Every proxy and tunneling service you have seen in the past few years uses the same shape: three columns, a "Pro" plan at $20–30/month, a "Team" plan at $100, and a tiny "Free" box on the left. Pay the subscription. Get the features. Cancel any time — just do not forget.
That model is wrong for the way most people actually use proxies. When we built Nodetonet we threw the subscription out entirely. This post explains what we replaced it with, how the daily math works, what credit buys you, and the two edge cases where a flat monthly might still make more sense.
TL;DR: $0.033 per active tunnel per day — roughly $1/month — with idle tunnels costing nothing, no tiers, and every feature on by default.
The model in one paragraph
You top up service credit on your account. Any amount: $1 to test the flow, $15 for a month of light work, $200 for a heavy fleet. While a tunnel is active (status: running), the panel deducts $0.033 per day from your credit at 03:00 UTC. While a tunnel is idle (status: stopped), you pay nothing. No monthly fee. No auto-renew. No "Pro" tier. Every feature is unlocked on every account, from the first dollar of credit.
$0.033/day x 30 days = $1/month per tunnel. That is the headline number.
Why $0.033?
The number round-trips cleanly at three time horizons that matter to different types of users:
| Horizon | Cost per tunnel | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Per day | $0.033 | Small enough to ignore for a single one-day test; accurate enough to bill against. |
| Per month | ~$1 | Run 50 tunnels always-on for $50/month. Run one tunnel 10 days out of 30 for $0.33. |
| Per year | ~$12 | A single side-project tunnel for a full year costs less than one month of a typical competitor Pro plan. |
The deduction granularity is one day, not one hour. If you spin up a tunnel in the morning and stop it at noon, the panel still charges $0.033 for that day — the same as if it ran all 24 hours. We made this trade deliberately: per-hour billing is more precise but creates a support burden (disputes over fractions of a cent) that is not worth it for anyone.
Idle tunnels cost nothing
This is the part that surprises first-time users most. You can leave any number of tunnels in your account — all paused, all fully configured — and pay exactly zero. Token paired, upstream wired, geo-targeting set, IP restrictions locked, custom domain attached — everything is there waiting. Hit Start when you need it. Hit Stop when you do not.
Compare that to a subscription model where every "seat" or "tunnel slot" you own costs the same whether you use it or not. On a subscription, an unused pre-configured tunnel is money leaving your account daily regardless.
The implication: your account becomes a library of ready-to-run configurations. A web scraper, a staging proxy, a client demo environment, a mobile proxy pointed at a specific carrier, a SOCKS5 upstream chain — all sitting at zero cost, ready to start in seconds.
What your credit covers
One line item in your ledger, one rate:
- $0.033/day per active tunnel — the burn rate while a tunnel is running.
- Bandwidth through the Nodetonet edge — included and unmetered for tunnels that route directly to your paired Android device. You are not charged per gigabyte for traffic that stays on our infrastructure.
- Every feature without exception — rotating proxy pools, sticky sessions, per-client user/pass auth, IP and domain allow/deny lists, reseller white-label via WISECP, quota and expiry controls, thread limits, TCP/IP fingerprint spoofing, REST API, bulk operations, audit logs. There is no gated Pro tier. Pay the per-tunnel-day rate and everything is on.
- Upstream byte traffic (your provider bills separately) — if you chain to a third-party residential or datacenter provider through upstream forwarding, that provider bills you for the bytes on their side. Nodetonet does not double-charge for upstream traffic.
Real-world cost profiles
Three illustrative profiles to make the numbers concrete. All figures assume always-on for a 30-day month where noted:
| Profile | Tunnels | Days active / month | Monthly cost | Suggested top-up |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobbyist | 1 | 10 | $0.33 | $5 covers ~15 months |
| Scraper / developer | 8 | 30 | $7.92 | $15 gives ~7 weeks headroom |
| Reseller fleet | 80 | 30 | $79.20 | $100 = ~5 weeks; auto-charge handles refills |
For context: a typical flat-fee Pro plan from a competing tunneling service runs $20–30/month for a fixed seat count. A hobbyist paying $0.33 on Nodetonet gets the same feature set. A scraper paying $7.92 gets rotating pools, geo-targeting and SOCKS5 — all included. See how the economics compare on our Nodetonet vs ngrok and Nodetonet vs LocalToNet pages.
How to top up
Go to /balance and pick a package. The smallest is $1 — enough to verify Stripe works on your side and run one tunnel for a month. The largest is $200 with a 3% bonus credit, yielding $206 in spendable balance. Stripe handles the card; we never see the full PAN. The webhook credits your account within seconds.
If you prefer a hands-off approach, the same page offers a saved-card auto-charge flow: set a reload amount and a minimum balance threshold. When your credit dips below the threshold, the panel pulls the next package automatically. A 10-minute cooldown between charges prevents runaway billing if something on our side goes wrong.
For a step-by-step walkthrough of the payment page itself, see topping up with Stripe. For details on the auto-charge setup, see saving cards and auto top-up.
No subscription means no surprise charges
Without a subscription, nothing renews on its own. If you stop topping up, your tunnels drain the remaining credit and then stop. Your account remains. Your configurations remain. You can return six months later, load $5, run a quick test, and leave again. The UX is identical to the day you signed up.
Our refund policy follows the same logic: unused credit is refundable within 30 days of purchase; used credit is not. Read the refund policy for the exact conditions. If you want to understand what each line in your statement represents, understanding your bills covers the full ledger breakdown.
When a flat monthly is genuinely better
Pay-as-you-go is not the right fit for every team. Two cases where a flat monthly rate makes more sense:
- Always-on production at very high tunnel counts. At several hundred always-on tunnels, the per-day model produces a predictable monthly cost and a flat-rate negotiation may save money. Email us at support@nodetonet.com — we do volume contracts.
- Procurement that requires a fixed subscription line item. If your finance team needs an annual invoice rather than rolling prepaid credit, we can issue one for a fixed dollar amount of credit. Same product, slightly different paperwork.
For everyone else — hobbyists, freelancers, agencies, scraping teams, resellers who manage variable loads — idle = free with a daily per-tunnel rate is the honest, flexible model.
Get started
Ready to try it? Create a free account, load $1, and follow how to use Nodetonet to pair your first Android device and run your first mobile proxy. You can also browse the full features overview or check the proxy glossary if any term above is new to you.