# How Much Proxy Data Do I Need? Real Numbers

> A GB of proxy buys 3,000 to 20,000 HTML pages or about 350 rendered ones. We measured 11 major sites: the real cost per page, the formula, how to cut usage.

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# How Much Proxy Data Do I Need? Real Numbers

ProxiesSep 3, 2026·8 min read·By [Aldo Morese](https://quanticdata.io/about/), founder of QuanticData

On this page [What actually counts as a gigabyte](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#what-actually-counts-as-a-gigabyte) [What we measured: 11 major pages, 3 September 2026](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#what-we-measured-11-major-pages-3-september-2026) [The formula](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#the-formula) [How to cut usage by 5 to 20 times](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#how-to-cut-usage-by-5-to-20-times) [When per-page pricing beats per-gigabyte](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#when-per-page-pricing-beats-per-gigabyte) [Sizing by volume is only half the question](/blog/how-much-proxy-data-do-i-need/#sizing-by-volume-is-only-half-the-question)

One gigabyte of residential proxy traffic buys roughly 3,000 to 20,000 pages if you fetch the HTML and let it compress, or about 350 pages if you load them in a real browser with images, scripts and fonts. The spread is that wide because the bandwidth a page costs depends on what you fetch, not on the site. Below is what we measured on 11 major pages, the formula that turns a monthly page count into gigabytes, and the settings that move you from the expensive end of the range to the cheap one.

## What actually counts as a gigabyte

Proxy providers meter bytes on the wire, in both directions, including headers and TLS overhead, and the body they count is the *compressed* one the server sent. That distinction matters more than anything else on this page. A modern HTML page is served gzip- or brotli-compressed, and text compresses well: in our measurement the decoded HTML was 4.7 to 10 times larger than what crossed the wire. Two consequences follow. A tool that reports “page size” after decoding overstates your proxy usage several times over. And a client that forgets to send `Accept-Encoding: gzip, br` pays the decoded size for real.

The other large multiplier is rendering. A plain HTTP fetch downloads one document. A headless browser downloads the document plus every script, stylesheet, font, image and tracking pixel the page references. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac puts the median total page weight at 2,862 KB on desktop and 2,559 KB on mobile, against an HTML document that is usually the smallest part. Rendering the same page costs 10 to 50 times the bandwidth of fetching it.

## What we measured: 11 major pages, 3 September 2026

We fetched one representative page from each site with a plain HTTP client, a Chrome TLS profile and US residential exits, and recorded the decoded HTML size. Where the server sent a `Content-Length` header we also have the exact compressed size on the wire; the others were streamed in chunks, so the wire size is estimated from the measured compression ratios.

| Page | Decoded HTML | On the wire | Pages per GB |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Wikipedia article | 238 KB | 47 KB (measured, gzip) | ≈ 21,000 |
| LinkedIn company page | 483 KB | 49 KB (measured, gzip) | ≈ 20,000 |
| BBC News front | 383 KB | 63 KB (measured, gzip) | ≈ 16,000 |
| GitHub repository | 311 KB | ≈ 60 KB (est.) | ≈ 16,000 |
| Reddit subreddit | 555 KB | ≈ 90 KB (est., brotli) | ≈ 11,000 |
| Zillow city listings | 632 KB | ≈ 110 KB (est., brotli) | ≈ 9,000 |
| NYTimes front page | 1,430 KB | 302 KB (measured, gzip) | ≈ 3,300 |
| Tripadvisor hotel list | 1,676 KB | ≈ 280 KB (est., brotli) | ≈ 3,500 |
| Walmart search | 1,733 KB | ≈ 350 KB (est., gzip) | ≈ 2,900 |
| Amazon search | 1,853 KB | ≈ 370 KB (est., gzip) | ≈ 2,700 |
| Indeed job search | 2,099 KB | ≈ 350 KB (est., brotli) | ≈ 2,900 |

Two clusters. Content and reference pages cost 47 to 63 KB on the wire and give you 16,000 to 21,000 pages per gigabyte. Commerce, travel and job search pages, which inline product data and scripts into the HTML, cost 280 to 370 KB and give you about 3,000. The difference is not the proxy; it is the page. Five other sites in the same run refused the plain fetch outright, which is a different problem covered in the [403 guide](https://quanticdata.io/blog/web-scraping-403-forbidden/), and one worth remembering here: a refusal costs almost nothing in bandwidth, but if it forces you into a browser, the cost per page rises by an order of magnitude.

## The formula

```
GB per month  =  pages per month  ×  bytes per page on the wire  ×  1.1   ÷  1,000,000,000

# the 1.1 covers request headers, TLS handshakes, redirects and retries; use 1.3 if you retry aggressively
```

Three worked examples with the numbers above:

- **100,000 product search pages a month, HTML only:** 100,000 × 350 KB × 1.1 = 38.5 GB. At $0.80/GB on [Residential Basic](https://quanticdata.io/residential-proxies/) that is about $31.

- **100,000 article pages a month, HTML only:** 100,000 × 55 KB × 1.1 = 6 GB, under $5.

- **100,000 product pages rendered in a headless browser:** 100,000 × 2,800 KB × 1.1 = 308 GB, about $246. Same pages, eight times the cost of the HTML fetch.

The lesson is in the third line. Before sizing a plan, decide how many of your pages truly need JavaScript. A page whose data is in the HTML, or in a JSON blob embedded in it, should never be rendered for bandwidth reasons alone.

## How to cut usage by 5 to 20 times

1. **Send `Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br`.** Most clients do by default; some minimal ones do not. This alone is a 4 to 10 times difference, and brotli is typically 15 to 25 percent smaller than gzip on HTML.

2. **Do not render unless the data is not in the HTML.** Fetch once with a plain client and look for the data or for an embedded state object (`__NEXT_DATA__`, `window.__INITIAL_STATE__`, JSON in a script tag). The [scraping API](https://quanticdata.io/web-scraping-api/) has an `app_state` option that mines exactly those blobs, and an `engine: tls` setting that refuses to escalate to a browser, so you can measure what the cheap tier gets you.

3. **If you must render, block what you do not need.** Route images, fonts, media and third-party analytics to abort in Playwright or Puppeteer. Scripts and stylesheets usually have to load; images rarely do. This typically cuts a render from 2.8 MB to 400 to 800 KB.

4. **Prefer the site's own JSON endpoints.** Search pages often call an internal API that returns 20 to 80 KB of JSON for the same results the HTML carries in 350 KB. Recording XHR traffic once and then calling the endpoint directly is the single largest saving on commerce sites.

5. **Use conditional requests for monitoring.** `If-None-Match` with the last ETag returns a 304 with no body when nothing changed. For price monitoring on pages that change daily, that is a 95 percent reduction.

6. **Cap the body.** Stop reading after the section you need, or after a byte limit. Infinite-scroll pages and long comment threads are where a “page” quietly becomes 5 MB.

7. **Match the IP type to the target.** Static and low-security sites do not need residential bandwidth; [datacenter exits](https://quanticdata.io/datacenter-proxies/) at $0.50/GB and [IPv6](https://quanticdata.io/ipv6-proxies/) at $0.083/GB at volume exist for that. Spend residential gigabytes only where the target checks.

## When per-page pricing beats per-gigabyte

Per-GB billing and per-page billing cross over at a page weight you can compute. The scraping API charges $0.0002 per successful plain fetch regardless of size; $0.80 of residential bandwidth buys 4,000 such fetches, so the break-even is 1 GB ÷ 4,000 = 250 KB on the wire. Lighter than that, raw proxies are cheaper; heavier, the per-page API is. On our table that puts articles, Wikipedia, GitHub and Reddit on the proxy side and Amazon, Walmart, Indeed and the NYTimes front page on the API side. Rendered pages are not close: $0.001 per rendered page against 2.8 MB of bandwidth at $0.80/GB, which is $0.0022, before counting the failed renders that the API does not bill and a proxy does.

The comparison assumes every request succeeds. If a share of your fetches are blocked and retried, the per-GB cost rises with the retries, while the per-page cost does not move. The proxy side of the math is also where the [residential proxy guide](https://quanticdata.io/blog/how-to-use-a-residential-proxy/) goes into rotating versus sticky sessions; the bandwidth is the same either way, but sticky sessions avoid paying a new TLS handshake per request, which is a few KB each time.

## Sizing by volume is only half the question

Gigabytes answer “how much”. They do not answer “how fast”. If you need 1,000 pages a minute against a site that tolerates 10 requests a minute per IP, you need 100 exits in flight regardless of whether the month costs 6 GB or 300 GB, and that is a concurrency question answered in the [429 guide](https://quanticdata.io/blog/429-too-many-requests-web-scraping/). A rotating gateway decouples the two: bandwidth is what you buy, concurrency is how many connections you open, and the pool handles IP variety underneath. Size the gigabytes from the formula, size the concurrency from the target's tolerance, and revisit both after the first week of real traffic, which will tell you your actual bytes per page better than any table, including this one.

### Sources & further reading

- [HTTP Archive — Web Almanac 2025, Page Weight chapter](https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/page-weight)

- [HTTP Archive — Page Weight report (transfer size definition)](https://httparchive.org/reports/page-weight)

- [MDN — Accept-Encoding](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Headers/Accept-Encoding)

- [MDN — If-None-Match and conditional requests](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Guides/Conditional_requests)

- [Google — Brotli compression format (RFC 7932)](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7932)

## FAQ

Quick answers on how much proxy data do i need.

[Something else? Ask us →](mailto:hello@quanticdata.io)

### How many pages can I scrape with 1 GB of proxy data?

Roughly 16,000 to 21,000 content pages, 3,000 to 6,000 commerce or job-search pages, or about 350 fully rendered pages. Measured on 11 major sites on 3 September 2026: article-type HTML costs 47 to 63 KB on the wire, commerce search pages 280 to 370 KB, and a full browser load is 2.5 to 2.9 MB by the HTTP Archive medians.

### How much proxy data do I need per month?

Multiply pages per month by bytes per page on the wire, add 10 percent for headers and retries, and divide by a billion. 100,000 product pages fetched as HTML is about 38 GB; the same pages rendered in a browser is about 308 GB; 100,000 article pages is about 6 GB. Measure your own bytes per page after the first week and re-size.

### Does proxy bandwidth count compressed or uncompressed bytes?

Compressed. Providers meter what crosses the wire, which is the gzip or brotli body plus headers and TLS overhead. Decoded HTML is 4.7 to 10 times larger than the wire size in our measurement, so a client that forgets Accept-Encoding pays that multiple for real.

### Do failed requests use proxy bandwidth?

On a raw proxy plan, yes: a 403 page or a challenge costs a few KB each, and retries add up. On a pay-per-success scraping API, failed requests are not billed at all. If a large share of your traffic is blocked and retried, that difference matters more than the per-GB price.

### Is it cheaper to pay per GB or per page?

It depends on page weight. At $0.80/GB and $0.0002 per page, the break-even is 250 KB on the wire: lighter pages are cheaper on a per-GB proxy, heavier pages are cheaper per page. Rendered pages are always cheaper per page, because 2.8 MB of residential bandwidth costs about $0.0022 against $0.001 for a rendered fetch.

### How do I reduce proxy bandwidth usage?

Send Accept-Encoding so bodies are compressed, fetch HTML instead of rendering whenever the data is in the document or an embedded JSON blob, block images and fonts when you must render, call the site's own JSON endpoints where they exist, use conditional requests for monitoring, cap the body you read, and use datacenter or IPv6 exits for targets that do not check IP type.

## Size it, then measure it

Residential Basic from $0.80/GB, datacenter from $0.50/GB and IPv6 from $0.083/GB at volume, all with per-request targeting. If your pages are heavy, the web scraping API charges $0.0002 per successful page whatever its size, and never bills a failed one. Every account gets $2 of free usage a month.

[Start free — $2/month included](https://quanticdata.io/signup/)[Explore Residential Proxies from $0.80/GB](https://quanticdata.io/residential-proxies/)

## Related reading

[Proxies How to Set Up Rotating Proxies How the single rotating endpoint works, config in curl/Python/Node, sticky vs per-request sessions, and the settings that decide whether you get banned. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/how-to-set-up-rotating-proxies/) [Proxies What Is a Rotating Proxy? A rotating proxy hands out a fresh IP per request from a pool behind one endpoint. How that works, how it differs from static and sticky, and what it's for. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/what-is-a-rotating-proxy/) [Proxies Residential vs Datacenter Proxy: Which to Buy Residential and datacenter proxies differ in one fact the target can look up in a millisecond: the network the IP belongs to. Everything else, speed, price, block rate, follows from that. What the label means, a table that compares them honestly, a 100-request test that tells you which one your target requires, the cost-per-successful-page math, and when ISP or mobile is the right third answer. Read →](https://quanticdata.io/blog/residential-vs-datacenter-proxies/)

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