Three ways scraping is priced
Most providers charge in one of three ways. The cheapest one for you depends on how big your pages are, how many need a real browser, and how often the sites block you.
Per GB of traffic. Proxy networks bill the bandwidth that passes through them, retries included. Residential proxies in our reviews start at $8/GB at Bright Data and $6/GB on Oxylabs' smallest tiers. Per-GB pricing is cheapest when pages are small, the HTML is all you need, and the sites rarely block you. You run the scraper yourself, so the bill is low but the engineering is yours. If the sites don't block datacenter IPs, those cost far less again; see residential vs datacenter proxies.
Per request. A scraping API fetches the page for you and charges credits per call. Page size stops mattering, but pages that need a browser cost several credits each, and APIs that bill every attempt also charge for the ones that fail.
Per successful result. Some APIs charge only when a page comes back usable. Scrape.do and Bright Data's Web Unlocker both bill only successful requests. This model wins on well-protected sites, where many attempts fail and a per-GB proxy bill grows with every retry.
Rules of thumb
- Heavy pages favour per-request or per-result pricing, because you stop paying for bytes.
- High block rates favour per-result pricing, because failures are free.
- A high share of browser pages pushes API bills up, because rendering uses extra credits.
- Large volumes of light, easy pages favour raw proxies, if you can maintain the scraper.
For a head-to-head between the two approaches, read Bright Data vs ScraperAPI. Before you budget for either, check whether the data already exists as a dataset: see datasets vs web scraping. To keep your block rate, and your retries, down, start with how to avoid getting blocked.
FAQ
Is it cheaper to use proxies or a scraping API?
It depends on page size and how hard the sites are to scrape. Raw proxies billed per GB are usually cheapest for small HTML pages on sites that rarely block you. Scraping APIs cost more per page but include unblocking, and success-only billing means blocked attempts cost nothing.
Where do the prices in this calculator come from?
From the provider reviews on this site. Each price links to the review it came from, and the date the prices were last checked is shown at the top of the calculator. Check each provider's own pricing page before you buy.
What does the estimate leave out?
Servers, storage, engineering time and any monthly plan minimums. It also treats every page as the same size and every retry as a full page load, so treat the result as a comparison between pricing models rather than a quote.