# Per-GB billing

Per-GB billing charges for the volume of data that passes through the proxy, measured in gigabytes in both directions, rather than for the number of addresses or the length of a rental. It is the standard model for residential and mobile pools, where the scarce resource is household or cellular bandwidth. The price per gigabyte usually falls with the size of the purchase, and the traffic you buy is either valid for a period or, at some providers, forever.


## 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

**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.

Source: https://proxshift.com/glossary/per-gb-billing