The proxy catalogue splits into four types — datacenter, ISP, residential and mobile — with price gaps that run several times over. Before paying for the priciest channel "just in case," or losing sessions on the cheapest one, run through this checklist. Five questions below pin down the proxy type; three scenarios after them show how to size the budget from the task itself, not the price list.

Question 1: how closely does the platform check traffic origin

If a service checks only the IP's country, a datacenter or ISP address is enough — cheaper, and stable. If the platform cross-checks the ASN, address reputation and the request history of that range, you need a residential or mobile channel that looks like a live subscriber's connection. The difference is covered in mobile versus residential proxies.

Question 2: do you need a specific country and city

Country-level targeting exists for every channel type and barely affects price. Targeting a specific city or carrier narrows the pool of live addresses, raising the chance of a reused IP and the price per gigabyte. If geolocation must be accurate to the city, budget for precise targeting up front — not after a datacenter address fails the check.

Question 3: is the load constant or a one-off

A constant task — daily monitoring, a working account, regular data collection — suits a dedicated address billed monthly: fixed price, any volume. A one-off task — testing a hypothesis, a single price scrape, a test signup — is better covered by a traffic-billed channel: you pay only for the gigabytes used.

Question 4: how much data will you push through

Residential and mobile traffic budgets are sized by page volume, not address count. A text listing page weighs 0.3–1 MB, a product card with images 2–5 MB, a feed with autoplaying video eats tens of megabytes a minute. A thousand product-card checks fit into roughly 3–5 GB, a hundred cards into 0.3–0.5 GB, a thousand text pages into about 1 GB — plug these figures in before comparing price per gigabyte.

Question 5: do you need an isolated address

If several accounts or clients must not share an IP, each profile needs its own dedicated address — datacenter, ISP or a pinned mobile channel. A shared pool with per-session rotation is fine where isolation isn't critical: one-off checks, public data collection, monitoring without logging in.

Three budget scenarios

A one-off check. Compare a competitor's prices across a hundred product cards without logging in. The platform checks only the country — take a datacenter IP; traffic runs around 0.3–0.5 GB, and disable image loading in the script to avoid spending more than needed.

Regular monitoring. Check a hundred catalogue pages daily and confirm prices and stock haven't drifted from a competitor's. The platform is moderately sensitive to traffic origin — take a residential channel with rotation; monthly usage lands around 1.5–3 GB.

A working account with a persistent login. The account must look like the same user every time, and the platform strictly cross-checks the ASN and address history — take a dedicated mobile or residential IP pinned to the profile; you pay for stability, not a one-off volume.

What not to cut corners on

The cheapest channel in any catalogue is almost always a shared datacenter pool — but it fails wherever a platform checks the ASN and reputation. Saving on channel type for a task it can't survive ends in banned sessions and retries, costing more than the price difference per gigabyte. A detailed breakdown of where savings are illusory is in cheap versus expensive proxies.

Second, don't skip checking the quality of an address already received: country, city, ASN and reputation take a minute to verify, and a problem found after an hour of work costs more than the check would have. The method is in how to check proxy quality. Third is the choice of carrier for a mobile channel — it drives NAT-pool stability and rotation speed, detailed in how to choose a mobile proxy carrier.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I start with a cheap channel and move up if problems appear?

Yes — for one-off tasks that's workable: start with a datacenter IP, and if the platform blocks you or shows a captcha, move up to residential or mobile. For regular work on the same account, pick the right type from the start so the address isn't rebuilding a history from scratch.

What's cheaper per month: a traffic package or a dedicated address?

It depends on volume. With steadily high usage, a dedicated datacenter or ISP address at a fixed price usually beats a gigabyte package. With low, irregular load, a traffic package with no monthly commitment saves money on idle time.

How do I know the budget is miscalculated before starting the task?

If the estimate isn't based on page volume and request frequency, and just grabs "extra just in case" or "the cheapest option," it almost always misses. Calculate from the scenario: page type, requests per day, required isolation level.

Current channel types, per-gigabyte prices and dedicated address terms are in the proxy section.