How much residential traffic to buy

What the gigabytes pay for

On the residential line you pay for traffic, not addresses: the bytes your requests move through the proxy. That is every page, redirect, retry and API call, plus any images, scripts and fonts your tool loads. Two jobs that fetch the same number of pages can need very different amounts, depending on what each one downloads.

The cheapest gigabyte is the one you never fetch. Block images, media and fonts when the data you need is in the HTML, ask for compressed responses, and skip pages you do not need. Then estimate.

This guide treats 1 GB as 1,000,000 KB so the sums stay round. Tools that count in 1,024-based units report figures about 7 percent apart from these, and the headroom below absorbs the gap.

Weigh the pages

Weighing a page does not need the proxy, so it costs nothing from your balance. Fetch a page you are allowed to fetch, the way your tool will fetch it, and read the size:

curl -sS -o /dev/null -w "%{size_header} + %{size_download} bytes\n" https://example.com/

Do it for ten typical pages, not only the home page, and take the average. If your tool is a headless browser, read the total from its network log instead, because it fetches every resource the page asks for.

Because the residential pool cannot be pinned to a country, the version of a page you are served can vary from request to request. Once you have a small order, weigh a few pages through the proxy as well and use the larger figure.

Count the requests, then add headroom

Multiply pages per run by runs per month, then add the requests that are not pages: logins, searches, pagination, redirects. Then add headroom for retries, page growth and the pages that turn out heavier than the sample. A further 25 percent is a workable planning figure for a first order. It is an assumption, not a measurement, so replace it with your own retry rate once the first batch has run.

A worked example: 1,500 pages a day for 30 days is 45,000 pages. At 160 KB a page that comes to 7.2 GB, and 25 percent headroom brings it to 9 GB.

Price the estimate, then the next rung up

On the ladder on the pricing page, 9 GB falls on the 5 GB rung at $4.60 per GB, so the order is $41.40. The next rung starts at 10 GB and charges $3.95 per GB, so 10 GB is $39.50: more traffic for less money.

Check the next rung whenever an estimate lands just under one. Buying a little more than the job needs can cost less than buying exactly what it needs, and the extra is headroom you would otherwise pay for later at a higher rate.

Renewals cost the one-GB rate

Volume rates are a price for one order of that size. A renewal is a separate purchase, and renewing a residential pool is charged at $5.50 per GB, the one-GB rate, whatever rung the first order reached. The pricing page states it beside the ladder.

Here is what that costs. Say the 10 GB order runs out in week three and you renew 10 GB. The renewal is $55.00, so the month comes to $94.50 for 20 GB. One 25 GB order at the start would have been $85.00, for 5 GB more.

So when you are unsure between two rungs, the larger one is the safer buy. Top-ups are paid by card, confirmed in the page on the order form, so a larger first order is one payment instead of several.

When per GB is the wrong meter

If the estimate comes out large and most of it goes to a few sites that accept a datacenter or ISP address, price a per-IP plan as well. The dedicated plans on the datacenter and ISP lines are not metered by the gigabyte, so a heavy page costs the same as a light one.

If the job needs a different address for each request, stay with the rotating pool and buy the rung your estimate points to.