Professional vs Scale Decision - Proxy Strategy & URL Credits with Images

#1

Planning a large-scale data collection project and trying to decide between Professional and Scale tiers. I have questions on both pricing and technical capabilities.

Context:

  • Scraping multiple high-traffic travel/accommodation websites
  • These sites have aggressive bot detection
  • Need reliable operation with minimal blocking
  • Pages contain multiple images (listings, photos, media)

Package Decision - My Concern:

Professional tier only includes datacenter proxies. If I get blocked, I have no fallback. Scale tier allows adding residential proxies ($2.5/GB) as backup.

Package Questions:

  1. For high-traffic sites with strong anti-bot measures, which tier do you recommend?
  2. Is residential proxy necessary, or can datacenter work effectively?
  3. Can I upgrade from Professional to Scale mid-project if blocking occurs?

Critical: URL Credits & Images

When scraping product pages with multiple images, how are credits counted?

Example: 1 product page with 10 images = 1 credit or 11 credits?

Also, Scale tier lists "Image download" as a feature. Does this mean image downloads are counted separately from URL credits, or do they still consume the unlimited URL limit?

This is crucial—if images eat individual credits, Professional becomes unviable instantly.

Additional Requirements:

  • API support for Java/Spring Boot backend?
  • Automatic exports to S3/Google Cloud?
  • Any data volume limits beyond URL credits?

Any guidance appreciated!

#2

Hi,

The Professional plan actually includes the use of Residential proxies. However, it is limited to 20,000 page credits a month.

The Scale plan includes unlimited page credits; however, residential proxies are not included in the price and must be purchased separately. The plan only includes datacenter proxies, which are lower quality and more susceptible to being blocked by anti-scraping mechanisms.

If you are unsure which plan fits your requirements best, you can start with the base plan and upgrade the subscription at any time - when upgrading, you will be charged the price difference between the plans and will have a corresponding difference of page credits added to your account.

A page credit represents a single page/URL rendered by the scraper. For example, if you scrape a website with 1000 products, each product will have a unique URL and consume a page credit. A page credit is deducted each time a URL is scraped. The number of data points scraped from a single URL does not matter.

Image download within the Scale plan is only available with the use of Residential proxy, which has to be purchased separately from the monthly subscription. The costs are based on bandwidth in this case. Currently, Image download is only available for Scale plan subscribers.

You are welcome to sign up for the free Trial to test the API and data export features.