What is the right proxy setup for price monitoring?
Reliability, geographic accuracy and compliance matter more than pool size. Datacenter addresses are fine for public pages with light protection, and they are a fraction of the cost. Move to residential or ISP where regional pricing or stronger defences are in play, rather than starting there.
Match the address location to the market you are tracking, because a price fetched from the wrong country is not a slightly worse answer, it is a different number. Use sticky sessions where a sequence of requests should look like one visitor, such as anything involving a cart.
What to record
Price, currency, stock status, shipping assumptions, the timestamp and whether the request succeeded. Without the last two you cannot tell a price change from a collection failure later, and that distinction is the whole value of the dataset.
Before committing to a larger plan, run a small pilot and measure.
- Successful page loads as a share of attempts.
- Whether the regional pricing you got back is actually correct for that market.
- Latency and bandwidth cost per page.
- How often you hit a CAPTCHA.
- How complete the extracted data is.
Worth knowing
Schedule checks sensibly, cache what you already pulled, respect rate limits, and collect only what is publicly available. Retried requests are billed like any other, so a crawl fighting a site can spend a surprising share of its budget on attempts that returned nothing.
Other questions
These answers describe how the NullVault proxy network works in practice, across residential, ISP, mobile, datacenter and IPv6 pools.