What Your Wi-Fi Is Worth: What Bandwidth-Sharing Apps Pay vs What Proxies Sell For (2026)

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✓ data: the apps’ own pages and help centres, saved 2026-10-02; resale prices from our live capture of 10 residential proxy providers on 2026-10-02 · method · download the data

How much is your home internet connection worth to the proxy industry, and how much of that do you get? Bandwidth-sharing apps (security researchers call them “proxyware”) pay you to let other companies send web traffic through your connection. Your home IP address becomes an exit node in a residential proxy network, and those networks sell access by the gigabyte.

We read the official pages, help-centre articles and terms of 8 of these apps and saved a copy of every page we quote. Then we compared what they pay with the per-GB prices residential proxy providers were charging on 2 October 2026, taken from our Price of a Gigabyte data. Anything an app doesn’t publish is marked not published. Anything we could only find from a third party is labelled with its source. We didn’t invent any earnings figures; every monthly number below comes from the app’s own statements, and we show the arithmetic.

• apps reviewed 8
• publish a consumer $/GB rate 2
• what they pay $0.10/GB
• median list price of a residential GB $4.50
• markup 45×

The headline numbers

1. Only 2 of the 8 apps publish what they pay per gigabyte, and both pay $0.10. PacketStream pays “$0.10 per GB of customer traffic”, before cashout fees. Honeygain says “10GB earns $1”. EarnApp dropped per-GB pay on 20 August 2025 and now pays by the hour. Pawns.app, Repocket and Traffmonetizer don’t publish a rate, and Grass pays in points, one of the factors in future token or USDC distributions.
2. A gigabyte that earns you $0.10 sells for a median $4.50, a 45× markup. That median is the entry-level list price across 10 residential proxy providers on 2 October 2026. At that price the person sharing their connection gets 2.2% of what the buyer pays. Across the 10 providers the markup runs from 10× (cheapest, $1.00/GB) to 80× (most expensive, $8.00/GB). At the 100 GB tier the median is $2.88/GB, still 29× what the apps pay.
3. PacketStream is the only app that publishes both sides of the deal: it pays $0.10/GB and sells at $1.00/GB. That’s a 10× markup, so PacketStream keeps 90% of each gigabyte’s list price before fees. PacketStream’s $1.00 is also as cheap as the cheapest provider in our live price data.
4. Peer2Profit users were paid $0.28/GB for traffic resold at $7.60/GB, a 27× markup. This comes from Silent Push research published 20 August 2026, which found that Peer2Profit “directly feeds” the AstroProxy proxy service. Mobile traffic paid $0.35/GB and sold for $13.44 (38×); datacenter traffic paid $0.10/GB and sold for $3.95 (39.5×). Silent Push says the operation “retains over 97%” of the revenue. Peer2Profit’s own website wouldn’t load when we tried it on 2 October 2026, so we couldn’t confirm these rates on an official page.
5. EarnApp, made by Bright Data, pays at most $10 a month per US IP address. That’s what EarnApp’s help centre gives as the ceiling, and it assumes a 100 Mbps connection running 24/7 with full demand. Outside the US the ceiling is $5. At Bright Data’s own pay-as-you-go residential price of $8.00/GB, $10 buys 1.25 GB. EarnApp’s EULA says: “By enabling EarnApp, you are incorporated to be part of the Bright Data network”.
6. By Honeygain’s own numbers, typical usage earns about $0.03 to $0.90 a month. Honeygain says usage “typically ranges from a few hundred MB to several GB monthly”, and it pays $0.10/GB. Its own example for reaching the $20 payout is three devices on separate networks for 3–4 months, which works out to $5.00–$6.67 a month. At 9 GB a month it would take about 22 months to reach the $20 minimum.
7. Payout minimums range from $5 to $20. PacketStream and Pawns.app pay out from $5, EarnApp and Traffmonetizer from $10, and Honeygain from $20. Repocket says only that its threshold is shown in the app. Fees come off the top: EarnApp takes 2% on PayPal, Pawns.app 4% on PayPal or Venmo, and PacketStream 3%.
8. The risks are well documented. In January 2026, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group disrupted IPIDEA, which it called one of the largest residential proxy networks in the world. In a single week it saw more than 550 threat groups using IPIDEA exit nodes, and it warned that consumers should be “extremely wary” of apps that pay for “unused bandwidth”. Xfinity’s acceptable use policy lists “proxy services and servers” among prohibited uses, and the terms of EarnApp, Pawns.app and Repocket all tell you to check your ISP contract yourself.

What each app pays, and where your bandwidth goes

Every entry comes from the app’s own website, help centre or terms, saved on 2 October 2026, unless it’s marked as third-party. “Not published” means we couldn’t find the figure on any public page we checked.

Pawns.app: traffic sharing is an optional feature that isn’t in every version of the app, and the homepage now leads with paid games and surveys. Its business page offers app developers who embed the Pawns SDK a fixed $0.20 per GB; that is not the consumer rate. Traffmonetizer’s homepage shows “$29 average income” but doesn’t say over what period, so we haven’t used it. Honeygain’s homepage shows a “$27 average payouts sum”, which looks like an average payout amount rather than monthly earnings.

The markup

Only PacketStream publishes both its payout and its resale price. For the others we compare with the market: the entry-level and 100 GB list prices of 10 residential proxy providers (Bright Data, DataImpulse, Decodo (Smartproxy), IPRoyal, NodeMaven, Oxylabs, ProxyEmpire, Rayobyte, SOAX, Webshare), captured live on 2 October 2026 for The Price of a Gigabyte. Honeygain doesn’t say who buys its traffic, so its row is a market comparison, not the price its buyers actually pay.

Markup = resale price ÷ price paid to the bandwidth owner. List prices are before coupons and volume deals and leave out the providers’ own costs (servers, sales, KYC, fraud), so this is a gross markup, not profit. EarnApp has no per-GB rate any more, so it isn’t in this table. For comparison, its $10 US monthly ceiling buys 1.25 GB at Bright Data’s $8.00 pay-as-you-go price, or 1.43 GB at its $7.00 100 GB rate.

What a household can expect to earn

None of these apps publishes an average monthly earning per household, so we used only the figures they do publish. Here are the assumptions, scenario by scenario:

• Most households have one public IP address. EarnApp pays per IP, and Pawns.app’s terms limit sharing to one device per IP address. Honeygain’s $5–$6.67 example assumes three separate networks, which is more than one household.
• Payout minimums slow things down. At $0.10/GB you need 50 GB of customer traffic to reach PacketStream’s $5 minimum (and you get $4.85 after its 3% fee), or 200 GB to reach Honeygain’s $20.
• Demand sets the pace, not you. Honeygain says usage depends on “bandwidth availability and regional demand”. EarnApp pays only for the time your device is “actively used”, not just connected. Pawns.app and Traffmonetizer both say they may restrict sharing from places where there’s a surplus of supply.
• Mobile data costs money. Pawns.app’s terms warn that “data usage, bandwidth usage, or internet or mobile service provider charges may apply” and that the app isn’t responsible for them.

The risks, from credible sources

• Proxy networks are heavily used by attackers. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) disrupted the IPIDEA network in January 2026, “reducing the available pool of devices for the proxy operators by millions”. In one seven-day period it saw more than 550 tracked threat groups, including groups from China, North Korea, Iran and Russia, using IPIDEA exit nodes for things like password-spray attacks. It also found more than 600 apps with code tied to IPIDEA’s control servers. Google says people whose devices act as exit nodes can end up “flagged as suspicious or blocked by providers”, and that these apps “could open security vulnerabilities on the device’s home network”. Google Cloud blog, January 2026. IPIDEA is not one of the apps reviewed here.
• Your home network may be reachable. When Silent Push joined Peer2Profit as a test node, it showed that buyers of the proxy could reach devices on the node’s internal network “via nothing more than a DNS record pointing to an internal IP”. Silent Push, 20 August 2026.
• Fake installers are a known malware route. Cisco Talos found fake Honeygain installers that also installed remote-access trojans, information stealers and, in one malware family, an XMRig crypto miner alongside a patched Honeygain client. It also found that unencrypted HTTP traffic could be “intercepted and manipulated in transit” by nodes under an attacker’s control. Cisco Talos, 31 August 2021. Download only from the app’s official site or official app stores.
• Hacked machines get enrolled too (“proxyjacking”). Sysdig (April 2023) saw an attacker use the Log4j vulnerability to break in and run the command-line version of IPRoyal Pawns. Sysdig cited Pawns’ profit scale of $9.60 a month for one IP running 24 hours. Akamai (June 2023) found hacked SSH servers being added to Peer2Profit and Honeygain. Both are 2023 figures and may not reflect current rates.
• Your ISP contract may forbid it. Xfinity’s acceptable use policy prohibits running equipment or servers that provide services to anyone outside your home network, and lists “proxy services and servers” as examples. The Verizon Fios customer agreement says you may not “resell, re-provision or rent the Services” or let third parties (other than guest Wi-Fi users) use them. EarnApp’s EULA says you can’t use it if your ISP agreement prohibits this, and Pawns.app and Repocket put the compliance burden on you. We haven’t reviewed every ISP; check your own terms.
• CAPTCHAs and blocks. Pawns.app’s own terms say sharing may lead to more CAPTCHA prompts, and that you could briefly lose access to a streaming service if a client uses the same platform. Google also notes that exit nodes can get flagged or blocked.

Methodology

• Apps. We started from the list of apps in our research plan (PacketStream, Honeygain, Pawns.app, EarnApp, Peer2Profit, Repocket, Traffmonetizer and Grass). For each one we loaded the homepage, FAQ or help centre, payout page and terms in a headless Chrome browser on 2 October 2026, and saved the HTML, the visible text and a screenshot. Every quote we rely on (76 in total) was checked automatically against those saved copies. The source-quotes CSV lists each quote with its URL and capture time.
• Pay rates. We only show a $/GB rate where the app states one. We converted credits where the app gives the conversion (Honeygain: 1 credit per 10 MB, 10,000 credits = $10). Peer2Profit’s rates come from Silent Push, because its own site was unreachable (connection closed, tried twice on 2 October 2026).
• Which network. We name a buyer only where the app or the network says so: EarnApp’s EULA (Bright Data), IPRoyal’s help centre (Pawns.app), PacketStream’s own pricing, and Silent Push’s research (Peer2Profit → AstroProxy). Honeygain, Repocket and Traffmonetizer refer only to “clients” or “partners”.
• Resale prices. Entry-level and 100 GB list prices for 10 residential proxy providers, captured from their pricing pages on 2 October 2026 for The Price of a Gigabyte. They are before coupons; where a page showed a struck-through price we used the price you would actually pay.
• Earnings. We only multiplied the apps’ own published figures. Each assumption is in the table above. Where wording was vague (“a few hundred MB”, “several GB”) we picked a reading (0.3 GB and 9 GB) and labelled it.

Limitations

• Rates change. EarnApp changed its pay model in August 2025, and any app can change its rates. Pawns.app’s terms say its traffic-sharing rates are shown in the app or dashboard, and Repocket’s say the same of its payout threshold. We didn’t sign up for any app, so we couldn’t see in-app rates.
• Not a profit figure. Markups compare list prices and leave out the proxy providers’ costs, discounts and unsold capacity.
• Third-party figures. Peer2Profit’s rates and AstroProxy’s prices come from Silent Push, not official pages. The Sysdig $9.60 figure is from 2023.
• Not every app. There are many more proxyware apps; we covered the best-known ones. ISP terms were checked only for Xfinity and Verizon Fios.

Download the data

• Apps (CSV): one row per app, with operator, pay model, rate, minimum payout, network fed, sources and snapshot files.
• Markups (CSV): every pay-versus-resale comparison on this page.
• Earnings scenarios (CSV): monthly figures and the assumptions behind them.
• Source quotes (CSV): all 76 quotes, with source URL, HTTP status and capture time.

Free to use with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Quotes remain the property of their publishers.

Cite or embed

Suggested citation: ProxyPicker (2026). “What Your Wi-Fi Is Worth: what bandwidth-sharing apps pay versus what residential proxies sell for.” Data checked 2 October 2026. https://proxypicker.com/what-your-wifi-is-worth/

Embed the chart:

<a href="https://proxypicker.com/what-your-wifi-is-worth/"><img src="https://proxypicker.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/proxypicker-wifi-worth-2026-10-pay-vs-resale.png" alt="Bandwidth-sharing apps pay $0.10-$0.35/GB; the traffic resells for $1-$13.44/GB (ProxyPicker)" width="800" /></a><br />Source: <a href="https://proxypicker.com/what-your-wifi-is-worth/">ProxyPicker, What Your Wi-Fi Is Worth</a> (2 October 2026)

Related: The Price of a Gigabyte (residential proxy prices since 2019) · Best residential proxies · Anti-Bot Census · Scraping Law Hub · Best proxies for web scraping.

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