Whether a scraping API beats raw proxies comes down to page weight

Per-GB and per-request prices cannot be compared until you convert one into the other, and the conversion is a single number: your average response size. Priced off one vendor that sells both models, the two meet somewhere between 159 KB and 1.3 MB per request. Here is the arithmetic and where real pages land.

The conversion, in one line

A proxy bills the bytes you move. A scraping API bills the requests you make. To compare them, divide the API's price per request by the proxy's price per GB. The answer is the response size at which the two cost the same.

break-even size (GB) = API price per request ÷ proxy price per GB
break-even size (KB) = that, times 1,000,000

Above that size the proxy is cheaper, because you are paying a flat fee per request and moving a lot of bytes for it. Below it the API is cheaper. Every argument about which model wins is really an argument about that one number, and almost nobody writing about it says so.

Geonode sells both, which holds everything else still

Most comparisons of these two models are written by a party selling one of them. Geonode sells both, so pricing them against each other removes the vendor, the network and the date as variables. Both ladders were read on 15 August 2026.

Its per-request ladder runs from $0.35 per 1,000 (read 15 Aug 2026) at 10K requests down to $0.13 per 1,000 (read 15 Aug 2026) at 1M. Its residential ladder runs from $0.792/GB at 10 GB down to $0.27/GB at 100 TB. Crossing them:

API tier	Cost per request	vs $0.792/GB	vs $0.500/GB	vs $0.270/GB
10,000 requests	$0.000350	442 KB	700 KB	1,296 KB
50,000 requests	$0.000260	328 KB	520 KB	963 KB
250,000 requests	$0.000172	217 KB	344 KB	637 KB
1,000,000 requests	$0.000126	159 KB	252 KB	467 KB

Read a cell as: at this API tier and this proxy rate, a response of this size costs the same either way.

The spread is narrower than the ladders suggest. Both sides get cheaper with volume, so they move together, and the whole grid sits between roughly 160 KB and 1.3 MB. A rough rule for the middle of both ladders is 400 KB.

The market has converged on the request price, too. ZenRows charges $0.000356 per credit on its entry plan against Geonode's $0.000350 per request, and $0.000091 at the top of its ladder against Geonode's $0.000126. Those are different companies with different networks arriving at the same number.

The multiplier that moves the answer by sixty times

Here is the part the per-credit headline hides. A credit is a billing unit, and one request does not always cost one credit. Scrapfly's own estimator prints the rate card:

credits per scrape · click to adjust 1 HTTP · datacenter 5 + anti-bot / browser 25 + residential 60 screenshot

Apply that to the crossover and the answer stops being close:

What you turn on	Cost per scrape	Break-even vs $0.27/GB
Plain fetch, datacenter	$0.000126	467 KB
Anti-bot or browser rendering	$0.000630	2.3 MB
Residential addresses	$0.003150	11.7 MB
Screenshot	$0.007560	28.0 MB

At 25 credits a scrape you would need an 11.7 MB response before raw proxies lost on price, and almost nothing is 11.7 MB. So the option you tick matters more than the vendor you pick, and a comparison that comes out even at 1 credit comes out lopsided at 25.

This is the same shape as the second meter on unlimited plans: the advertised unit is not the unit you are billed in.

What we measured

We fetched twelve vendor pricing and policy pages on the night of 15 August 2026, which is ordinary work for this site rather than a benchmark. Their HTML averaged 397 KB, with a median of 253 KB. The largest was 1.57 MB and the smallest 54 KB.

Those pages sit right on the crossover. For work that looks like this, the two models cost about the same, and the choice should be made on something other than price.

One correction to that, and it moves the answer toward the API. 397 KB is the HTML document alone. A proxy carries whatever the client requests, so if you run a headless browser without blocking subresources, the images, CSS, fonts and scripts all cross the meter as well, and the real figure per page is often several times the document. Measure at the proxy, not at the parser.

Working out your own number

Three steps, and the first is the one people skip:

1. Measure your average response, at the proxy. Sum the bytes your proxy account actually reports over a real run, and divide by requests. Do not use the HTML size, and do not use a figure from an article.
2. Take both prices at the volume you will really buy. Entry-tier rates on either side are the worst case for both. Our cost calculator will give you the per-GB side across every metered plan we track.
3. Divide, and check the multiplier. API price per request over proxy price per GB, times a million, gives your break-even in KB. If the API charges more than one credit for the mode you need, multiply the API side first.

We are not declaring a winner between the two models, here or anywhere else on this site, because the answer changes with page weight and with which unblocking you need. What we can do is give you the arithmetic and both sets of real numbers with the date attached. How we check covers where the proxy side of these figures comes from.