How Much Proxy Traffic Do I Need?

GB per month = requests per month × KB per response ÷ 1,000,000

What 1 GB of proxy traffic covers depends almost entirely on the response size. For scale, the HTTP Archive's Web Almanac 2025, page weight measures the median web page at about 2.2 MB on mobile and 2.4 MB on desktop when fully loaded, with its HTML at about 33-35 KB (transfer sizes of home pages; third-party figures, not ProxyField data). Product and results pages often carry more HTML than that, so the rows below use cautious example inputs, not measurements:

Measure your own size. Send a few hundred typical requests through the proxy and read the change in the dashboard's real-time usage, or log the response sizes in your code. Then add a margin, for example 10-20%, for retries, redirects and pages that come back larger than expected.

50,000 product pages a month need under 2 GB as lean HTML, about 5 GB at 100 KB per page and about 100 GB in a full headless browser. With one residential purchase at that volume's tier:

The way you fetch decides the bill more than the page count: the same 50,000 pages cost $5.90 or $298.80. Test 500-1,000 of your real product URLs with the Easy Trial before a larger purchase. Proxies for scraping, with a cost table by job, are on web scraping proxies.

Monthly totals for common jobs, with the example sizes above and one residential purchase at that volume's tier. Inputs are examples; replace them with yours.

The last 2 rows are the same job: blocking what you do not need cuts its traffic by three quarters. Mobile proxies cost $0.50/GB more in each band.

ProxyField counts proxy traffic per GB and deducts it from your balance:

• One rate for the whole purchase. The rate for your volume tier applies to the entire purchase: residential $2.95/GB for 1-9 GB, $2.79 from 10 GB, $2.65 from 50 GB, $2.49 from 100 GB, $2.29 from 250 GB, $2.09 from 500 GB and $1.95 from 1,000 GB. From 1 TB, the price is individual: contact sales.
• No monthly reset. There is no subscription, and the traffic never expires: buy 100 GB and spread it over a year if you like.
• One balance. Residential and mobile draw on the same balance, and the dashboard shows usage in real time and the gigabytes left.
• No surcharges for countries, requests or threads.

Which directions and which requests are counted: both directions (upload and download), including a site's error responses; a connection the gateway refuses (407, 402, 502) costs nothing. All purchases are final, so size the first order with a test rather than a guess. The full price table is on pricing.

Because the meter at the proxy sees every byte that passes through it, not only the page you wanted. The usual causes, from the most common:

1. Browser assets. A browser loads every image, font, script, stylesheet, ad and tracker on the page. By the Web Almanac medians, a loaded page (about 2.2 MB) is dozens of times its HTML (about 33 KB).
2. Retries and redirects. Every attempt transfers data, even when you see one result, and a redirect chain fetches several responses for one page.
3. A new connection per request. Each new HTTPS connection goes through a CONNECT tunnel with its own TLS handshake; the gateway does not decrypt it, so the handshake bytes pass through the proxy like the page does.
4. Uncompressed responses. A client that does not ask for compression downloads several times more text.
5. Other tools still running. A browser profile, a phone, a second scraper or a scheduled job that uses the same login or allowlisted IP draws on the same balance; so do a browser's background requests (updates, extensions) when the whole system uses the proxy.
6. What your logs miss. Code that logs only response bodies leaves out headers, failed attempts and redirects, so the meter's count is higher than your log's.

Compare your logs with the dashboard:

1. Stop every job and note the gigabytes left in the dashboard.
2. Send 100 typical requests and log the bytes of each response in your code (proxy management has a script).
3. Read the dashboard again. A small, steady gap over your log is normal (headers, handshakes). A large gap points to retries, redirects or browser assets.
4. If usage keeps growing while every job is stopped, something else is using the login. Check other tools, browser profiles and devices, and on servers switch to the IP allowlist, so only an allowlisted machine can use it.

From the most to the least, per request:

1. Video and large files. A single video or file download can outweigh thousands of HTML pages.
2. Headless browsers. A browser downloads everything on the page, often dozens of times the HTML alone.
3. Retries and redirects. Each failed attempt still transfers data.
4. Heavy HTML pages. Large product, search and social pages carry inline data and markup.
5. Uncompressed responses. Text without gzip or Brotli is several times larger.
6. JSON APIs. The lightest: just the data, compressed.

If your usage is far above your estimate, the cause is almost always one of the first 3.

• Block what you do not parse. In a headless browser such as Playwright, abort images, fonts and media before they load:

  JavaScriptCopy JavaScript code

  await page.route("**/*", (route) =>
    ["image", "font", "media"].includes(route.request().resourceType())
      ? route.abort()
      : route.continue()
  );

• Fetch the data, not the page. Many sites load their data from a JSON endpoint you can call directly, at a fraction of the size.

• Ask for compression. Send Accept-Encoding: gzip (add br only if your client decodes Brotli); Python requests and most HTTP clients send gzip by default.

• Do not re-download what has not changed. Cache responses, and send If-None-Match (with the page's ETag) or If-Modified-Since where the site supports them.

• Retry with a limit. Cap retries at 2 or 3, with a pause, so a blocked page does not eat traffic in a loop.

• Route only target traffic through the proxy. Analytics, CDNs and your own APIs do not need the proxy; send them directly.

• Use datacenter traffic where it works. For tolerant targets, ProxyField's rotating datacenter proxies cost from $0.29/GB down to $0.22/GB.

More setup tips are in how to set up a proxy.

With a rotating gateway, you do not count proxies: every request can leave from a new IP in a pool of 412M+ residential IPs, and what you plan is concurrency. ProxyField allows unlimited concurrent threads, so start with a few, raise them while the success rate holds and slow down at the first 429 Too Many Requests responses from the site.

You count IPs only when each identity needs its own address:

Dedicated datacenter IPv4 costs $1.39 per IP and dedicated ISP IPs from $2.29, each for a 30-day term you renew yourself. Managing several accounts of your own or your clients' is an allowed use; creating fake accounts or fake engagement is not (acceptable use policy).

1. Measure. Buy the Easy Trial, 1 GB for $2.95 (mobile $3.45), with no minimum purchase. Run a few hundred requests of your job and read the usage.
2. Multiply the measured GB per request by your requests per month, add the margin, and pick the tier.
3. Check the tier edge. The tier rate applies to the whole purchase, so near an edge more can cost less: 99 GB × $2.65 = $262.35, while 100 GB × $2.49 = $249.00.
4. Buy ahead if it suits you. Traffic never expires, so a larger purchase at a lower tier keeps its value until you use it.

The same pool and quality run at 1 GB as at 1 TB: there is no separate trial pool, so the trial measures the real thing.