How proxy reselling makes money: the wholesale-to-retail math

2026-09-26 · Bazyl

A proxy reseller makes money on one number: the gap between what a gigabyte costs you and what you charge for it. Everything below is about keeping that gap from leaking away.

Most new partners price off their own cost. Price off the ceiling instead, the price your customer would pay if they skipped you. That's the number they compare you against.

The two numbers

Your floor is the wholesale rate. Ours starts at $0.50 per GB and goes lower as the volume goes up. The exact band depends on what you buy, and I quote it when you ask.

Your ceiling is our own public price, because anyone can read it. Pay as you go, in US dollars, as of September 2026:

• 1 GB: $4.20 per GB
• 5 to 14 GB: $3.60 per GB
• 15 to 29 GB: $3.00 per GB
• 50 to 99 GB: $1.68 per GB
• 100 to 199 GB: $1.20 per GB
• 500 to 999 GB: $1.08 per GB
• 1,000 GB and up: $0.96 per GB

The full ladder, subscriptions included, is on the pricing page. Price above it and you're selling convenience: your Discord, your support, your setup help. That's real, but it's thin. Price under it and you're selling a better deal. That's easier.

A worked example: 1,000 GB

Say you buy 1,000 GB wholesale at $0.50. That's $500 out.

You sell it in 10 GB packs at $2.50 a gigabyte, so $25 a pack. Our own price for 10 GB is $3.60 a gigabyte, which puts you 30% under us on the same size.

Sell all 100 packs and $2,500 comes in. Take off the $500 and you keep $2,000 before payment fees and your own time. That's an 80% gross margin on paper.

The paper part matters. Three things decide how much of it you ever see.

Where the margin leaks

Gigabytes you bought and haven't sold

Wholesale is paid up front, by bank transfer. A 1,000 GB pool that sells 400 GB in its first month has cost you $500 and brought in $1,000, and the other 600 GB are money parked in a pool. That's still a profitable month, but it's half the one on paper.

Buy for the month you can actually sell, not the month you hope for. A top-up is one transfer away, and the gigabytes land in your pool when the sale is recorded.

Gigabytes on accounts nobody uses

The second leak is allocation. Move a customer's whole purchase onto their account on day one and it sits there whether they use it or not.

On our partner API, allocation is a move, not a spend. balance/add moves gigabytes from your pool to a customer. balance/remove moves them back, and suspending or deleting a customer reclaims their whole balance automatically. So if you sell monthly plans, you can hand out a month at a time and take back what's left when a plan lapses.

This is the call a top-up job makes, with the customer's id and your partner key:

# Move 10 GB from your pool to an existing customer.
# Same Idempotency-Key on a retry = the stored result, never a second move.
curl -s -X POST "https://api.basilproxies.com/api/reseller/v1/customers/$CUSTOMER_ID/balance/add" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BASIL_PARTNER_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: order-84421" \
  -d '{"amountGb": 10, "product": "residential2"}'

Use your own order id as the idempotency key. When your checkout webhook fires twice, and one day it will, the second call returns the first call's result instead of paying out another 10 GB.

One more rule that saves a lot of mess: top up the same customer for every repeat purchase. Don't create a new customer per order. Their proxy strings keep working, and your ledger reads like a history instead of a pile.

Customers who run past their allocation

Usage is metered as it happens and the cap catches up with a short lag, so a busy customer can finish a little over what you gave them. You don't pay for that. The next top-up writes the overrun off first and then adds the full amount, so the customer gets what they paid for and your pool isn't charged twice. It shows in your ledger as a pair of rows that nets to zero.

Payment fees and your time

Card processing takes a slice of every sale, and most processors add a fixed fee per charge on top of a percentage. That fixed part hurts small packs most: it takes a larger share of a $25 sale than of a $250 one. Read your processor's rate card before you set a 1 GB price.

Then there's your time. Support questions, top-ups, the odd refund. Automate the top-ups first, because that job grows with every customer you add.

Setting your own ladder

A ladder does two jobs. It makes the first purchase easy and the next purchase bigger. Here's one built on a $0.50 wholesale cost. It's an example to argue with, not a price list:

• 5 GB at $3.00 per GB ($15): 83% gross margin. Our price for 5 GB is $3.60.
• 25 GB at $2.50 per GB ($62.50): 80%. Ours is $3.00.
• 50 GB at $1.50 per GB ($75): 67%. Ours is $1.68.
• 100 GB at $1.10 per GB ($110): 55%. Ours is $1.20.
• 500 GB at $0.95 per GB ($475): 47%. Ours is $1.08.

Every step sits under our pay-as-you-go price for the same size. The margin falls as the size climbs, and that's deliberate. The big buyer is the one comparing prices, and 47% of $475 is still more money than 83% of $15.

Two limits to know before you publish yours. Our subscriptions are cheaper per gigabyte than pay as you go, so a subscriber compares you against a lower line. And wholesale gets cheaper as your own volume grows, so a ladder you set at 1,000 GB a month has more room in it at 5,000.

When the math works

Reselling works when you already have the buyers: a cook group, a bot with paying users, a Discord where people keep asking where to buy proxies. It's a poor way to go looking for them. With the audience already there, the spread above is real money, and the partner API does the moving so you don't have to.

If you want the exact wholesale band for your volume, start on the white-label page and open a ticket from there.