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Team playbook

How Many Proxies Does Your Team Need?

C By Cheapest Proxies team Updated

Before buying, most teams ask how many proxies they need, and with our service the honest answer changes the question. All four proxy types are billed by bandwidth (per gigabyte), and the residential, mobile and premium plans draw on large rotating pools, so nobody buys a fixed number of IPs. Two other questions size the order: how much data will the work transfer, and does it need concurrency or particular locations?

This guide sizes a workload by data volume instead of IP count, then turns the estimate into a budget with the proxy calculator. Throughout, the work is assumed to be legitimate and carried out within each site's terms of service.

C
Cheapest Proxies team

We write these guides for e-commerce, marketing and agency teams that pay for proxies by the gigabyte.

Why you buy gigabytes, not IPs

On rotating residential, mobile and premium plans, the pool spreads traffic over many addresses automatically, so a single gigabyte of allowance can pass through thousands of different IPs. That is why orders are sized by the volume of data the work moves rather than by a count of addresses.

The exception is work that needs one consistent address per account or session. Static residential IPs, also called ISP proxies, are supplied through our Residential Premium plan and billed per GB like everything else; for that kind of work, also count how many fixed addresses must run at the same time.

Estimating the data your work will use

The basic sum is number of pages × average page size, which gives the total data. Two choices move that figure most:

  • Plain HTTP or a headless browser. A text-only HTML page can weigh tens of kilobytes; the same page rendered with images and scripts in a headless browser can reach several megabytes, often 10× as much or more.
  • Only the assets you need. Downloading just the HTML you parse, and skipping images nobody uses, cuts consumption sharply.

Multiply the per-page size by the page count, allow a margin for retries, and the result is a realistic gigabyte figure to put in the budget.

Typical monthly volumes by workload

The table shows ballpark monthly data for common business workloads. Treat each figure as a starting point, then refine it with the proxy calculator and the real-time usage figures in your dashboard.

Ballpark monthly data per workload
Workload Method Rough data/month
Light rank tracking Plain HTTP Under 1 GB
Mid-size price monitoring Plain HTTP A few GB
Large catalogue scraping Plain HTTP Tens of GB
Rendered (headless) scraping Headless browser Many GB (10× plain)

Where concurrency and location come in

Volume is not the only consideration. Two other needs shape the order:

  • Concurrency. Running requests in parallel barely changes the total data, but it shortens the time a job takes. Our pools support high concurrency and we do not impose request rate limits, so a small IP count will not hold your team back.
  • Locations. A need for particular countries or cities decides which pool you choose, not how many IPs you buy. Coverage spans 55+ countries.

For work that needs a stable session, such as one account per client, count the static IPs that must run in parallel as well as the data.

Turning the estimate into an order

Put your gigabyte estimate into the proxy calculator and check the pricing page, where per-GB rates start at $3.50 for datacenter, $3.99 for residential, $4.50 for mobile and $6.50 for premium. Then buy what the estimate calls for. Every order carries a fixed 30-day validity with no surprise renewals, so a sensible way to test the estimate is to start small, watch usage in the dashboard and top up when needed.

Match the pool to the workflow

Every pool is billed per GB and run from the same dashboard, so one team can keep low-cost volume work and high-trust checks side by side.

Covering several markets in one report? MIX packages combine multi-country residential traffic in a single order. Agencies buying on behalf of clients can apply for the reseller programme.

Get your team running

Per-GB pricing from $3.50 · 55+ countries · instant delivery · 30-day validity · no traffic logs · 24/7 human support

  1. 1

    Size the job

    Pick a proxy type in the proxy calculator and enter the gigabytes you expect to use to see the order total.

  2. 2

    Order and pay

    Choose the pool on the proxies page and pay by card through Stripe or in crypto through Cryptomus. Each order is billed per GB and does not renew on its own.

  3. 3

    Share access

    Credentials appear in the dashboard as soon as payment clears. Add them to each tool with a login or an IP whitelist, then send one test request before the real job starts.

Questions team leads ask

On rotating residential, mobile and premium plans you buy bandwidth rather than a set number of IPs, so size the order by the data the work will transfer. Count IPs as well only for static work that needs one fixed address per account or session.
Because rotating pools spread traffic over thousands of IPs on your behalf. The cost driver is the data your team moves, not the number of addresses it happens to pass through.
Take the number of pages, multiply by the average page size and add a margin for retries. Plain HTTP pages are small; rendering in a headless browser can use 10 times as much. The proxy calculator converts the estimate into gigabytes.
No. Our pools support high concurrency, so parallel requests make a job finish sooner without a bigger IP count. Concurrency changes how fast a job runs far more than how much data it uses.
Use static IPs. Static residential (ISP) addresses come through the Residential Premium plan and are billed per GB, like every plan. Then work out how many consistent addresses must run in parallel, since that is what session-based work depends on.

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