Overseas rotating residential proxies are usually billed either per IP or per gigabyte. Traffic-based billing suits workloads with many requests and small payloads — but without an estimate, budgets drift fast.

Do the math first

Cost ≈ average page size × requests × unit price. At 300 KB per request and 50,000 requests a day you consume about 15 GB/day; strip images and call APIs only, bring it down to 60 KB per request, and the same workload needs roughly 3 GB/day.

Five ways to cut bandwidth

  • Hit APIs instead of pages — skip images, fonts and video;
  • Request gzip/br compression;
  • Use HEAD when you only need to know whether a resource exists;
  • Cache identical resources locally for a short TTL;
  • Page and rate-limit: validate small, then scale.

When IP-based billing is better

Account-based work that must keep the same egress over time belongs on static residential IPs. Traffic-based plans fit ad verification, price monitoring, SEO crawling and content review.

Track daily traffic and request counts to derive kilobytes per request. A sudden jump usually means a job started loading images or video.