Proxy Pricing Playbook - September 2024
Let's discover what's happening in the proxy market
This is Proxy Pricing Playbook, a new recurring series of articles from The Web Scraping Club. Every three months I’ll analyze how the costs of proxies are moving, to understand market trends and offerings.
All the prices collected for this article are available at this link.
Data collection methodology
Comparing apples with apples when it comes to proxies is challenging: every company has its own way of billing its customers, pricing plans, credits, and so on.
In the hope of creating the clearest picture possible, I’ve followed these rules:
I include only proxies and unblockers, but not APIs that include data parsing functions like Zyte API or E-commerce APIs from other vendors, otherwise, they would be too difficult to compare.
I’m differentiating between pricing plans and pay-as-you-go prices (column “Minimum Commitment” = No). When a provider offers for the same product a plan and a pay-as-you-go price, you will find two rows in the excel with two values of the column “Minimum Commitment”
These prices don’t take into account coupon codes or offers that are not explicated on the provider's website pricing page. Data is extracted exclusively from there.
In the case of plans, if there’s the option to be billed annually or monthly, I’ll use the monthly price to show coherent prices between different providers
Data center proxies
Comparing the July version of the Playbook with the September one, the market of datacenter proxies didn’t move too much.
We can safely say that the price plateaued to 0.6$ per GB, while we have still some differences in pay-per-IP plans between vendors.
Residential proxies
Even the residential proxy market has been quite stable, except for NetNut which has reduced the cost per GB from seven to six USD.
If in 2023 eight USD per GB was considered a bargain for a residential proxy, more and more established providers are pushing prices down, especially when purchasing plans.
Helping you choose the best architecture for your scraping needs, including proxies, is one of the activities we’ll cover during our consultation path.
If you’re struggling with your web scraping operations and need help, or simply want to check that everything is at its place in your company, you can book a consultation call and see what we can do for you.
ISP Proxies
In this category, we mainly have two different pricing models: pay per GB, on average 14/15 USD, and Pay per IP. In this case, depending if the IPs are shared or dedicated, prices can vary from half a dollar per IP to five.
Even in this category, the most interesting movement we had was made by NetNut who lowered its price per GB from 17 to 14.4 USD.
Mobile Proxies
Not so long time ago, mobile proxies were billed like 40 USD per GB by most of the providers.
Today the average price is around eight dollars per GB, and the trend keeps consolidating. The latest company to slash its prices these months has been Infatica, which changed its Pay Per Use price from 18 to 8 dollars, while its plans start from 7.5 USD instead of 15 observed two months ago.
Unblocker proxies
Unblockers are billed mainly in two ways: per GB or per Requests. The price per GB is established at around fourteen dollars, with the exception of Geonode which is selling its unblocker for four dollars per GB. I wasn’t aware of this offer (and honestly also of their unblocker, so I’ll add it to the new Unblocker Benchmark coming in the next weeks).
The price per 1k requests instead is around 3 dollars, with the exception of Zenrows. They have pricing plans based on credits, where every request consumes one credit but only a limited amount of GB for proxies are included in the plan, so it’s difficult to compare with other vendors where proxies are bundled in the unblockers. In any case, the most interesting move of this month comes from Zenrows: in the July Playbook I saw that there were two different prices, according to the difficulty of the website, this is no longer true and the price is the same for all the websites and aligned to the cheapest of the two previous plans.
Oxycon 2024
Oxycon 2024, scheduled for the 25th of September, is coming and promises to be interesting as always. From AI panels to advanced data collection strategies, it opens the season of web scraping conferences.
Here’s the full agenda (GMT +3 Time), so secure your spot by subscribing to the official page of the event.
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