7 Ways to Cut Your Proxy Bill by 60% Without Losing Success Rate
We see the usage graphs of thousands of scraping operations, and the same pattern shows up everywhere: 70% or more of total bandwidth goes to requests that did not need premium IPs. Here are the seven fixes that consistently cut bills the most, ordered by effort.
1. Segment traffic by target difficulty
Route unprotected targets through datacenter and protected ones through residential. This single change typically moves half of total volume to a pool that costs 33% less. It is a routing table, not a rewrite.
2. Kill media downloads
Images, fonts and video routinely account for 60 to 80% of page weight. If you parse HTML or JSON, block media at the client level. Playwright and Puppeteer both support request interception in a few lines. Same data, one fifth of the GB.
3. Use HEAD and conditional requests where possible
Monitoring for changes does not require re-downloading the page. ETags and If-Modified-Since headers turn most polling into near-zero bandwidth checks.
4. Cache what does not change
Category trees, sitemaps, product taxonomies: crawl once a day, not once per job. A shared cache in front of your scrapers deduplicates a surprising share of requests across your team.
5. Match rotation to the actual block window
Rotating every request feels safe but wastes session setup and defeats caching on the target side. If your target blocks after roughly 40 requests per IP, sticky sessions of 30 requests are both faster and less suspicious.
6. Compress responses
Send Accept-Encoding and make sure your client actually decompresses. Text-heavy endpoints shrink 5 to 10x with gzip or brotli. Traffic is billed as transferred, so compression is a direct discount.
7. Burst jobs belong on time billing
If you run occasional massive crawls, an Unlimited Residential session at $5 per hour usually beats per-GB billing once you sustain more than 7 GB per hour. A 6-hour, 300 GB crawl costs $30 on hourly billing vs $225 per GB. Know your break-even point.