What is Bandwidth Pricing?
Bandwidth pricing charges for the data a proxy moves, metered per gigabyte, instead of charging per endpoint or per seat. Mobile and residential networks use it because the provider pays real carrier data costs. Rates usually step down as committed volume rises, and providers differ on what counts as billable data.
Meters normally sit at the socket and count bytes in both directions. That includes request headers, TLS handshakes, redirects, retries and responses you did not want, since a 403 page still costs you the handshake and the body. Encrypted traffic cannot be compressed or filtered on the way through, so the provider bills what your client asked for. Terms differ on failed requests, CONNECT overhead and per-request rounding, and that fine print moves an invoice more than the headline rate does.
What you load drives consumption more than how many requests you send. An HTML document is small. The same page rendered in a headless browser pulls images, fonts, third-party scripts and analytics, and can cost an order of magnitude more per view. Request interception in Puppeteer or Playwright, blocking the image, media and font resource types, is the largest single lever most teams have. Reusing sessions instead of re-handshaking, and caching static assets on your own machine, take another slice off the total.
Compare models by converting both to an effective per-gigabyte figure. Metered billing suits work that is broad and uneven - many countries, short campaigns, traffic that spikes and stops - while a flat monthly port suits one identity consuming continuously. PROXIES.SX prices bandwidth at $4/GB and steps down to $2.40/GB at volume, with free endpoints, no monthly fee and gigabytes that never expire, which is one shape a metered rate card can take.
Forecast from measurement rather than intuition. Push a hundred representative requests through the proxy, read the byte counters, then multiply out to your expected volume and add a retry factor for blocks and timeouts. Check whether unused gigabytes carry over, because plans that reset every month punish uneven workloads, and check for minimum commitments hiding underneath the volume tiers. Per-job byte accounting is worth building early, since one misconfigured crawler rendering full pages can spend more in a week than everything else you run.
Where you meet it
This lands when a month's bill arrives at several times the forecast and someone traces it to an automation job that was loading every image on every product page. It also shapes architecture, since per-gigabyte billing rewards hitting JSON endpoints over rendering pages and rewards blocking assets in the browser. Ask any provider exactly what it counts before you compare two rate cards.
Common questions
Do failed requests still use bandwidth?
On most networks, yes. A blocked request still carries DNS, a TLS handshake, headers and whatever error page came back, and retries multiply that. Providers vary on whether they exclude particular failure classes, so read the terms rather than assuming a non-200 response is free.
How much bandwidth does scraping a page use?
It depends almost entirely on whether you render it. Fetching the HTML alone usually runs from tens to a few hundred kilobytes. Loading the same page in a real browser with images, fonts and third-party scripts commonly reaches several megabytes, so the same job can differ by more than tenfold.
How do I reduce proxy bandwidth usage?
Block images, media and fonts in your automation framework, prefer JSON or API endpoints over rendered pages, reuse connections and sessions, cache static files locally, and stop retrying requests that fail the same way twice. Per-job byte counters will show you where the volume goes.
Related terms
Real 4G/5G mobile and residential IPs
PROXIES.SX runs carrier IPs in 100+ countries with HTTP and SOCKS5 on every endpoint. $4/GB down to $2.40/GB at volume, free endpoints and rotation, and your GB never expire.