Should I pay for proxy bandwidth or proxy requests?

Proxy providers offer different pricing models, each with tradeoffs.

Bandwidth-based pricing:

Pay per GB transferred:

• Best for: Large pages, media-heavy sites, uncertain page sizes
• Advantage: Predictable cost per GB regardless of request count
• Disadvantage: Can be expensive if pages are large
• Typical cost: $1-15 per GB depending on proxy type

Request-based pricing:

Pay per request made:

• Best for: Small pages, API endpoints, text-heavy sites
• Advantage: Cost is predictable per page scraped
• Disadvantage: Expensive if pages are large
• Typical cost: $0.001-0.01 per request

Which is better:

• If average page size < 100 KB: Request-based usually cheaper
• If average page size > 1 MB: Bandwidth-based usually cheaper
• For mixed sizes: Calculate both to see which is more economical

Calculation example:

Scraping 100,000 pages at 500 KB each:

• Bandwidth: 50 GB × $5/GB = $250
• Requests: 100,000 × $0.003/request = $300

Optimization considerations:

With bandwidth pricing:

• Block resources aggressively to reduce page size
• Worth the effort to optimize since savings are direct

With request pricing:

• Resource blocking doesn't save money
• Focus on reducing failed requests instead

Hybrid pricing:

Some providers offer both:

• Use bandwidth pricing for development/testing (high retry rate)
• Switch to request pricing for production (if pages are small)

Hidden factors:

• Failed requests count differently by provider
• Some providers charge for requests but cap bandwidth
• Check whether redirects count as one request or multiple

Always test with your actual scraping workload before committing to large volumes.