Proxy pricing: per GB, per IP or per port for your job

Originally published on proxymint.

Proxy pricing per GB, per IP and per port only compares once the job is fixed. How to size a job in GB, which unit fits it, and what else moves a bill.

TL;DR

• Proxy pricing comes in three units. Residential and mobile bill per GB, static ISP per IP per month, datacenter IPv4 per port per month. On proxymint every tier is priced in volume bands, with a lower rate per unit at higher quantity.
• A rate only compares once the job is fixed. 100,000 pages a month are about 2.2 GB as HTML and about 216 GB as full renders, so the fetch mode decides between per GB and a flat address.
• Small jobs start at the minimum unit. 1,000 HTML fetches move about 22 MB; the smallest package is 1 GB, with no expiry set on the GB, and the smallest flat unit is one month.
• Location, rotation and protocol do not change the rate. On proxymint, city targeting, every rotation mode and both HTTP and SOCKS5 come inside the same price.

Key takeaways

• Size the job first. Fetch 20 representative pages with the real client, average the bytes, multiply by the page count and add 20-30% for retries.
• Pick the fetch mode before the tier. HTML or JSON instead of a full render cuts bytes by roughly 98x at the Web Almanac medians.
• Match the unit to the target. A datacenter port is billed the same at 2 GB or 200 GB on targets that accept hosting ranges; targets that block them call for residential per GB.
• Buy one package per job. A package sized from the estimate covers the whole run at the rate for its volume.
• Divide the bill by what was used. The real per-unit cost of any plan is the bill over the units the job actually consumed.

Read the full guide on proxymint, with the commands, tables and sources.