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Proxies or a scraping API: which costs less?
100,000 pages of 500 KB are 50 GB a month: $90.00 of proxy traffic at $1.80 per GB (Scrapeless's residential rate), against $19.00 on BrowserCloud, the cheapest scraping API for plain pages. From 10,000 to 1,000,000 pages, traffic alone costs more than the cheapest API.
Residential proxy prices published by APIs on this site:
Page size is yours to measure: open a target page with your browser's network panel and read the transferred size. The 500 KB here is only an example.
Both bills as the volume grows
- The cheapest API at each volume
- Proxy bandwidth only
| Route | Monthly bill | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Scraping API: BrowserCloud | $19.00 | Proxies, retries and blocking handled by the vendor; Hobby |
| Proxies | $90.00 | 50 GB of traffic only; your servers, browsers, retries and upkeep are extra |
What the proxy line leaves out
The proxy bill above is traffic and nothing else. Running your own scraper also means the servers or cloud functions that send the requests, a headless browser for pages that need JavaScript (which downloads every image, font and script unless you block them, so a rendered page usually weighs more than its HTML), the retries a blocked request needs, CAPTCHA solving where a site asks for it, and the hours spent keeping the scraper working when a site changes. A scraping API folds those into its price per page, and most bill only the pages that succeed. So read the crossing point as the volume where it becomes worth pricing the rest of the do-it-yourself route, not as the point where it is cheaper.
Bandwidth is counted here as 1 GB per 1,000,000 KB, the way proxy traffic is usually sold. The API side is the lowest complete bill on this site for the same pages, every page succeeding, read from each vendor's own pricing page.