What counts as a gigabyte#
Everything that crosses the gateway: request and response bodies, headers and TLS records, in both directions. A 350 KB HTML page costs about 350 KB; a page that also loads 3 MB of images costs 3.35 MB. Connections that fail before reaching the destination are usually not billed.
Estimating a job#
| Job | Typical size per unit | 100,000 units |
|---|---|---|
| HTML-only page fetch | 100 to 500 KB | 10 to 50 GB |
| Product page with JSON API | 50 to 200 KB | 5 to 20 GB |
| Headless browser with images | 1 to 5 MB | 100 to 500 GB |
| SERP page | 200 to 800 KB | 20 to 80 GB |
Keeping the bill down#
- Block images, fonts, media and trackers in headless browsers; HTML is a small fraction of a page.
- Prefer JSON endpoints to rendered pages when they exist.
- Cache what does not change; re-fetch prices, not descriptions.
- Use datacenter or ISP addresses (unmetered or pooled) for targets that do not need a residential exit.
How it works at ProxShift#
ProxShift residential traffic costs from $2.45 per GB at 1 GB down to $0.95 at 10 TB, at one rate worldwide; the tier of a purchase applies to every gigabyte in it, both directions are counted, failed connections are not, and the traffic never expires.
Questions people ask#
Is a GB 1,000 or 1,024 megabytes?
Providers differ; ProxShift counts decimal gigabytes (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes) and shows usage in bytes in the API so nothing is ambiguous.