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Proxy Pricing by Use Case: Datacenter vs Residential vs Scraping APIs, and What to Pay (Aug 2026)

A companion to "Polite Web Scraping: Rate-Limit Design Patterns, Whether You Need Proxies, and the AI-Agent-Friendly Open Source Stack" (polite-web-scraping-design-patterns.md). That article answers whether you need a proxy; this one answers how much it costs when you do. All prices are list prices from official provider pages fetched Aug 5, 2026 — pricing changes; verify before committing.

TL;DR

There are three different pricing models, and picking the wrong one can cost 10-100x more for the same job:

Model What you pay for Who it fits Entry price (Aug 2026)
Datacenter proxy pool per IP / month You run your own crawler, site is robots-friendly, moderate volume Webshare 100 IPs = $2.99/mo (10 free)
Residential proxy per GB of traffic Geo-targeting or sites that block datacenter IPs; you run your own crawler $2.25-$3.75/GB at modest volume (Webshare/Decodo)
Managed scrape API per successful request/1k You want proxies+retries+rendering+CAPTCHA handled; fastest to ship Zyte from $0.13/1k; ScraperAPI $0.49/1k; Firecrawl $0.83/1k

Cheapest per use case:

  • Polite scraping of a robots-allowed site (any volume): $0 — no proxy. Reuse the article's tiered approach (Crawlee starts at [null]). Only add proxies if actually blocked.
  • Datacenter rotation for cheap scaling: Webshare — 100 proxies for $2.99/mo (https://www.webshare.io/pricing). At $0.018-$0.03/IP/mo, datacenter IPs are ~100-300x cheaper than residential bandwidth.
  • Managed API at scale, simple sites: Zyte PAYG, $0.13-$0.23/1k for easy tiers (https://www.zyte.com/pricing/) — the cheapest on-paper per-request. ScrapeOps Aggregator is the flexible aggregator at $0.36/1k (https://scrapeops.io/proxy-aggregator/).
  • Residential for geo/anti-bot, per-GB: Webshare $2.25/GB @100GB or Decodo (ex-Smartproxy) $3.75/GB entry; IPRoyal if you want pay-as-you-go with no expiry ($7.35/GB small, $5.51/GB @10GB); Bright Data is the premium option (list $8/GB, ~$4/GB with promo).
  • Hardest anti-bot targets: Bright Data Web Unlocker $1.50/1k (5k free/mo) bundles unblocking+CAPTCHA (https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker); Zyte's highest tiers handle advanced sites.
  • AI-agent friendly: Firecrawl hosted — free 1,000/mo, $0.83/1k at Standard (https://firecrawl.dev/pricing.md) — or self-host Firecrawl/Crawl4AI for infra cost only. Crawlbase gives 20,000 free requests (https://crawlbase.com/pricing).

The headline insight: managed scrape APIs charge per successful response, raw proxies charge per GB. For ~1MB HTML pages, Zyte's $0.13/1k = roughly $0.13/GB-equivalent, while residential bandwidth runs $2.25-$8/GB — so the managed API is often 10-30x cheaper than raw residential bandwidth and does more work for you. Raw residential only wins when you need full control of your own Crawlee/Scrapy pipeline, or pages are tiny.

Part 1 — The three pricing models, and what's actually cheap

1.1 Datacenter proxy pools (per IP/month) — the "cheap rotation" option

Datacenter (DC) proxies come from cloud/data-center IP ranges. They're easily detected by anti-bot systems, but for a robots-allowed site they're all you'd ever need, and the price is tiny:

  • Webshare: 10 proxies free; 100 IPs $2.99/mo ($0.0299/IP), 1,000 IPs $26.91 ($0.0269/IP), 5,000 $119.60 ($0.0239/IP), 60,000 $1,076 ($0.0179/IP). Yearly billing cuts up to 60%. (https://www.webshare.io/pricing)
  • Webshare static residential (ISP): $0.30/IP → $0.225/IP @10,000 (https://www.webshare.io/pricing).
  • Apify: 5 DC IPs on Free, then ~$1/IP on Starter down to ~$0.60/IP (https://apify.com/pricing).

Rule of thumb: ~$0.02-0.03/IP/mo for shared datacenter IPs. If your crawler is polite (per the companion article), a 100-1,000 IP pool at $3-$27/mo is already massive headroom.

1.2 Residential proxies (per GB of traffic) — the expensive axis

Residential IPs ride on real end-user connections (Bright Data claims 400M+; Oxylabs 175M+), so they pass most anti-bot checks — and that's why they're priced per-GB at an order of magnitude more. Verified list prices (Aug 2026):

Provider Entry Effective price/GB Notes
Bright Data PAYG $8.00 list (→ ~$4.00 with 50% promo); $3.50/GB @ $499/mo, $2.50/GB @ $1,999/mo 400M+ IPs, free trial (no card); KYC required
Oxylabs 5 GB / $30/mo $6.00 → $2.50/GB @ 1 TB 175M+ IPs
IPRoyal PAYG, $10 deposit $7.35 (1 GB) → $5.51 (10 GB) → $1.75 @ 10 TB no expiry, no contracts
Smartproxy → Decodo 3 GB / $11.25/mo $3.75 → $2.75 @ 100 GB, from $2.00 enterprise 115M+ IPs
SOAX Builder $200/mo $3.00 tier-1 (US/EU) → from $0.85 enterprise credit-based (1 credit = $1)
Webshare 1 GB / $3.50 $3.50 (1 GB) → $2.25 @ 100 GB → $1.40 @ 3,000 GB monthly; yearly: $1.58/GB @100GB, $0.98/GB @3TB
ScrapeOps resi aggregator $15/mo / 3 GB $5.00 → $2.49 @ 100 GB → $2.00 @ 500 GB routes to many pools
Apify resi add-on — $8.00 (Starter) → $7.00 (Business) bundles with actor platform

Sources: https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies · https://oxylabs.io/pricing · https://iproyal.com/pricing/residential-proxies/ · https://decodo.com/proxies/residential-proxies/pricing · https://soax.com/pricing · https://www.webshare.io/pricing · https://scrapeops.io/proxy-aggregator/ · https://apify.com/pricing

What a GB buys: providers don't publish "pages per GB," and bandwidth accounting includes request headers + response (Bright Data FAQ, https://docs.brightdata.com/proxy-networks/residential/introduction). A reasonable planning estimate is ~1,000 HTML pages (≈0.5-1 MB each) per GB — so $2.25/GB ≈ $2.25 per 1,000 pages. That's the number to compare against the per-request APIs below.

1.3 Managed scraping APIs (per successful request) — the "everything included" axis

These bundle proxies + retries + JS rendering + CAPTCHA solving + geo-targeting into one HTTP call, charging only for successful responses. That's a fundamentally different cost unit than bandwidth.

Provider Free tier Entry paid Effective per 1k Notes
Zyte $5 credit trial PAYG $0.13 (Simple) - $1.27 (Advanced) HTTP body; $1.01-$16.08 browser-rendered 5 difficulty tiers by site; DC+resi+mobile auto-rotated; $500/mo commitment → from $0.06/1k
ScrapeOps Aggregator 1,000 credits $9/mo $0.36 (25k credits) → $0.083 @ 3M routes to 15+ smart-proxy APIs; resi routing = 10x credits, render_js = 10x
ScraperAPI 1,000 credits (5k trial) Hobby $49/mo $0.49 (100k credits) → $0.095 @ 5M premium resi+mobile by default; domain multipliers (Amazon 5x, Google 25x)
Crawlbase 20,000 requests Smart AI Proxy $149/mo ~$0.75 (200k credits, DC); resi at $229/mo 1 credit = 1 request; JS = 2 credits
Bright Data Web Unlocker 5,000/mo PAYG $1.50 → $1.30 @ Scale residential-grade unblocking + CAPTCHA + rendering
Firecrawl 1,000/mo Hobby $16/mo (annual) $3.20 (5k) → $0.83 @ 100k (Standard $83/mo) agent-friendly: markdown/JSON, MCP; self-hostable (AGPL)
Apify $5 usage/mo Starter $29/mo ~$0.20/CU-h compute + resi $8/GB pay for compute + proxies separately

Sources: https://www.zyte.com/pricing/ · https://scrapeops.io/proxy-aggregator/ · https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing · https://crawlbase.com/pricing · https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker · https://firecrawl.dev/pricing.md · https://apify.com/pricing

Why the unit matters: Zyte's $0.13/1k for a "Simple" site is roughly $0.13 per GB of response body — versus $2.25-$8/GB for raw residential. Even Bright Data's residential-grade unlocker ($1.50/1k) beats its own raw residential bandwidth ($2.50-$8/GB) on page-sized responses. Managed APIs win on cost-per-page and save you the engineering of proxies, retries, and rendering.

Part 2 — Worked example: 100,000 pages/month of a robots-allowed site

Assume ~1 MB HTML per page ≈ 100 GB/month of raw traffic, polite crawler, no anti-bot wall.

Option Monthly cost Effort
No proxy (Crawlee/Scrapy, polite defaults) $0 write own crawler
Datacenter rotation (Webshare 1,000 IPs) $26.91 write own crawler
Zyte API (Simple tier, PAYG) $13 (100k × $0.13/1k) API call per page
ScrapeOps Aggregator $29 (250k credits) API call per page
ScraperAPI Hobby $49 (100k credits) API call per page
Firecrawl Standard $83 (100k credits) API call + markdown/JSON for agents
Webshare rotating residential (100 GB) $225 write own crawler
Bright Data residential PAYG $800 ($8/GB, or ~$400 w/ promo) write own crawler

For a robots-allowed site the answer is unambiguous: $0 first (you likely never get blocked if you follow the companion article's rate-limit pattern), then Webshare DC if you want IP diversity cheaply, then a per-request API if you'd rather not run infrastructure. Residential bandwidth is the most expensive option here — reserve it for sites that actually block datacenter/automated traffic or need geo-targeting.

For a hard site (Cloudflare/DataDome, geo-locked): budget the residential-grade managed tier instead — Bright Data Web Unlocker $1.50/1k or Zyte's higher difficulty tiers — because raw residential bandwidth still leaves you to build retries, rendering, and CAPTCHA handling yourself.

Part 3 — Recommendations per use case

1. Polite scraping, robots-allowed, any volume → $0. No proxy. Tiered escalation built into your crawler (Crawlee tieredProxyUrls: [[null], ...] https://crawlee.dev/docs/guides/proxy-management) means you only touch a proxy if you're actually blocked.

2. Cheapest insurance / modest scale-up → Webshare datacenter. 10 free proxies to test; $2.99/mo for 100 IPs. Perfect for a polite crawler that just needs more than one egress IP. Don't expect it to defeat real anti-bot systems (the companion article's caveat).

3. Build vs buy at scale → Zyte or ScrapeOps. Zyte is the cheapest per-request at easy tiers and handles everything (IP rotation across DC/residential/mobile automatically); ScrapeOps gives you an aggregator + a cheap datacenter default with optional per-request "residential" upgrade. Both free-tier start small.

4. Agent/LLM data extraction → Firecrawl (or self-host). 1,000 scrapes/mo free, $0.83/1k at Standard, official MCP server + agent skill (https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server), respects robots.txt by default. For $0-at-scale, self-host Firecrawl (AGPL, docker-compose) or Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0, Docker + MCP) per the companion article.

5. Geo-targeting or genuinely blocked sites → residential per-GB or managed unblocker. Cheapest per-GB at modest volume: Decodo $3.75/GB entry or Webshare $2.25/GB @100GB; IPRoyal if you want no-expiry PAYG and dislike commitments. For the hardest targets, Bright Data Web Unlocker $1.50/1k (5,000 free/mo) is the "it just works" price point; Zyte's Advanced tier ($1.27/1k PAYG) is the alternative.

6. Always avoid → free public proxy lists. Rejected in the companion article: "easy for websites to detect, throttle, or block," only for tests (https://www.scraperapi.com/blog/best-10-free-proxies-and-free-proxy-lists-for-web-scraping/).

Part 4 — Caveats that change the numbers

  • Pricing is volatile. Several providers run standing promotions (Bright Data's 50%-off coupon, Webshare's 50%-off banners); list price ≠ street price. Verify on the day you buy.
  • Bandwidth accounting bites. Residential "per GB" counts headers + responses both directions, and IPRoyal's FAQ warns traffic "runs out fast" partly due to rotation/keep-alive overhead (https://help.iproyal.com/en/articles/12782215-why-your-traffic-seems-to-run-out-quickly).
  • Site difficulty tiers. Zyte/ScraperAPI/Crawlbase price by how hard a specific site is to scrape (5 tiers, or domain multipliers like Amazon=5x, Google=25x). A cheap "Simple" price only applies if your target is actually simple.
  • Credits vs requests. "1 credit" isn't uniform: Crawlbase JS = 2 credits, Firecrawl JSON/enhanced mode = +4 credits, ScrapeOps residential = 10x credits. Always compute your effective per-request cost.
  • Commitment requirements. SOAX's cheap per-GB tiers require $200-$3,000/mo plans; Oxylabs' $5/GB needs a $100/mo plan. Pay-as-you-go (Bright Data, IPRoyal, Zyte, ScraperAPI) costs more per unit but has no minimum.
  • Self-host vs hosted. For a robots-allowed site, self-hosting Firecrawl/Crawl4AI or running Crawlee/Scrapy on a $5 VPS means the only cost is your compute — no per-request or per-GB fees at all.

Sources

  • Bright Data residential: https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies · https://brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network
  • Bright Data Web Unlocker: https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-unlocker · Web Scraper API: https://brightdata.com/pricing/web-scraper
  • Oxylabs residential: https://oxylabs.io/pricing · https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy-pool
  • IPRoyal residential: https://iproyal.com/pricing/residential-proxies/ · trial: https://help.iproyal.com/en/articles/7222620-do-you-offer-a-free-trial · traffic: https://help.iproyal.com/en/articles/12782215-why-your-traffic-seems-to-run-out-quickly
  • Smartproxy/Decodo residential: https://smartproxy.com/pricing → https://decodo.com/proxies/residential-proxies/pricing
  • SOAX: https://soax.com/pricing · https://soax.com/proxies/residential
  • Webshare: https://www.webshare.io/pricing
  • ScrapeOps: https://scrapeops.io/proxy-aggregator/ · request costs: https://scrapeops.io/docs/web-scraping-proxy-api-aggregator/account/request-costs/
  • Zyte API: https://www.zyte.com/pricing/
  • ScraperAPI: https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing · free proxies: https://www.scraperapi.com/blog/best-10-free-proxies-and-free-proxy-lists-for-web-scraping/
  • Crawlbase: https://crawlbase.com/pricing
  • Apify: https://apify.com/pricing
  • Firecrawl: https://firecrawl.dev/pricing.md · MCP: https://github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl-mcp-server
  • Crawlee proxy management (tiered, starts at no proxy): https://crawlee.dev/docs/guides/proxy-management
  • Companion article on this site: Polite Web Scraping: Rate-Limit Design Patterns