PacketStream review

Pricing

PacketStream has one proxy price: $1.00 per GB for rotating and sticky traffic alike (as of October 2026, per the pricing page). There are no tiers to work through and no feature multipliers, so the bill is simply gigabytes × $1. Larger buyers can email sales about volume pricing. The $1/GB price has been unchanged since at least 2021.

You prepay, from a $50 minimum purchase ($500 for resellers). There is no subscription, and purchased balance never expires. That suits scraping, which tends to come in bursts: Oxylabs plans expire monthly and SOAX credits expire after 60 days, while a PacketStream balance waits until you need it. You can ask for the remaining balance back within 24 hours of purchase, and PacketStream may grant free trial credits after a person reviews your use case.

The same balance pays for the Search, Fetch and MCP APIs: $0.0025 per successful call ($2.50 per 1,000). Payment is by card (Stripe) or PayPal, with bank transfer by approval for large purchases.

The proxy network

PacketStream runs a residential, peer-to-peer network. Everything goes through one gateway, proxy.packetstream.io, on three ports:

• 31111: HTTPS proxy, recommended. The connection from your code to the gateway is TLS-encrypted.
• 31113: SOCKS5, for clients that need it. (One 2026 review claims there is no SOCKS5; the docs say otherwise.)
• 31112: HTTP proxy, kept for legacy clients.

You authenticate with your username plus an auth key, and you control targeting and sessions with suffixes on that key. The dashboard's Proxy Access page builds the key for you, country suffix included:

# rotating, any country
curl -x https://proxy.packetstream.io:31111 \
  --proxy-user "$PACKETSTREAM_USER:$PACKETSTREAM_AUTH_KEY" https://example.com/

# US exits, and keep the same exit for this session label
curl -x https://proxy.packetstream.io:31111 \
  --proxy-user "$PACKETSTREAM_USER:${PACKETSTREAM_AUTH_KEY}_country-US_session-order42" https://example.com/

Three behaviours to know before you write a line of scraper code:

• Rotation is per connection. PacketStream picks a new exit when your client opens a new connection; a connection your HTTP client keeps alive keeps its exit.
• Sticky sessions (_session-ID) cost the same $1/GB. A session has a rolling 60-minute inactivity timeout and can last longer while active. If the peer behind your session disconnects, requests fail rather than silently switching IP, which is the safer behaviour for logged-in flows.
• Country targeting uses ISO two-letter codes (_country-US). Combine it with a session as _country-US_session-label, country first.

Approved resellers also get an API for creating sub-users ($0.10 each), moving balance, pulling 90 days of usage and resetting keys. PacketStream relaunched its site between late June and late July 2026 with rewritten terms and documentation, so work from the current docs linked below.

Search, Fetch and MCP APIs

PacketStream offers three APIs. All three bill the same $0.0025 per successful call from the proxy balance.

Search API

POST https://api.packetstream.io/v1/search (GET also accepted) returns Google results in seven types: web, news, shopping, places, autocomplete, Scholar and AI Mode. Results come back as JSON or Markdown: up to 10 web results with position, title, URL and snippet, plus rich blocks, with a country parameter for local results. A single request can batch up to 10 queries, and failed requests are free. At $2.50 per 1,000 successful searches it costs about a fifth of ScraperAPI's Google pricing on its $49 entry plan (about $12.25 per 1,000), and it matches the $2.50 per 1,000 Apify charges for its Google SERP proxy on the Starter plan without needing a subscription.

Fetch API

POST /v1/fetch downloads a public page live through the residential network, follows up to five redirects and returns the page's main content as clean Markdown, with the final URL, HTTP status, title and description. max_length defaults to 50,000 characters and goes up to 500,000, and start_index pages through longer documents. You can also choose a country (default US), set a user agent and include links. Every error is free, including target-site errors, timeouts and rate limits. It reads the page as served, without running JavaScript; single-page apps can come back as javascript_required.

MCP server

The hosted server at https://api.packetstream.io/v1/mcp uses HTTP transport with a Bearer key and exposes two tools, packetstream_search and packetstream_fetch. The docs cover Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, VS Code and Claude Desktop. For Claude Code it is one command:

export PACKETSTREAM_API_KEY="YOUR_API_KEY"
claude mcp add --transport http --scope user packetstream https://api.packetstream.io/v1/mcp \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer ${PACKETSTREAM_API_KEY}'

The fetch tool returns 40,000 characters by default, adjustable from 1,000 to 100,000. Compare it with ScrapingBee, Firecrawl and ZenRows in our AI-agent search and fetch guide.

Docs and integrations

PacketStream's documentation is detailed. It covers endpoints and authentication, rotation and sticky sessions, country targeting and troubleshooting, with code for Python, Node (Undici), Go and curl. Dedicated guides walk through Scrapy, Playwright and Puppeteer: the Scrapy guide uses a local socat TLS bridge and the Puppeteer guide a proxy-chain bridge. Our open-source tools guide shows the general pattern for plugging a residential proxy into each framework.

Where the IPs come from

The exits are home connections of people running PacketStream's "Packeter" desktop app (Windows, macOS, or Linux via Docker). They earn $0.10 per GB, cash out weekly via PayPal from $5 (3% fee plus PayPal fees), must be 18+ and authorised to share the device and connection, and share only while the app runs. Customers see only the exit IP and approximate location. Terms updated on 6 October 2026 spell out that sharers' connections also carry PacketStream's own traffic for its Search and Fetch services, monitoring and testing, paid at the same rate.

Synthient rates PacketStream's consent practices LOW risk.

What scraping costs on it

For a DIY scraper, bandwidth is usually the biggest variable cost, so the arithmetic is simple: page size × pages × $/GB. At $1/GB, 1,000 HTML-only fetches of about 100 KB cost about $0.10; 1,000 renders with images, fonts and CSS blocked (about 500 KB) cost about $0.50; and 1,000 full renders at about 2 MB cost about $2.00. The same jobs cost four times as much at the $4/GB market median and eight times as much at Bright Data's $8/GB list price. Because the balance never expires, a $50 top-up is 50 GB to use whenever you need it. Plug your own numbers into the web scraping cost calculator.

The company

PacketStream Inc. is a US company, founded in 2018, whose terms are governed by California law. Its terms of service and documentation are public and were rewritten in 2026. Support is by email and a contact form, which PacketStream says are monitored around the clock.

Where it fits

PacketStream is the first pick in all five of our guides (how we pick):

• Simplest flat bill that never expires in the proxy guide: one $1/GB price for rotating and sticky traffic, no tiers or multipliers, no subscription, and a balance that never expires.
• Google search, fetch and MCP on one prepaid balance in the AI-agent search and fetch guide: $2.50 per 1,000 successful calls with every failed call free, and a hosted MCP server documented for Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, VS Code and Claude Desktop.
• Public pages as clean Markdown, every error free in the scraping API guide: the Fetch API bills only fetches that return content, with the final URL, HTTP status, title and description alongside the Markdown.
• Cheaper residential bandwidth for Apify Actors in the no-code guide: $1/GB flat against the $8/GB list price of Apify's own residential proxy, entered as your own proxy URL in Actors whose input offers proxy configuration.
• Residential proxies with setup guides for Scrapy, Playwright and Puppeteer in the open-source tools guide, with official code for Python, Node, Go and curl.

Strengths