Proxy and web-scraping cost calculator

Proxy buyer's cheat sheet

The fastest way to overpay for proxies is to buy the wrong class for the job. Use this as a sanity check before you sign anything.

• Datacenter is cheapest per GB and fine for static or lightly protected pages. It fails fast against sites that score IP reputation, because the whole subnet is known to be a data center.
• Residential routes through real consumer IPs, so you look like ordinary visitors. You pay a large premium per GB, so keep your payloads small: fetch HTML, not full browser renders, wherever you can.
• Unblocker products (Web Unblocker, Site Unblocker) are a managed service that handles fingerprints, CAPTCHAs and retries server-side, and usually bill per successful request. They are the pragmatic choice against Cloudflare, DataDome and PerimeterX, where rolling your own is a losing battle.
• Bandwidth is the bill. Disable images and fonts, request HTML over headless rendering when the data is in the markup, and cap retries. On residential pricing, a 2 MB page render instead of a 0.3 MB HTML fetch is roughly 6 times the cost for the same record.
• List price is the starting point, not the price. Per-GB rates drop steeply on volume commitments. Always ask for the tiered rate at your real monthly volume before comparing providers.

Proxy prices move, and that quietly changes which provider in the table above is cheapest. Watch a provider's pricing page and we will email you the moment it changes, with a one-line note on what moved. One confirmation link, nothing else until you click it.

How the estimate is built

Bandwidth is your page count times the average page weight, multiplied by a retry overhead. The overhead comes from the anti-bot difficulty and your success target: harder targets fail more attempts, and each failed attempt still spends bandwidth. The recommended proxy type follows the difficulty, low maps to datacenter, medium to residential, high to a managed unblocker, because that is the cheapest class that reliably gets through.

The provider prices use approximate published pay-as-you-go list rates for mid-2025, shown next to each number so nothing is hidden. They are a planning baseline, not a quote: volume tiers cut them sharply, and unblocker products often bill per successful request rather than per GB. The build-your-own line compares a self-hosted datacenter pool, with assumed fixed infrastructure and maintenance cost, against the cheapest managed match. It only applies to datacenter-class work; residential and managed unblocking cannot realistically be self-built.

Who this is for

Anyone sizing a scraping budget: founders pricing a data product, ops teams monitoring competitor pricing, or engineers deciding between a managed proxy and a weekend of rolling their own. If you would rather not run any of this, competitor and price monitoring is exactly what Mue Watch Business does for you, on a schedule, with the alerts handled.

Proxy and scraping cost questions, answered