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✓ every rate in this calculator was read from the provider’s live pricing page on 2026-08-07 · how we verify
Work out what a scraping workload actually costs before you buy. Enter your page volume and this estimates the bandwidth you will consume, then prices it against every provider whose rates we have verified — landing you on the tier you would really be buying, not a headline rate you cannot reach. It also prices the same job as a per-request scraping API, because that comparison is usually the real decision.
What that costs, by provider
At the cheapest verified rotating datacenter rate ($0.30/GB) the same
workload would cost —. Test
datacenter proxies first and escalate to residential only on evidence
of blocking.
Or skip proxies: scraping APIs at this volume
Assumes one credit per request. JavaScript rendering and premium-proxy modes consume
several credits each under published multiplier tables we have not independently verified — check yours
before budgeting.
How the bandwidth maths works
Proxy providers bill gigabytes of traffic, not pages, so every estimate starts with one multiplication: pages × average page weight. Page weight is where most budgets go wrong. Fetching raw HTML pulls roughly 50–300 KB per page. Let a headless browser render it and you also pull images, fonts, CSS and scripts — commonly 1–3 MB, a tenfold jump in spend for identical extracted rows.
The second multiplier is failure. Blocked requests, timeouts and retries consume bandwidth while producing no data, and per-GB billing charges you for every one. Fifteen percent is a reasonable default on cooperative targets; hostile ones run far higher, which is exactly when per-successful-request API pricing starts to win.
Worked examples
Four common workload shapes, each including a 15% retry allowance, priced against verified rates. These render without JavaScript, so they are also the answer if you only want a number.
A price-monitoring job — 10,000 pages/month at 150 KB (about 1.7 GB)
| Provider | Monthly cost | Effective /GB | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProxyEmpire | $1.27 | $0.75/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Proxy-Cheap | $1.33 | $0.78/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Proxy-Seller | $2.21 | $1.30/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| NodeMaven | $3.74 | $2.20/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| DataImpulse | $5.00 | $2.94/GB | $1.00/GB standard (published tier) |
| Rayobyte | $5.95 | $3.50/GB | Starter 1–49GB (published tier) |
A mid-size scraper — 100,000 pages/month at 500 KB (about 58 GB)
| Provider | Monthly cost | Effective /GB | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProxyEmpire | $43.12 | $0.75/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Proxy-Cheap | $44.85 | $0.78/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| DataImpulse | $57.50 | $1.00/GB | $1.00/GB standard (published tier) |
| Proxy-Seller | $74.75 | $1.30/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Rayobyte | $115 | $2.00/GB | Consumer 50–249GB (published tier) |
| NodeMaven | $127 | $2.20/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
A production data pipeline — 1,000,000 pages/month at 500 KB (about 575 GB)
| Provider | Monthly cost | Effective /GB | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProxyEmpire | $431 | $0.75/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Proxy-Cheap | $448 | $0.78/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| DataImpulse | $575 | $1.00/GB | $1.00/GB standard (published tier) |
| Proxy-Seller | $748 | $1.30/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Rayobyte | $862 | $1.50/GB | Professional 250–999GB (published tier) |
| NodeMaven | $1,265 | $2.20/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
JavaScript-heavy targets — 250,000 pages/month at 2000 KB (about 575 GB)
| Provider | Monthly cost | Effective /GB | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProxyEmpire | $431 | $0.75/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Proxy-Cheap | $448 | $0.78/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| DataImpulse | $575 | $1.00/GB | $1.00/GB standard (published tier) |
| Proxy-Seller | $748 | $1.30/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
| Rayobyte | $862 | $1.50/GB | Professional 250–999GB (published tier) |
| NodeMaven | $1,265 | $2.20/GB | published entry rate (estimate) |
Why two providers are missing
- SOAX — Prices by geographic tier (Tier 1 US/UK/AU/JP down to Tier 3) on top of monthly plans with included credits. A single $/GB figure would be fiction for most workloads, so we leave it out rather than guess — verified rates are on its profile.
- Storm Proxies — Pricing not verified: its site blocks automated checks, and it bills by threads rather than bandwidth, which this calculator does not model.
Five more carry an estimate label because they publish only a “from” rate whose volume conditions they never state. Those figures are a best case, not a quote — the label exists so you treat them that way.
Reading the confidence labels
| Label | What it means |
|---|---|
| exact plan | Your volume maps onto a published plan; the figure is that plan’s price. |
| published tier | A published per-GB rate for your volume band, multiplied out. |
| upper bound | Your volume falls between published tiers; the real rate is likely lower. |
| estimate | Only a “from” rate is published; conditions unknown. |
| extrapolated | Beyond the largest published tier; real contracts are negotiated. |
What this deliberately does not model
Success rates. Two providers at the same price can differ enormously in how often a request actually returns the page, and nobody publishes independently audited figures — including the review sites quoting precise percentages. Our benchmark panel is on the methodology roadmap; until it exists, treat these as price comparisons and validate quality with a small paid test against your own targets. It also ignores VAT (Decodo and SOAX add it), annual-billing discounts, and any negotiated enterprise rate, which at volume is where the real number gets decided.
The bigger saving is usually the right type rather than the right vendor: see datacenter, ISP, and which proxy each target actually needs.
Frequently asked questions
How much does a residential proxy cost per month?
There is no monthly price — providers bill per gigabyte, so it depends entirely on your traffic. On rates verified 2026-08-07, 50 GB runs about $50 at the cheapest flat rate and $150–$175 mid-market; 500 GB runs roughly $400–$1,100 depending on provider and tier. Enter your own volume above for the per-provider figure.
How much bandwidth does web scraping use?
Roughly 50–300 KB per page for raw HTML, and 1–3 MB per page if you render it in a browser with images and scripts. Add 10–20% for retries on cooperative targets and considerably more on protected ones. A million lean HTML pages is about 150 GB; the same million rendered is closer to 1.5 TB.
Is it cheaper to use proxies or a scraping API?
Proxies win on high-volume, high-success workloads, because per-GB billing is cheap when little bandwidth is wasted. APIs win on hostile targets, because success-only billing absorbs the retries a proxy plan charges you for regardless of outcome. The calculator prices both at your volume so you can see where the crossover falls for your job.
Can I get a free residential proxy?
Not legitimately. Residential bandwidth costs providers real money to source, so free pools monetise another way — logging traffic, injecting content, or routing strangers’ activity through your connection. Free datacenter tiers do exist (Webshare has run one for years) and short paid trials are common; at a verified $1.00/GB floor, a meaningful test costs a few dollars.
Are residential proxies illegal?
No. Using residential proxies is legal in the US and EU, and they are standard infrastructure for ad verification, price monitoring and market research. Liability comes from conduct — bypassing authentication, breaching site terms at scale, or handling personal data unlawfully. Provider-side sourcing is a separate question the July 2026 NetNut seizure made concrete.
What is the best residential proxy provider?
There is no single best, and any ranking without published benchmarks is opinion. On verified price the floor is DataImpulse at $1.00/GB; Decodo and Webshare lead published self-serve ladders; Oxylabs and Bright Data lead enterprise procurement; SOAX leads geo-targeting. The full ranking is on best residential proxies.
How do I get a residential proxy?
Pick a provider from the table above, buy the smallest increment it sells, and you receive gateway credentials — host, port, username and password — that you point your scraper or browser at. Entry costs are small: several providers here start between $5 and $35, so validating on your own targets before committing is cheap.
What are the risks of using a proxy?
For paid services the risks are commercial rather than technical: promotional rates that reset after the first invoice, plan traffic that expires unused, and providers whose IP sourcing cannot survive scrutiny. Free web-proxy sites are a different category entirely — never send a login or payment through one.
Using these numbers
The rates behind this calculator are the same verified, dated records that drive the rest of the site — the full matrix is on the pricing page and every change we catch is logged in the changelog. If you cite a figure from here, cite the date with it: these numbers move, which is the entire point of the site.