You watched a video, you have a script that works on your laptop, and every provider’s pricing page wants you to pick a proxy type before you know what one is. Here are four questions. Answer them in order and stop at the first one that settles it.
The rule behind all of them: the cheapest proxy that gets your pages is the right proxy. Sometimes that is no proxy at all.
The flowchart
Does the site load fine from your own connection, at the pace you need?
- YesYou may not need a proxy yet. A few hundred polite requests a day from a home connection is ordinary traffic. Come back when you get blocked or need more volume.
- NoGo to question 2.
Do you need to look like the same visitor across several requests?
- YesA login you keep, a cart, a form that spans pages. You want a static address. Go to question 4.
- NoEach request stands alone. Go to question 3.
Does the site block datacenter IPs?
- NoDatacenter. Rent a few addresses and spread your requests across them.
- YesResidential. A different home IP on every request, billed by the gigabyte.
You need one address that stays put. Does the site block datacenter IPs?
- NoDatacenter, one dedicated address per identity.
- YesISP. A static address whose whois record names a consumer ISP.
Question 3 is the one people answer from gut feeling, and it is the one that decides whether you pay per gigabyte or per IP. Do not guess it. The five-minute test in residential vs datacenter answers it with fifty URLs and a shell loop.
What about location?
If the site shows different prices or content by country, location matters and it changes the answer. Our residential pool does not let you choose a country: you get whichever home IP comes up. ISP and datacenter addresses are bought for a country you choose at checkout, so if you need to appear from one specific place, that is the route. The locations page lists which countries each line covers.
What each answer costs
These figures come from our price list at the time this page was built. The pricing page always has the current ones.
| Answer | Billed by | Smallest order | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | The gigabyte, pay as you go | $5.50 for 1 GB | Down to $1.75/GB from 1,000 GB |
| Datacenter, shared | The IP, 30 days | $2.10 | 1 GB included, then $0.35/GB |
| Datacenter, dedicated | The IP, 30 days | $3.20 | No allowance to run out of |
| ISP, dedicated | The IP, 30 days | $3.20 | No allowance to run out of |
Rules for spending as little as possible
- Test with the smallest thing first. One shared datacenter IP for 30 days is $2.10. If your pages come back, you are done and the flowchart was overkill.
- Do not buy residential just in case. One dedicated datacenter IP for 30 days costs the same as 0.58 GB of residential at the single-gigabyte rate. If datacenter works for your target, residential is a tax.
- Size the job before you buy gigabytes. You can measure what a page weighs from your own connection for free. Here is how.
- Top up small. The minimum top-up is $5, the balance does not expire, and the refund policy gives unused balance back if you change your mind soon after topping up.
Still not sure?
Post the site and what you are trying to collect in Discord. Somebody there has probably pointed a scraper at it already and can tell you which branch of the flowchart it lands on. If the honest answer is “you do not need us”, you will hear that too.
Top-ups start at $5.
One shared datacenter IP for 30 days is $2.10. A single gigabyte of residential is $5.50. The balance never expires.