A Dedicated Miami Mobile Line or a Pay-per-Gigabyte Pool?

Most people shopping for mobile proxies end up weighing two very different products that happen to share a name. One is a pool: a large set of mobile addresses, usually sourced from apps on strangers' phones, that you tap into through a gateway and pay for by the gigabyte. The other is what we sell at Florida Proxies: a single SIM in a single device in our Miami rack, yours alone, paid for by time. Both can be the right answer. Here is a straight comparison from a company that only sells one of them.

What you are actually buying

With a pay-per-gigabyte pool you buy traffic. The provider meters every byte that passes through the gateway, and your bill is the sum. The addresses behind the gateway are borrowed from phones whose owners installed an app, often without much idea of what it does, and each address is available only while that phone is online. You do not control which phone you get, how long it stays, or who else is using it at the same time.

With a dedicated line you buy time on a specific piece of hardware. We put a real AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon SIM into a modem, router or Android phone in Miami, and for the hours, days, weeks or months you paid for, nobody else touches it. The address comes straight from the carrier, exactly as it would for a phone in your pocket, and the device is yours to rotate, hold, move to another of our US cities, or run flat out within fair use.

Price: time versus traffic

Our prices are simple because there is nothing to meter. On 4G: $2 for the first two hours, the same for each extra hour up to four, $5 for a day, $28 for a week, $65 for a month. On 5G: $3 for the first two hours, $6 a day, $31 a week, $75 a month. Data is unlimited within fair use on every plan, and a full month costs the same whether you move a few megabytes or run checks all day.

Pool pricing is quoted per gigabyte, and the going rates we see advertised for mobile pools sit somewhere between a few dollars and the mid teens per gigabyte, with the lower end reserved for large prepaid commitments. That sounds small until you measure your work. A session of marketplace checks with images can move hundreds of megabytes an hour. An account manager keeping several social profiles warm will use a gigabyte or two a day without trying. Video and modern web apps are heavier still. At those volumes a month on a pool can cost several times what a dedicated Miami line costs, and the bill is unpredictable because you only find out after the fact.

The flip side is honest too: if your whole month of work is a few short checks adding up to well under a gigabyte, a pool will be cheaper than $65, and you should probably use one, or use our hourly plan, which starts at $2 for two hours and never renews on its own.

Side by side

The table below puts the two products next to each other on the points our Miami customers ask about most. Where a row says it depends, that is because pools vary a great deal from one provider to the next; our column is the same for every line we sell.

Who shares your address

On a dedicated line the only other people on your public address are real carrier subscribers behind the same carrier-grade NAT, which is precisely what makes a mobile address valuable. No other proxy customer is ever routed through your SIM. On a pool the address is shared three ways: with the phone's owner, with every other pool customer the gateway happens to assign to that phone in the same window, and with the carrier's NAT crowd. If one of those other customers does something a platform dislikes, the address carries that history into your session, and you will never know why things went sideways.

Consistency and location

A Miami line says Florida every time: the SIM was activated here, the device sits here, the carrier's tower is here, and the time zone is Eastern. For regional verification, Florida store locators, Spanish-language campaigns aimed at South Florida, or LATAM teams that need a steady US presence on the Miami side, that steadiness is the product. A pool gives you whatever phones are online, and city-level targeting, when offered, is usually a filter on geolocation data rather than a guarantee, and it often costs more per gigabyte.

Where a pool wins

Pools are better at breadth. If you need a thousand different addresses in a thousand different cities in an afternoon, a single line in Miami will not do that for you, and we would not pretend otherwise. Pools also win on very small, bursty workloads where the bill stays under a few dollars, and on jobs that need a country we do not cover. Dedicated lines win on depth: long sessions, account work, anything where the same clean address matters more than the number of addresses.

A simple way to decide

Add up the traffic your work actually moves in a month; your browser's network tab or a day of logs will tell you. Multiply by a realistic per-gigabyte rate from the pools you are considering. If that figure lands above $65, or if you have ever lost a session because an address disappeared under you, a dedicated Florida line is the cheaper and calmer option. If it lands far below and you need many locations, a pool fits. And if you are not sure, $5 buys a day in our Miami rack, activated the moment you pay, with a free move to another of our US cities if Florida turns out not to be the place you needed.

Questions about per-GB pricing