one that fits the work instead of the one with the nicer headline.
Side by side
The table below is the short form. Everything under it is the reasoning.
| California Proxies dedicated line | Typical per-gigabyte mobile pool | |
|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Flat: $5/day, $28/week, $65/month on 4G; $6, $31, $75 on 5G; hourly from $2 | By the gigabyte, usually a few dollars each, less in big prepaid bundles |
| Data included | Unlimited, under a fair-use rule written for proxy work | Exactly what you bought; the meter runs on every byte, including retries and page assets |
| Who else is on the address | Only the carrier's own phone subscribers, by carrier design | Other customers of the same pool, plus whoever owns the phone the exit runs on |
| Who else is on the SIM | Nobody. One SIM, one device, one customer | Usually not applicable; the exit is a third party's device or a pooled SIM |
| Address stability | Sticky until the carrier rotates or you ask; timer, link, API and button | Often changes between requests unless you pay for a sticky session, which has a time limit |
| Location | Los Angeles rack, California carrier pool, consistent on every request | City targeting is a request; the pool sends what it has |
| Speed | 4G typically 20–45 Mbps, 5G typically 50+ Mbps, the whole line to yourself | Whatever the exit device and its uplink are doing at that moment |
| Rotation cost | Free and unlimited | Free, but each new address starts a new page load, which costs gigabytes |
| Carrier choice | AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon, chosen at checkout | Mixed; usually not selectable per request |
| Support | Humans by email and Telegram, around the clock | Varies; ticket queues are common |
What a flat rate changes about how you work
When a line costs the same whether you move a hundred megabytes or a hundred gigabytes, you stop thinking about bytes. That sounds small and isn't. Per-gigabyte billing quietly shapes behavior: people block images, skip videos, turn off auto-play, cut retries short and avoid the exact kind of full, realistic page load that makes a session look like a person on a phone in Los Angeles. On a flat line you load the page the way a visitor would, because the page costs nothing extra.
It also changes how you budget. A week of monitoring a set of listings on a dedicated line is $28 on 4G, known in advance, whatever happens to the pages. The same week on a pool depends on how heavy the pages are, how many retries the site forces, how many assets each load pulls in, and how often an address change restarts a session. Teams that have done both will tell you the pool invoice is the one they can't predict.
And it changes what you can run. Headless browsers, full-page screenshots for ad verification, app testing that downloads real builds, long sessions in a social dashboard: all of these are ordinary on a flat line and a cost conversation on a metered one.
What the pool is actually made of
A per-gigabyte mobile pool sells you access to a large number of exits. Some pools are built from SIM farms, many are built from SDKs embedded in consumer apps, where a phone owner has agreed, somewhere in a terms screen, to let traffic pass through their device. Either way, the address you get is not yours. Before your request there was someone else's, after it there will be another, and the reputation attached to that address is the sum of everything that passed through it.
That's fine for broad, one-shot scraping where every request is anonymous and nothing needs to persist. It's awkward for anything with an account, a cart, a login or a session, because the platform sees your activity arrive from an address that has recently done ten other people's work. Sticky sessions help for a while, then expire, and you're back in the pool.
A dedicated line flips that. The public address is shared with real phone subscribers by the carrier, which is the normal state of every mobile address on earth, but the SIM, the device and the line are yours. Nobody else's traffic touches them for as long as you hold the plan.
Location, and the consistency rule
Our line sits in a rack in Los Angeles with a SIM from AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon. Every request reads as California, as Los Angeles or a neighboring SoCal city depending on the geolocation database, and as a mobile carrier. That's consistent across the whole plan: same carrier, same region, same identity, request after request.
A pool lets you ask for a city, and then it sends whatever exits it has that match, or the nearest thing. If you're running work that needs IP, time zone and language to all say California, a pool that drifts between cities, or hands you an address whose owner is on a different carrier every hour, breaks the one rule that matters. The dedicated line doesn't drift. You set your browser to Pacific time and US English, the carrier says Los Angeles, and nothing contradicts anything.
If you do need to work from a different city, moving the plan is free from the dashboard and the remaining time comes along. That's a deliberate move you make, not a surprise.
Where per-gigabyte is the right call
We'd rather you pick correctly than pick us. A metered pool wins when you need thousands of distinct addresses in an hour, when each request is independent and tiny, when the job is a one-off crawl of public pages at scale, or when you need many countries and cities in one run. A single dedicated line can't fan out that wide, and a stack of them is the wrong tool for that job.
A pool also wins for a quick test where the total data is trivial and you'd rather not commit to a day. Although on that point, the hourly block on our line starts at $2 for two hours on 4G, which usually makes the test cheaper on the line anyway.
Where the dedicated line wins
Anything that lives on an account: social profiles, creator and brand pages, marketplace seller tools, ad accounts, app store consoles. The platform sees one carrier address, with sessions that look like one person, from one city, day after day.
Anything heavy: screenshots, video previews, app downloads, long dashboard sessions, parallel headless browsers. The bytes don't cost anything beyond the flat rate.
Anything that needs the carrier to be a specific one. You pick AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon at checkout and it stays that carrier. Pools rarely let you choose per request and never guarantee it across a session.
Anything where predictability matters more than peak scale. One line, one price, and a rotation button for the moments you want a new address.
Doing the math for a normal month
Take a team running account management and ad checks for three LA-based clients. On the dedicated side that's three 4G lines at $65 each per month, or three 5G lines at $75, with no meter. On the pool side the same work tends to move tens of gigabytes a month once real page loads, retries and screenshots are counted, and at a few dollars per gigabyte the invoice lands in the same neighborhood or higher, with the added cost that someone has to keep watching the meter. When the work is session-based, the flat line is simpler and usually cheaper. When the work is a wide anonymous crawl, the pool is the honest choice.
Questions about per-GB pricing
Is unlimited really unlimited on the dedicated line?
For proxy work, yes: browsing, accounts, scraping at a sane pace, screenshots, app testing. The fair-use rule exists to stop bulk file transfer, which a consumer SIM isn't built for. Normal work never gets near it.
Can I get thousands of addresses from one line?
No. One line draws from one carrier's regional pool and rotates on demand, but it's one address at a time. For wide fan-out, a per-gigabyte pool is the right tool.
Does the flat rate change if I use more data?
No. The daily, weekly and monthly prices are fixed. The only thing that changes the price is the tier (4G or 5G) and the plan length.