How did we calculate this table?
Your company needs to collect information from the web by sending 1,000 HTTP requests per hour to a specific website. You write the scraper code and run it through a server. The target website allows 50 requests per minute from the same IP before blocking your scraper. Now, you have to purchase more proxies.
Assuming you choose datacenter proxies,
You don’t want to share IPs, so you buy 200 dedicated proxy IPs from a datacenter. You code the integration of the scraper with the new data-center proxies for 2 hours and then run the new program. This time, it takes 3 days for your target website to detect your scraper. Once your proxies are detected, you’ll have to purchase new proxies and repeat this process, checking each day to make sure the proxies haven’t been detected.
Cost per month (all numbers are from real customers):
* 200 dedicated IPs: $500
* Bandwidth: (1000 requests X 20KB per request X 24 hours X 30 days = 14.5GB): $3 per month
* Developer (2 hours of integration X 10 + 1 hour every 3 days for managing the proxies): 3 days of work a month or $900
Your total cost per month will be at least $1400 for just these things alone, and the salary of $30 per hour for a developer is very conservative. Additionally, this doesn’t account for lack of information reliability if your target website sends misinformation before blocking you or if your information flow is cut every few days, which can be detrimental to your brand and your revenue stream.
Assuming you choose Bright Data residential proxies:
You buy a basic package of 40GB with access to unlimited residential IPs. It takes 2 hours to integrate your scraper. Due to an average of 3 million residential IPs available each day, your target website can’t detect your scraper, allowing you to focus on other projects.
The bandwidth and unlimited IPs cost just $500 per month (prices subject to change slightly). Your information is always reliable because your requests are always successful and access is never cut off in the middle of the month. When your business grows as a result of this scraping and your projects exceed 600MB each month, the difference in costs can be much higher than just $1000.
Bright Data also allows you to suspend your account when not in use, so your cost can be lower than $500 per month. Start by using $5 of datacenter free traffic to test Bright Data’s benefits and then ask for access to our residential network for cheap and reliable data collection.
