Why "similar price per GB" is the wrong first question
Someone on r/proxies put it plainly: "I need an alternative residential proxy provider to Data Impulse with somehow similar price/GB. Thanks in advance." Reasonable question. It only breaks down once you notice it assumes every provider bills the same way. Residential proxies are usually billed by bandwidth. ISP proxies are usually billed per IP per month. A per-GB number and a per-IP number aren't measuring the same thing, so comparing them head to head tells you nothing. Find out what you're paying for first: bandwidth consumed, a fixed IP held for a billing period, or a flat account fee with usage caps. Once you know the unit, the price comparison becomes real. Skip that step and you're comparing a taxi fare to a rental car and wondering why the numbers don't line up.
There's a second thing that single number hides: pool size and IP diversity. A cheap price per GB on a small, heavily shared pool can cost more in blocked requests and retries than a slightly higher price on a larger pool. Ask what the pool actually is. Not just what it costs.
Why "which ASN" is a fair question and most people never ask it
Another poster asked a single, specific question with no elaboration: "Which proxy vendor provides residential static ISP in Toronto and is their ASN Rogers or Bell?" Sharper question than most buyers think to ask. An ISP proxy's trust comes from being registered to a real ISP block. If you don't know which ASN it sits in, you know a city name and a promise, not what you actually bought. Two providers can both claim "Toronto" while one routes through a residential-grade ASN and the other through a business or hosting block that just happens to geolocate nearby. Sites that fingerprint by ASN, not just by IP, will treat those two very differently even when the map looks identical.
A provider who can't name the ASN, or the ISP the IP is registered to, has a real gap, not a rounding error. "Residential-grade trust" and "just not a datacenter IP" are different claims.
What "IPQS-verified" actually checks, and what it doesn't
A more recent thread asked for something specific: "Looking for Premium ISP proxies that have verified safe proxies via IPQS results." IP Quality Score and similar fraud-scoring tools check one narrow, useful thing: does this IP currently show up as a known proxy, VPN, or datacenter address on abuse databases, and does it carry a bad reputation from prior abuse. Worth checking. It is not the same as verifying an IP will pass every site's specific anti-bot system, because sites layer browser fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and their own private blocklists on top of whatever a generic fraud score reports. A clean score is a floor, not a guarantee.
Treat a fraud-score check as one input among several, run at the point you plan to use the IP, not as a one-time badge a provider slaps on a listing. Scores drift as IPs get reused or flagged elsewhere. If a provider lets you check IPs yourself, before or after generating them, that beats a marketing claim that everything in the pool is "verified."
What "limited stock" means for a static ISP pool, and why it's not padding
The same thread added a real complaint: "IPRoyal has been good but has limited stock, what alternative platforms are there?" People treat that as a minor inconvenience. For static ISP proxies it's structural. A rotating residential pool absorbs demand because IPs cycle through many users over time. A static ISP proxy is assigned to one customer for the whole billing period, so the pool only grows as fast as the provider can source and verify new IP ranges in a given city or ASN. Stock isn't a number someone forgot to update. It's a real ceiling on how many customers can hold a clean IP in one location at the same time.
When a provider shows stock by region, that's the actual constraint you're buying into, not padding. No visible stock numbers doesn't automatically mean a shortage. But you can't tell "plenty of supply" from "sold out, hoping you don't ask" until you try to check out.
Why subnet requests like "Bart Telus" come up and what's really being asked
A fourth poster asked for something oddly specific: "Please let me know if you have the old subnets or Yk any other company that has subnets for sale in Canada." Read past the specific subnet name and the real ask is the one running through all four threads: which range does this IP actually come from, and is a fresh purchase built the same way as whatever I used before. Buying "subnets" instead of loose IPs is a way of asking for the same ASN, the same registration pattern, the same behavior every time. Not a grab bag that might land anywhere.
Country and city coverage varies enormously provider to provider because it depends on which ISP relationships and IP ranges a given provider has actually secured, not on how big the company is. A provider deep in US ISP ranges may have almost nothing in Canada, and the reverse is just as common. If a specific city or carrier matters to your use case, ask before you buy. Not after the account stops working.
Turning this into a checklist you can run against any provider
Put the four questions from these threads together and you get a short, repeatable evaluation. It works on any provider, BirdProxies included. What unit am I actually billed in, per GB or per IP. Which ASN or ISP is the IP registered to. Is there a way to check a specific IP's fraud or reputation score myself, rather than trusting a blanket claim. Does the provider show real stock numbers for the country or city you need, instead of a generic "available." A provider that answers all four clearly is one you can evaluate honestly. One that only answers the price question is asking you to trust the rest on faith.