The meter counts bytes your app never sees
Per-GB billing charges for every byte transferred through the proxy: requests, responses, retries, redirect chains, blocked pages (429 Too Many Requests), error bodies, and assets the application parses and discards. The proxy sees all of it. Your scraper app reports accepted rows or saved HTML after filtering, which is always smaller.
When the app says 22 GB and the provider meter says 29 GB, you pay for 29 GB. Price the provider number, not the application number, or the comparison is wrong before it starts.
Proxynade's dashboard usage logs show host, outcome, latency, and byte totals per request. Export them as CSV before running any subscription calculation.
Proxynade per-GB rates
Volume Residential: $0.89/GB. Premium Residential: $5.00/GB. Both are billed per transferred byte with no monthly minimum. Load balance, run traffic, balance drains.
Static ISP proxies and bare-metal servers are priced differently — pay-per-IP with unlimited bandwidth, and monthly/quarterly/semi-annual rent respectively. Neither belongs in a GB-per-dollar comparison with residential proxies.
Unused quota is the subscription trap
The subscription pitch assumes the workload fills the allowance every cycle. Most workloads do not. A public catalog job might use 6 GB in a quiet week and 70 GB during a product launch, then nothing while a merchant's template is broken. With a subscription, you either buy for the peak and waste the quiet months, or buy for normal traffic and overpay during the only week that matters.
With per-GB billing, the balance just drains faster when the job is busy. No cliff, no wasted quota.
When a subscription actually wins
A fixed plan can beat per-GB when the same allowance is consumed every cycle, the overage terms are published and clear, and unused quota is reliably small. That requires a flat, predictable workload — the same job running the same paths every month with no pauses, no blocks, and no spikes.
That is not the common case. Treat it as the exception to verify, not the default to assume.
Run one ugly week before committing monthly
Pull usage logs from the last cycle. Include failed requests, retried connections, and discarded responses. Compare that total against the subscription allowance and overage rate. If the sheet shows unused quota most weeks and overage during a spike, the monthly plan is not cheaper — it only looks calmer.
Per-GB billing is the safer default until the logs prove a subscription would actually be consumed.
Billing model does not change access rights
A lower per-GB rate or a cheaper subscription does not expand what the job is authorized to request. Paywalled content, API-gated endpoints, robots-restricted paths (RFC 9309), and authorization-gated pages stay out of scope regardless of how the allowed traffic is priced. Billing changes the cost per byte, not the boundary of permitted collection.
Billing FAQ
What does per-GB billing actually charge for? Every byte transferred through the proxy counts: requests, responses, retries, redirects, blocked pages, and assets the application discards. The provider meter sees it all; the app counter usually does not.
When does a subscription plan cost less than per-GB? When the same allowance is consumed every cycle with little unused quota and no overage. That requires a predictable, flat workload. Spiky or paused jobs almost always leave unused quota.
Why does the app counter show less data than the invoice? Apps report accepted rows or saved pages after filtering. The proxy meter counts every byte: failed requests, redirect chains, blocked responses, and retried connections.
Do Static ISP proxies and servers use per-GB pricing? No. Static ISP proxies are pay-per-IP with unlimited bandwidth. Bare-metal servers run on monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual rent. Neither belongs in a GB-per-dollar comparison.
Before committing to a plan
- Export usage logs and price the provider-metered bytes, not the app counter.
- Include failed requests and redirect chains in the total.
- Check the overage rate, not just the headline allowance.
- Run the math against an ugly week, not an average one.
- Default to per-GB until the logs show consistent, full consumption.