The Home-Internet Supply Chain Behind AI and Proxies

Home › Guides › The Home-Internet Supply Chain

✓ data: Chrome UX Report via BigQuery (August 2025 and August 2026 releases, queried 8 October 2026), CC BY 4.0; company web pages captured 2 and 8 October 2026 (saved copies with SHA-256 hashes) · published 8 October 2026 · method · caveats · download the data

Residential proxies and some AI data companies route traffic through ordinary home internet connections, and many of those connections come from apps that pay people to share their bandwidth. We put three public sources side by side to see what that supply chain looks like in October 2026: how popular the apps’ dashboards are in Chrome, country by country; what households are told they earn per gigabyte compared with what proxy buyers now pay; and what Grass, which says it uses home connections to gather AI training data, says it has paid out.

Read this first. Chrome UX Report ranks measure how many Chrome users visit a website. They come in buckets (top 1,000, top 5,000, top 10,000 and so on), and a visit to an earnings dashboard is not the same as an app install. Prices are published list prices. Payout and network figures are the companies’ own statements, which we quote and haven’t audited. Apart from the links the companies state themselves (quoted below), we have no information about who buys bandwidth from whom.

countries where Honeygain’s dashboard is a top-5,000 site 42lowest residential list price we found $0.0095/GBstated payout to users $0.10/GBGrass: USDC paid per user, on average about 48¢

Headline numbers

1. Honeygain’s earnings dashboard was one of the 5,000 most-visited websites in 42 countries in August 2026, and in the top 10,000 in 80. None of the 42 is a high-income country: 15 are low-income, 19 lower-middle-income and 8 upper-middle-income (World Bank groups), and 30 are in sub-Saharan Africa. In the US and UK the same dashboard was in the top 100,000 bucket, so outside the top 50,000.
2. That reach narrowed over the year. In August 2025 the dashboard was a top-5,000 site in 55 countries, including the top 1,000 in Rwanda and Burundi. Grass’s app (app.grass.io) went from the top 5,000 in 14 countries to 1 (Togo), and Pawns.app from 6 to 0. Worldwide, app.grass.io moved from the top-50,000 bucket in August 2025 to the top-100,000 bucket in August 2026.
3. Proxy sellers’ own websites rank far lower. Of the six proxy sellers we checked, only IPRoyal reached the top 5,000 anywhere (in Laos). Bright Data, Oxylabs, Decodo and Webshare were no higher than the top 50,000 in any country.
4. The lowest residential list price we found is below what two apps say they pay households. Rayobyte’s new Scale Residential plans list $0.0150/GB on the $100 monthly plan, falling to $0.0095/GB on the $5,000 plan. PacketStream says it pays users “$0.10 per GB of customer traffic” and Honeygain says “10GB earns $1”. The stated payout is 10.5 times Rayobyte’s lowest list price.
5. Most of the market still lists far above the payout. On 2 October the median entry-level price for a residential gigabyte across 10 providers was $4.50, 45× the $0.10 payout, and the median 100 GB rate was $2.88. Rayobyte’s lowest Scale price is about 1/303 of that median.
6. Grass says it has paid $3 million in USDC to more than 6.29 million users. That works out to about $0.48 per user, before any token distributions. Grass calls the per-person share “modest”. On 28 September, a post on Grass’s website by the CEO of Wynd Labs said Grass “supplies most of the world’s leading AI labs with data to train frontier AI models”.

Where the bandwidth-sharing dashboards rank

Bandwidth-sharing apps pay people for letting their internet connection carry other people’s traffic. Users check their earnings on a web dashboard, so the dashboard’s Chrome traffic is a rough guide to where the users are. The Chrome UX Report (CrUX) publishes, for each country, which popularity bucket a website falls into.

Honeygain’s dashboard appears in the CrUX data for 158 countries in August 2026. Its top-5,000 list lost 17 countries over the year, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Senegal and Venezuela, and gained 4: Ghana, Mozambique, St Lucia and Zimbabwe. The company’s main website (www.honeygain.com) was also a top-5,000 site in 6 countries.

Grass

Grass’s app was a top-5,000 site in Togo and a top-10,000 site in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Nigeria, Ukraine and Uzbekistan in August 2026. A year earlier it was top 5,000 in 14 countries and top 10,000 in 37. Its earlier app address, app.getgrass.io, was in the worldwide top-50,000 bucket in August 2024.

Proxy sellers

Proxy sellers mostly sell to businesses, so their sites draw far less consumer traffic. This table shows the best bucket each seller’s website reached in any country in August 2026.

When we checked on 8 October 2026, netnut.io showed a page titled “Seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation”. For what has happened since, see NetNut, 98 Days After the FBI Seizure and our residential proxy botnet timeline.

From household to buyer: the price of a residential gigabyte

Rayobyte’s pricing page lists four Scale Residential plans: $0.0150/GB for 6,600 GB at $100 a month, $0.0125/GB at $500, $0.0110/GB at $1,500 and $0.0095/GB for 526,000 GB at $5,000. Its residential page says of Scale and Premium: “Both run on the same consent-sourced residential network”. It adds that Scale comes “with no targeting, and is sold to verified businesses after a compliance review”. Premium is sold “pay as you go at $0.70 to $3.50/GB, or $0.50/GB through sales”.

Only 2 of the 8 bandwidth-sharing apps we reviewed on 2 October publish what they pay per gigabyte, and both pay $0.10. At that rate, the 526,000 GB in Rayobyte’s $5,000 plan would earn households $52,600.

How do these numbers fit together?

The companies’ pages don’t say, and we don’t know. What the pages do say:

• Rayobyte’s residential page says a person installs an app, described as “A game or utility they get free, or an app that pays for sharing”. Asked where its residential IPs come from, its FAQ answers: “From people who opted in through an app, on a consent screen, with a visible opt-out”. That means not every device in a network is necessarily paid per gigabyte.
• Rayobyte says it can price low partly because “We move petabytes a month, so our infrastructure and hosting providers give us volume rates”, and describes Premium as “Residential IPs from 50M+ opted-in devices every month, on a network we own”.
• PacketStream’s $0.10 is per gigabyte of customer traffic, “before cashout fees”. PacketStream sells its own proxy bandwidth at $1.00 per GB.
• Some apps feed named networks: EarnApp’s user agreement says “By enabling EarnApp, you are incorporated to be part of the Bright Data network”, and IPRoyal says it “built its residential proxy network through the Pawns.app initiative”. Neither Honeygain nor PacketStream names a customer on the pages we read, and neither is connected to Rayobyte by any source we found.

Questions we’d like the companies to answer: how a list price below $0.01 per gigabyte relates to the cost of sourcing residential bandwidth; whether Scale traffic runs over the same devices as Premium at all times or over spare capacity; and how much of a residential network is paid per gigabyte versus through free apps. If any of them responds, we’ll add it here.

Grass by its own numbers

Grass pays users in points, which count toward distributions of Grass tokens or USDC. In a 17 September 2026 article it says:

“The Grass network has rewarded more than 6.29 million users and distributed $3 million in USDC to contributors.”

$3 million divided by 6.29 million users is $0.48, and Grass says “more than” 6.29 million, so the average is at most about 48 cents. That figure covers USDC only, not tokens. The same article says “the per-person share of a $3 million pool across 6.29 million users is modest”.

In a 28 September post, “Abundant Intelligence”, Andrej, CEO of Wynd Labs, wrote:

“Today, Grass supplies most of the world’s leading AI labs with data to train frontier AI models. Because most of the internet is inaccessible to modern AI crawlers, Grass uses millions of residential internet connections to access it.”

The post adds: “Grass has access to millions of residential connections that have opted in and are being compensated for being part of the network.” It also describes a planned Contents API: “Our Contents API will allow a model to open and render any public webpage through any of the Grass network’s millions of residential internet connections.” We haven’t verified the claim about AI labs.

Method

Chrome UX Report. We queried Google’s public CrUX dataset in BigQuery on 8 October 2026: chrome-ux-report.materialized.country_summary for August 2026 (31 origins of bandwidth-sharing apps, proxy sellers and one scraping API) and August 2025 (the Honeygain dashboard, the Grass app and Pawns.app only, to stay within our query budget), and materialized.device_summary for worldwide buckets in August 2024, 2025 and 2026. We took each origin’s best (smallest) rank bucket across device types. The three queries billed about 4.8 GB. Country income groups and regions are the World Bank’s classifications, retrieved 2 October 2026; Taiwan isn’t on the World Bank’s list.

Prices and statements. Rayobyte’s pricing and residential-proxy pages and Grass’s two articles were saved on 8 October 2026 at 3:54 PM ET. App payout rates, PacketStream’s resale price and the 10-provider medians come from captures made on 2 October 2026 for our Wi-Fi earnings study and price index. Every quotation on this page is checked word for word against the saved page, and the figures CSV lists each page’s SHA-256 hash.

Verification. A separate script re-reads the raw query results and saved pages, recomputes every number on this page and in both CSVs, and checks that each one appears on the page as stated.

Caveats

• CrUX only covers Chrome users who sync their history and allow usage statistics, and only websites with enough traffic. Ranks are buckets, so “top 5,000” means somewhere between 1,001 and 5,000.
• Country ranks are relative. In a country with less web traffic, fewer visits are needed to reach the top 5,000, so a high rank there doesn’t mean more users than a lower rank in a large country.
• A dashboard visit is not an install. The apps share bandwidth in the background on phones, computers or servers, and people can use them without opening the dashboard.
• The August 2025 comparison covers three origins only. A falling bucket can reflect growth in other websites as well as fewer visits.
• List prices are not what every customer pays. Rayobyte’s Scale plans have no location targeting, a $100 monthly minimum and one concurrent request per dollar of plan, so they aren’t directly comparable with pay-as-you-go prices.
• The $0.10 payout is what two apps publish. Other apps don’t publish a rate, and we have no information about what any proxy seller pays for bandwidth.
• Grass’s figures are its own and are rounded. The per-user average covers USDC only, and we don’t know how the payments are spread.

Download the data

• CrUX ranks (CSV): every rank bucket we pulled (1,049 country rows for August 2026, 399 for August 2025 and 58 worldwide rows), with country names and World Bank income groups.
• Prices and statements (CSV): each price, payout and quotation on this page, with the source URL, capture time and SHA-256 hash of the saved page.

Cite as: ProxyPicker, “The Home-Internet Supply Chain Behind AI and Proxies”, 8 October 2026, https://proxypicker.com/home-internet-supply-chain/. Includes data from the Chrome UX Report by Google, licensed CC BY 4.0, and World Bank country classifications (CC BY 4.0).

Related: What Your Wi-Fi Is Worth (what the apps pay) · The Price of a Gigabyte · Residential IP Supply by Country · Residential proxy botnet timeline · Proxy IP Claims vs the IPv4 Registry · Edge devices in CISA’s KEV catalog · MASQUE Tracker (the IETF proxy protocols behind HTTP/3).

Press & data requests: email [email protected] for interviews, the raw data behind this page, or corrections. See also our contact page.