Pay as you go or subscription proxies, which should I pick?
Pay as you go charges for what you use, usually by bandwidth, and suits occasional, seasonal or unpredictable work because you are not paying for capacity that sits idle. A subscription charges a recurring fee for a fixed allowance and tends to win once usage is steady and high, sometimes with better support or higher limits attached.
A subscription is not automatically cheaper, and it is most often the wrong choice for somebody using a fraction of what they pay for. Estimate a month of real usage first, then run both sets of numbers against that figure rather than against the plan you hope to grow into.
Compare these before deciding, because the headline rate hides most of them.
- The real price per gigabyte at the volume you will actually buy, not at the top tier.
- The minimum purchase.
- Whether unused bandwidth expires or carries over.
- Concurrency limits.
- Location coverage for the countries you need rather than the total count.
- Refund terms.
Worth knowing
Per gigabyte plans where credits never expire remove the main disadvantage of the model, which is the pressure to use bandwidth before it disappears. Ours work that way, which is a point in our favour and worth verifying rather than taking from us.
Other questions
These answers describe how the NullVault proxy network works in practice, across residential, ISP, mobile, datacenter and IPv6 pools.