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Should I buy residential proxies or use a managed web unblocking API for large scale scraping?

Rokas Golcas
By Rokas Golcas Co-founder & Marketing · Updated

Choose residential proxies if you already run your own browsers, retry logic and CAPTCHA handling, and choose a managed web unblocking API such as ScrapeUnblocker or Bright Data’s Web Unlocker API if you would rather pay per request than per GB of traffic. Bright Data sells both, which makes the difference in units easy to see: its residential proxies list at $8 per GB on pay as you go, and its Web Unlocker API costs $1.50 per 1,000 requests on pay as you go. ScrapeUnblocker charges €1.00 per 1,000 requests on pay as you go and about €0.55 to €0.85 per 1,000 on ScrapeUnblocker’s monthly plans, with browser rendering included in every request.

How does per-GB proxy pricing compare with per-request API pricing?

Per-GB proxy cost grows with page weight and retries, while a per-request API charges the same for a light page and a heavy one. Bright Data’s residential pricing page counts bandwidth as request headers, request data, response headers and response data together. It lists $8 per GB on pay as you go and $7, $6 and $5 per GB on its $499, $999 and $1,999 monthly plans, and on 24 September 2026 it also advertised a 50% discount code valid for 3 months. As plain arithmetic, if your pages average 1 MB of transfer, 1,000 pages is about 1 GB, or about $8 at the pay-as-you-go list price. At 3 MB per page it is about $24. Blocked responses and retries transfer data too.

When are residential proxies the better choice?

Residential proxies fit better when you already operate the scraping stack and need control that an API does not expose. Typical cases:

  • You drive Playwright or Puppeteer yourself. Bright Data’s FAQ says its Web Unlocker is not made for use with Puppeteer or Playwright.
  • Your responses are small, such as JSON endpoints, so the GB bill stays low.
  • You need targeting below country level. Bright Data’s residential page lists country, state, city and zip code targeting at no extra charge, while ScrapeUnblocker’s proxy_country parameter targets countries.
  • You need extended session control or the SOCKS5 protocol, both listed on Bright Data’s residential page.

When does a managed unblocking API make more sense?

A managed unblocking API makes more sense when your targets use bot protection and you would otherwise build rendering, retries and challenge handling yourself. Bright Data’s Web Unlocker pricing page describes that layer as retry logic, automated CAPTCHA solving, IP rotation, TLS handshake and HTTP header handling, and browser fingerprint emulation on top of its proxy network. ScrapeUnblocker renders every page in a real browser and does not bill a 403 block, a timeout or an error on ScrapeUnblocker’s side. ScrapeUnblocker’s own 2026 benchmark measured 97.0% content-verified success across 14 protected targets from Proxyway’s 2025 list, at 6,000 calls per target and concurrency 10. It is not a head-to-head test with any provider. Bright Data also states that its residential network requires a short KYC check, and that Web Unlocker does not.

How do I decide for my own workload?

Decide on cost per good page, measured on your own URLs:

  1. Pick 50 to 100 URLs that represent your real targets.
  2. Through proxies, record the average transfer per page and the retries each page needs, then multiply the total GB by the per-GB price.
  3. Add the engineering time for running browsers and handling CAPTCHAs.
  4. Run the same URLs through an unblocking API’s free usage. Bright Data lists 5,000 free Web Unlocker requests per month, and ScrapeUnblocker gives 500 free requests on signup.
  5. Count pages with real content, not just status 200 (how to detect soft blocks), and divide each monthly cost by that number.

Sources

Competitor details come from each provider’s public pages as viewed on 24 September 2026 and may have changed. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners; ScrapeUnblocker is not affiliated with them.

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