Glossary · Proxies
Per-GB pricing
Per-GB pricing is a proxy billing model in which you pay for the volume of traffic that passes through the proxy, measured in gigabytes, rather than per IP address, per request or per month; the number of threads, requests and exit IPs you use does not change the price.
Reviewed 30 Oct 2026
What counts toward a gigabyte
- Everything that crosses the proxy: request and response bytes, TLS handshakes, redirects and retries.
- For a headless browser, every subresource the page loads, not only the HTML.
- Under HTTPS the proxy carries encrypted bytes through a CONNECT tunnel, so it cannot compress them. Ask the site for compression yourself with
Accept-Encoding: gzip, br; RFC 9110 defines how content codings compress a representation without changing its type. - Units: a gigabyte is 10⁹ bytes and a gibibyte 2³⁰ (about 7% more). Check which one a provider's meter uses.
Estimating how many gigabytes a job needs
Multiply pages by average transfer per page, then add a retry margin. As an illustration: 100,000 HTML pages at 150 KB each is 15 GB; the same pages rendered in a browser can be ten times that or more. Measure one representative page through the proxy before buying — the method is in how much bandwidth scraping uses.
Per GB vs per IP vs per request
| Model | You pay for | Fits |
|---|---|---|
| Per GB | Traffic volume | Many small fetches across many exits; bursty workloads |
| Per IP per month | Reserved addresses; traffic often unmetered | Heavy, steady traffic from a fixed origin |
| Per request / per result | Successful calls | Scraping APIs that also fetch and parse |
How ARC bills
Every rotating and mobile plan is per GB: a one-time purchase, no subscription, and bandwidth that does not expire. The volume discount is automatic and depends on how many gigabytes are in one purchase; a failed request costs the bytes it used. Static ISP proxies are the one exception — per IP per month, unmetered. Current prices are on the pricing page.
FAQ
Questions
Something not covered? Write to contact@arcproxies.io.
Do failed requests count toward per-GB billing?
Yes, for the bytes they transferred before failing. A blocked request usually returns a small response, so it costs little on its own, but large retry loops show up on the bill. There is no separate per-request charge on ARC.
Does unused proxy bandwidth expire?
It depends on the provider; monthly plans often reset. On ARC, gigabytes are bought once and stay on the account until used, with no monthly reset.
Is per-GB or per-IP pricing cheaper?
Per GB is usually cheaper for jobs that need many addresses and move modest volume, such as price checks across many pages. Per IP wins for heavy, steady traffic through a few fixed addresses, because the traffic is typically unmetered.
How can I use fewer gigabytes?
Fetch HTML or JSON instead of rendering where possible, request compressed responses, block images, media and fonts in browsers, cache unchanged pages and avoid aggressive retries.
Sources & review
Last reviewed by the ARC Proxies team. Prices are read from the live catalog at build time.
- [1]IETF: RFC 9110: HTTP Semantics
- [2]NIST: Prefixes for binary multiples
In practice