How web scraping got harder, even as proxies got cheaper…
Proxies have never been cheaper. Scraping has never been more expensive.
That's the Proxy Paradox, a quiet contradiction reshaping the economics of web scraping.
Over the past few years, the cost of proxies has fallen dramatically. Residential bandwidth that once cost $30 per GB can now be found for $1. Datacenter proxies are cheaper than coffee.
On paper, this should have ushered in a golden age for web scraping; faster, cheaper, easier access to public data.
But that's not what's happening.
At ScrapeOps, we see billions of requests every month across thousands of domains. And the trend is undeniable…
While proxies keep getting cheaper, the cost of successful scraping is exploding.
In today's scraping market, proxies have become a commodity.
But scraping success is now at a premium.
This is the paradox at the heart of modern web scraping.
And it's redefining how companies measure, optimize, and compete in the data economy.
In this article, we will walk through: