Best Proxies for Lead Generation Scraping in 2026: 5 Providers Priced

Updated 6 November 2026: residential proxy prices read from each provider's public pricing page on this date, with screenshots; business directory responses and page weights measured on this date.

The best proxies for lead generation scraping are rotating residential proxies for collecting public business listings from directories and maps across many cities, and dedicated static ISP proxies for steady, high-volume jobs and for the sales team's own browser sessions. CleanProxies ranks #1 for both: our rotating residential proxies cover 190+ countries with state and city targeting as low as $0.63/GB, with data that never expires, and our US ISP proxies are 100% dedicated IPs on Tier-1 carrier ASNs as low as $0.75/IP with unlimited bandwidth. Both are built as proxies for web scraping, and every plan is on our proxy pricing page: the cheapest pricing in the market.

This guide is for growth teams, agencies and developers who build B2B lead lists from public business data: company names, categories, business phone numbers, websites and ratings from directories and map listings. On 6 November 2026 we tested how five well-known business directories and two map sites answer a plain request from a cloud server, measured how much data a directory page costs to load, modelled what 100,000 records cost in proxy data, and priced the same job on Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo and IPRoyal from their public pricing pages.

TL;DR

• Directories treat cloud traffic differently from normal visitors. From our cloud server on 6 November 2026, 4 of 5 directory search pages and 3 of 3 directory profile pages answered 403 Forbidden on the first plain request. The same pages are built for people browsing from home internet connections, which is the network profile residential and ISP proxies give you.

• Rotating residential for many cities, ISP for volume. Lead lists are local: plumbers in Austin, dentists in Leeds. City-targeted residential IPs return the results a local visitor sees. A fixed list of sources crawled every day runs best on a pool of dedicated ISP IPs with no GB meter.

• Proxy data is the smallest line in a lead budget when you fetch HTML. In our model, 100,000 records from a directory with 15 businesses per page is about 0.32 GB of HTML, or about 5.16 GB with a profile page per business (profile size assumed). Rendering every page in a browser is about 82 GB (page weight assumed), which is where per-GB prices start to matter: one $99 pack of 100 GB with us.

• Stay on public business data and follow each site's rules. Read robots.txt and the terms, prefer official APIs where they exist, collect business contact data rather than personal profiles, and keep request rates polite.

• CleanProxies is the best and cheapest proxy provider for lead generation. Cleanest ISP IPs (0 fraud score), Tier-1 US carrier ASNs, 100Gbps network ports, under 20ms latency on ISP, 99.9% uptime, unlimited bandwidth and threads on ISP, delivery in seconds and 24/7 support. A $4.99 trial lets you run your scraper end to end before you buy.

See pricing · Proxies for web scraping · Rotating residential · US ISP proxies · Free proxy checker

The best proxies for lead generation scraping at a glance

Why lead generation scrapers need proxies

A lead generation scraper does one thing over and over: it opens a directory or map search ("roofers in Denver"), reads 10 to 20 businesses from the results, moves to the next page, and often opens each business profile for the phone number and website. A list of 100,000 businesses means tens of thousands of page loads, all asking for the same kind of page.

Sent from one office IP or one cloud server, that traffic stands out three ways:

1. Volume from one address. Every directory rate-limits per IP. A few hundred searches an hour from a single address will meet slower answers, verification pages or 429 Too Many Requests.

2. Cloud IP ranges. Many sites score traffic from hosting providers (AWS, Google Cloud, Hetzner and so on) as automated before reading a single header. Our test below shows how common that is.

3. Wrong location. Directories and maps rank businesses by distance to the searcher. Searching "plumbers near me" from a server in Virginia returns Virginia, not Austin.

Proxies solve the address and location part: residential and ISP IPs are registered to consumer internet providers, the same networks real visitors use, and a residential pool lets every request leave from the city you are researching. They do not change what you are allowed to collect; that is covered in the compliance section.

What we measured: how directories answer a cloud server

On 6 November 2026 at 01:14 UTC we sent one plain request (curl, a current Chrome user agent, compressed transfer, no cookies, no retries) from our cloud server to the search page for "plumbers" in Austin, Texas on seven sites (five directories, two map sites), then to three business profile pages linked from the one directory that answered. No proxy, no browser. The command was simply:

UA="Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0 Safari/537.36"
curl -s -o /dev/null --compressed -A "$UA" -H "Accept-Language: en-US" \
  -w "%{http_code} %{size_download}\n" "https://www.bbb.org/search?find_country=USA&find_text=plumbers&find_loc=Austin%2C%20TX"

What this tells a lead-gen team:

• 4 of 5 directory search pages refused the first request outright. Not after a burst, not after a pattern: the first request. Sites do not say why they refuse, and one test from one server is not a study, but the request carried nothing unusual except its cloud origin. A scraper deployed on a cloud server with no proxies can fail on day one for sources like these.

• Partial access is the sneaky case. BBB served its search page but refused every profile page from the same IP. A scraper that only checks the first page would look healthy while losing the phone numbers and websites that live on the profiles.

• Map sites answered, but that does not make them open season. Google Maps returned a page, yet Google's Maps Platform terms restrict scraping Maps content. For map data, the Places API is the supported route; use proxies for location-accurate checks of the public results you are allowed to read, such as your own or your clients' listings.

A directory page costs very little data when you fetch HTML: 43.6 KB compressed for 15 businesses. We use these numbers in the cost section below. We did not run these requests through any proxy provider, so we do not publish success rates for competitors or for ourselves, and this test does not show that any proxy gets a given page; test your own sources with the $4.99 trial before you scale.

How we compared

On 6 November 2026 we:

• opened the public residential pricing pages of Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo and IPRoyal without logging in, read plan sizes, per-GB prices, VAT notes, billing periods and expiry rules, and captured the screenshots below;

• reused the ISP prices we read from the same providers' public pages on 5 November 2026 for our SEO rank tracking comparison;

• ran the directory test above and the cost calculator in the cost section;

• read the robots.txt files of the directories we tested.

We did not buy competitor plans or benchmark competitor speeds or success rates, and we do not quote numbers we did not see. CleanProxies network figures are our published specs; delivery times come from our own live orders.

Cost per 100,000 leads: what the proxy data really costs

Proxy cost for lead generation depends on three numbers: how many businesses one listing page shows, whether you also open each profile page, and whether you fetch HTML or render every page in a browser. This short script turns those into gigabytes and dollars. It uses only the Python standard library.

"""Cost per 100,000 lead records on per-GB residential proxies."""
import argparse, math

p = argparse.ArgumentParser()
p.add_argument("--records", type=int, default=100_000)
p.add_argument("--per-page", type=int, default=15, help="records on one listing page")
p.add_argument("--list-kb", type=float, default=44, help="transfer per listing page, KB")
p.add_argument("--detail-kb", type=float, default=0, help="transfer per profile page, KB (0 = not fetched)")
p.add_argument("--retry", type=float, default=0.10, help="share of requests repeated")
p.add_argument("--gb-price", type=float, default=0.99, help="$ per GB residential")
a = p.parse_args()

list_pages = math.ceil(a.records / a.per_page)
detail_pages = a.records if a.detail_kb else 0
requests = math.ceil((list_pages + detail_pages) * (1 + a.retry))
gb = (list_pages * a.list_kb + detail_pages * a.detail_kb) * (1 + a.retry) / 1_000_000
print(f"listing pages   {list_pages:>10,}")
print(f"detail pages    {detail_pages:>10,}")
print(f"requests        {requests:>10,}  (incl. {a.retry:.0%} retries)")
print(f"data            {gb:>10.2f} GB")
print(f"residential     ${gb * a.gb_price:>9.2f}  at ${a.gb_price}/GB")
print(f"cost / 1k leads ${gb * a.gb_price / a.records * 1000:>9.4f}")

We ran it on 6 November 2026 with the BBB numbers we measured (15 businesses and 43.6 KB per listing page, rounded to 44 KB) and 10% of requests repeated:

$ python3 leadcost.py
listing pages        6,667
detail pages             0
requests             7,334  (incl. 10% retries)
data                  0.32 GB
residential     $     0.32  at $0.99/GB
cost / 1k leads $   0.0032

Jobs B and C are the same script with --detail-kb 44 and --list-kb 700 --detail-kb 700. Three jobs, all for 100,000 fetched business records. Only the listing page size and the 15 businesses per page are measured; the profile size, the browser page weight and the 10% retry rate are assumptions you should replace with your own numbers:

What you pay is the pack you buy, and our residential data never expires, so whatever a job does not use stays on your account for the next one. Note also that fetched records are not usable leads: directories list one business under several categories, so the unique count after deduplication is lower, and your cost per usable lead is higher than the per-record figure.

Two lessons. First, fetch HTML whenever the data is in the HTML: job C uses 16 times the data of job B for the same 100,000 records. Second, at browser-rendering volumes the per-GB price decides the bill: job C fits in one $99 CleanProxies pack, while the same volume is $275 + VAT a month at Decodo, the $500 Flexible plan at Oxylabs and about $657 at Bright Data's pay-as-you-go list price.

When the job runs every day, switch the heavy part to static ISP proxies: 100 dedicated ISP IPs cost $149 a month with unlimited bandwidth, so a crawler that renders pages all day never meets a GB meter.

Scorecard: 100,000 browser-rendered leads (job C), priced 6 November 2026

How we ranked

The best proxies for lead generation scraping, ranked

1. CleanProxies: the best proxies for lead generation scraping

Pricing: rotating residential as low as $0.63/GB (100 GB $99, 1,000 GB $840, one-time, never expires), US ISP proxies as low as $0.75/IP (100 IPs $149/month, 1,000 IPs $990/month), ISP /24 subnets from $1.19/IP, mobile as low as $0.79/GB. $4.99 trial.

CleanProxies covers both halves of lead generation. For collecting listings across many cities, our rotating residential proxies give you 50M+ residential IPs in 190+ countries, targeted by country, state or city. Rotate per request to spread searches across the pool, or hold a sticky session for 5, 10, 15, 30 or 60 minutes or 24 hours so a scraper pages through one search and its profile pages from the same IP. Data never expires: buy 100 GB once, use it across this quarter's campaigns.

For daily crawls of fixed sources and for your sales team's own browsing, our US ISP proxies are 100% dedicated static IPs, never shared, registered to Tier-1 US carriers such as Comcast, AT&T, Cox and Frontier. Bandwidth and threads are unlimited, so rendering pages all day adds nothing to the bill. The IPs are the cleanest we can find: 0 fraud score, super clean, which matters because a flagged IP gets verification pages instead of business listings.

Everything runs on 100Gbps network ports with 99.9% uptime, and our ISP proxies answer in under 20ms. Orders are delivered in seconds (6 to 19 seconds from payment to active IPs across 15 live ISP orders), and our support team answers 24/7.

Why it ranks #1

• The cheapest price at every lead-gen volume we priced: $99 once for 100 GB of residential data against $275 + VAT to about $657 elsewhere, and $149 for 100 dedicated ISP IPs against $260 to $275.

• Data never expires, which suits campaign-based lead generation with busy and quiet months.

• City and state targeting on residential, so local searches return local businesses.

• Unlimited bandwidth on ISP for daily crawls and browser-rendered jobs.

Good to know

• Rotating residential and mobile use username and password over HTTP(S) on one gateway; IP whitelist (up to 20 IPv4 addresses) and SOCKS5 are on ISP.

• ISP IPs are fixed per carrier and country with no city choice; for city-by-city searches use the residential pool. AT&T ISP IPs have their own price ladder from $2.00/IP.

• Our web scraping proxies guide covers residential scraping setups in more depth.

Pricing checked 6 November 2026: cleanproxies.com/pricing.

2. Bright Data: big pool, monthly plans

Pricing: residential $8/GB pay-as-you-go list price; monthly plans of $499 (141 GB), $999 (332 GB) and $1,999 (798 GB) at the promo rate shown, with a 50% discount code for 3 months; dedicated ISP $2.75/IP at 100 IPs (checked 5 November).

Bright Data has the largest headline pool (400M+ residential IPs in 195 countries on its page) with zip-code targeting, and it sells ready-made scraper APIs. For lead generation the problem is the price structure: pay-as-you-go lists at $8/GB (about $657 for job C), the promo halves that only for 3 months (about $329), and monthly plans start at $499. The same 82 GB job fits in one $99 pack with us.

Pros

• Very large residential pool with zip-level targeting.

• Scraper APIs for teams that do not want to run their own code.

• Deposit match offer for new accounts.

Cons

• About $657 for job C at the pay-as-you-go list price; the 50% code lasts 3 months.

• Pay-as-you-go list price is $8/GB.

• Dedicated ISP IPs at $2.75 each for 100, with a 100 GB per-IP fair-use cap.

Pricing checked 6 November 2026: residential, ISP (5 November).

3. Oxylabs: credit plans across products

Pricing: monthly plans of $15, $100 and $500, Enterprise from $2,500 (VAT may apply); residential $6/GB (Starter, up to 2 GB), $5/GB (Basic, up to 20 GB), $4/GB (Flexible, up to 125 GB), $2.5/GB from 1K+ GB.

Oxylabs moved to one subscription for all products: the plan's dollars become credits, and the per-GB rate depends on the plan. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle, so lead-gen work that comes in bursts pays for months it does not use. Its standard ISP proxies are shared with up to 3 users, and once an IP passes 50 GB in a month its concurrency drops from 100 to 10 sessions. See our Oxylabs comparison for the full picture.

Pros

• One balance across proxies and scraping APIs.

• Parsed results from its Web Scraper API.

• $5 welcome credit.

Cons

• About 82 GB needs the $500 Flexible plan.

• Credits expire every billing cycle.

• Standard ISP IPs shared with up to 3 users.

Pricing checked 6 November 2026: residential, ISP (5 November).

4. Decodo: monthly residential subscriptions

Pricing: residential $3.75/GB (3 GB) to $2.75/GB (100 GB), + VAT, billed monthly; pay-as-you-go $4/GB; dedicated ISP $2.60/IP at 100 IPs, + VAT (checked 5 November).

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) sells residential data as monthly subscriptions with VAT on top. 100 GB is $275 + VAT every month, against $99 once with us, and the pool is 115M+ IPs by its own page. See our Decodo comparison.

Pros

• Clear plan ladder with targeting included.

• Pay-as-you-go option at $4/GB.

Cons

• Monthly subscriptions with VAT added.

• 100 GB = $275 + VAT per month.

• Dedicated ISP $2.60/IP at 100 IPs, + VAT.

Pricing checked 6 November 2026: residential, ISP (5 November).

5. IPRoyal: small packages, then custom

Pricing: residential $7.00/GB (1 GB), $5.95/GB (2 GB), $5.25/GB (10 GB) on its subscription tab, custom plans from 10 TB; ISP from $2.70/proxy for 30 days (checked 5 November).

IPRoyal's residential traffic does not expire, which suits lead-gen. But its listed packages stop at 10 GB: job C's 82 GB comes to about $431 bought as 10 GB packages at $5.25/GB (our estimate), against one $99 pack of 100 GB with us. See our IPRoyal alternative page.

Pros

• Traffic does not expire.

• Subscription option with 5% off.

Cons

• No listed package between 10 GB and 10 TB.

• $5.25/GB at its largest listed package.

• ISP from $2.70/proxy with no public volume table.

Pricing checked 6 November 2026: residential, ISP (5 November).

ISP, residential or mobile: which proxy for which lead-gen job

Settings that keep lead scrapers healthy

• Rate per host, not per proxy. More IPs do not entitle you to more load on one site. Keep a delay between requests to each host (one to a few seconds is a sane start), cap concurrent requests per host, and back off on 429 with the Retry-After header.

• Sticky for a journey, rotate between journeys. Open a search and its profiles on one sticky session, then move to a new session for the next search. Rotating mid-journey looks stranger than it helps.

• Validate content, not only status codes. A 200 that holds a verification page or zero results is a failure. Check that the page contains the fields you expect (a business name, a phone pattern) before counting it.

• Bounded retries. Retry a failed page two or three times (on a new session if the IP itself is the problem), then log it and move on. Retries are the 10% in the cost script.

• Deduplicate as you go. Directories list the same business under many categories. Key records on a normalized phone number or website domain and skip profiles you already have: it cuts requests and data.

• Fetch HTML first. Render in a browser only the sources that need JavaScript; job C above shows the cost of rendering everything.

A minimal Python example on our rotating residential gateway. Location and session length are set when you generate proxy lines in the dashboard (country, state or city, and rotating or sticky for 5 minutes to 24 hours); the generated username carries those settings, so the script reads one generated line per search journey from a file and keeps credentials out of the code:

import random, time
from email.utils import parsedate_to_datetime
import requests

# proxies.txt: lines generated in the dashboard, sticky, city-targeted, format host:port:user:pass
LINES = [l.strip() for l in open("proxies.txt") if l.strip()]

def session_from(line: str) -> requests.Session:
    host, port, user, password = line.split(":", 3)
    proxy = f"http://{user}:{password}@{host}:{port}"
    s = requests.Session()
    s.proxies = {"http": proxy, "https": proxy}
    return s

def retry_after(value) -> float:
    if not value:
        return 30
    if value.isdigit():
        return int(value)
    try:  # HTTP-date form
        return max(0, parsedate_to_datetime(value).timestamp() - time.time())
    except (TypeError, ValueError):
        return 30

def fetch(s: requests.Session, url: str, must_contain: str, tries: int = 3):
    for attempt in range(tries):
        try:
            r = s.get(url, timeout=30)
        except requests.RequestException:
            time.sleep(2 + attempt * 3)
            continue
        if r.status_code == 429:
            time.sleep(retry_after(r.headers.get("Retry-After")))
            continue
        if r.ok and must_contain in r.text:  # content check, not just a 200
            return r.text
        time.sleep(2 + attempt * 3)
    return None  # give up after `tries`, log the URL and move on

# one sticky line = one search journey (search page, then its profile pages)
s = session_from(random.choice(LINES))
html = fetch(s, "https://example-directory.com/search?q=plumbers&loc=Austin,TX", "result")
time.sleep(random.uniform(1.5, 4.0))  # polite delay per host before the next request

The retries here use the same sticky line; to retry on a new IP, take another line from the file.

For Scrapy, Playwright and Node examples see how to use proxies with Python requests, Playwright and Puppeteer.

Compliance: what to collect and what to leave alone

Lead generation is a legitimate use of public business data, and it stays that way when you keep to a few rules. This is practical guidance, not legal advice.

• Business data, not people, and know where the line is. Company names, categories, addresses, main phone lines, websites and ratings are the core of a B2B list. But business contact details can still be personal data when they identify a person, such as a sole trader's name and number or a named employee's email, and privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA apply even when the data is public. The UK ICO's business-to-business marketing guidance is a clear starting point. Collect only what you need, and skip personal profiles entirely.

• Read robots.txt and the terms. On 6 November 2026, Manta's robots.txt disallowed its search and directory paths (/search, /mb*) for all crawlers, so it is not a source for a scraper at all. Yelp disallows some search paths and offers an API. Google's Maps Platform terms restrict scraping Maps content and offer the Places API instead.

• Prefer official APIs and licensed data where a source offers them. A proxy does not change a site's rules; it gives your permitted traffic a normal network route and the right location.

• No logins, no bypassing. Collect only what any visitor can see without an account; never scrape behind a login, and do not use proxies to get around a block a site has placed on you.

• LinkedIn: no scraping. LinkedIn's User Agreement prohibits scraping. The LinkedIn-safe setup is for people, not bots: one dedicated ISP IP per sales rep for manual work. See our LinkedIn proxies guide and proxies for LinkedIn.

• Outreach laws apply after the scrape. CAN-SPAM, GDPR and similar rules govern how you contact the leads you collect.

How many proxies do you need?

• Residential: you buy data, not IPs; the gateway gives every request or session a new IP from 50M+. Size it in GB with the script above, using your own page weights: in our model, HTML jobs used 0.32 to 5.16 GB per 100,000 records and the browser-rendered job about 82 GB.

• ISP: one dedicated IP can carry a modest, polite request rate to each site. Divide your daily requests per host by a conservative per-IP rate you have tested, add 20% headroom, and start there. Our how many proxies do I need guide has worked examples.

• Sales team: one dedicated ISP IP per person.

What the numbers mean

The data bill for lead generation is small when you scrape HTML and large when you render everything in a browser. That is why the per-GB price and the expiry rule matter more than headline pool sizes: at 82 GB, the difference between providers is $99 once versus $275 + VAT to $657 elsewhere, most of it billed monthly. For daily volume, flat-rate ISP proxies with unlimited bandwidth turn the data bill into a fixed $149 for 100 dedicated IPs.

Which should you pick

For almost every lead generation team, the answer is CleanProxies: rotating residential with city targeting for multi-city listing collection, dedicated ISP proxies with unlimited bandwidth for daily sources and for your reps' browsers, and data that never expires between campaigns. Start with a 5 GB residential pack or a small ISP pool, measure your own pages with the script, and scale on the same account when the numbers hold.

Testing checklist before you scale

1. Run the free proxy checker on your proxy lines: exit IP, country and ASN as expected.

2. For each source, check robots.txt and the terms, and pick an API if one exists.

3. Fetch one listing page and one profile page through the proxy; confirm the fields you need are in the HTML.

4. Measure the page weight (curl -w "%{size_download}") and plug it into the cost script.

5. Run 100 requests at your planned rate; count content-valid pages, not 200s.

6. Check that a sticky session holds the same IP for the length of one search journey.

7. Start with the $4.99 trial: 5 dedicated ISP IPs for 1 hour, or 100 MB of residential or mobile data. Start the trial.

Key stats

• 4 of 5 business directory search pages and 3 of 3 directory profile pages answered 403 to a single plain request from a cloud IP (our test, 6 November 2026).

• A BBB search page held 15 businesses in 43.6 KB of compressed HTML (our test, 6 November 2026).

• 100,000 records: 0.32 GB (listings only), about 5.16 GB (with profiles) or about 82 GB (browser-rendered), from our cost script; the last two use assumed page weights.

• Residential list prices on 6 November 2026: Bright Data $8/GB pay-as-you-go, Oxylabs $6 to $2.5/GB, Decodo $3.75 to $2.75/GB + VAT, IPRoyal $7.00 to $5.25/GB, against CleanProxies as low as $0.63/GB.

• Our ISP orders go from payment to active IPs in 6 to 19 seconds (15 live orders).

Final verdict

CleanProxies is the best proxy provider for lead generation scraping in 2026: city-targeted rotating residential as low as $0.63/GB with data that never expires, 100% dedicated US ISP proxies as low as $0.75/IP with unlimited bandwidth, the cleanest IPs on Tier-1 carrier ASNs, and a $4.99 trial.

• Bright Data: huge pool and scraper APIs, but an $8/GB pay-as-you-go list price (half for 3 months with its code) and monthly plans from $499.

• Oxylabs: one credit balance across products, but credits expire monthly and about 82 GB needs the $500 plan.

• Decodo: clear ladder, but monthly subscriptions with VAT: $275 + VAT for 100 GB.

• IPRoyal: non-expiring traffic, but no listed package between 10 GB and 10 TB.

See proxy pricing · Rotating residential proxies · US ISP proxies · Proxies for web scraping · Compare providers

Prices and policies last checked on 6 November 2026 from each provider's public pages.

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