Glossary

Residential proxy

The same request, arriving from a home address rather than a server rack.

By Roger Campos · Last updated: September 2026

TL;DR

A residential proxy sends your request out through an IP address that a consumer internet provider assigned to a home connection, instead of one owned by a cloud or hosting company. Sites see what looks like an ordinary household visitor, which can change what they serve: regional prices, local stock, or whether they answer at all.

Start free See the API

Free plan, no credit card. 1,000 credits a month.

How it works

Datacentre vs. residential

Every IP address belongs to a network, and the network's owner is public: anyone can look up whether an address belongs to a cloud provider or to a home broadband ISP. Requests from a cloud server come from a datacentre range. A residential proxy relays your request through a device on a consumer connection, so the site sees the ISP's address.

Sites act on that difference. Some serve prices and stock by region and treat datacentre traffic as having no region. Some put a bot check in front of datacentre ranges they would never show a household. Residential bandwidth is bought by the gigabyte, so it costs far more than a datacentre request.

In practice

When it helps, and when it doesn't

The page answers with a bot check that never clears from a server address.
The page loads but comes back thin: a consent wall, a paywall stub, prices missing.
You need what a household is served — regional pricing, local inventory.
It does not help against a site that blocks every automated visitor, or content behind a login.

Try without it first. Most pages come back complete from a datacentre, and paying for a residential exit on every request is money spent for nothing.

URLpipe

Residential exits in URLpipe

Pass residential: true on any endpoint. It adds 25 credits per page visit — once per visit, not per operation, so a /scrape with four operations pays it once. It is one residential exit, not a rotating pool. Residential results are cached apart from ordinary ones, and when no exit is free the request fails at once and costs nothing.

POST /markdown

{ "url": "https://shop.example.com/product/123", "sync": true, "residential": true }

The free tools and the Playground always use the standard network, so compare the two with an API key. See Residential exits.

Try it

Residential proxy, on a page you choose

Get the rendered HTML of any URL

Paste a link and get the page's HTML after JavaScript has run and redirects have been followed — the DOM a real browser sees, not the empty shell curl returns.

Try it free

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is using a residential proxy legal?

Routing a request through one is legal in most places; what matters is what you fetch and whether you have the right to use it. Ask any provider how its residential addresses are sourced.

What is the difference between a residential and a datacenter proxy?

Who owns the IP address. A datacentre address belongs to a hosting company; a residential one belongs to a consumer ISP. Datacentre traffic is cheaper and faster, and more often treated as automated.

Does URLpipe rotate residential IPs?

No. It is one residential exit, not a rotating pool, and it is off unless you ask for it.

Keep reading

Close your account or delete an organization yourself Headless browser Bot detection Fetch a page from a residential address ScrapingBee alternatives What stops a headless browser in 2026 All of glossary

See it on your own pages.

Free plan, no card. Confirm your email and your API key is live — you'll be making real requests in minutes.

Start free Email the team