Prepaid traffic
A balance of traffic purchased in advance and consumed as you use it. Usually sold without a subscription, sometimes with an expiry date attached.
Why it costs you money
It removes the risk of paying for an allowance you do not reach, and replaces it with a different question: whether the balance expires, and whether topping up resets the clock on what you already hold. A non-expiring balance you cannot access after cancelling has expired under another name.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Pay as you goBuying bandwidth in top-ups instead of a monthly plan. Cheaper for bursty work, dearer per gigabyte.
- Traffic rolloverWhether gigabytes you paid for but did not use survive into the next billing period. Most providers do not say.
- Minimum commitmentThe smallest spend or term a provider will sell, which decides whether an advertised rate is reachable by you at all.
- Per-GB pricingBilling by the gigabyte you move, the dominant model for residential proxies and the one most comparisons assume.
- Every term we define