Web Scraping Cost Calculator

How this web scraping cost estimate works

This calculator estimates one pass of a scraping run using three variable cost buckets: proxy/network fees, storage for captured data, and processing/compute for parsing/ETL. It uses the inputs below and converts them into consistent units (per 1,000 requests/pages and per GB).

Formulas

Inputs

• P = pages to scrape
• Cp = proxy cost per 1,000 requests (USD)
• S = average data per page (KB)
• Cs = storage cost per GB (USD)
• Cpr = processing cost per 1,000 pages (USD)

Component costs

• Proxy cost = (P / 1000) × Cp
• Processing cost = (P / 1000) × Cpr
• Storage cost = (P × S / 1,000,000) × Cs (KB → GB using 1 GB ≈ 1,000,000 KB)

Total cost = Proxy cost + Processing cost + Storage cost

Interpreting the results

• If proxy cost dominates, you usually reduce spend by lowering retries, using cheaper geos, reducing concurrency, or improving cache/deduping.
• If storage cost dominates, your biggest lever is retention (how long you keep raw HTML), compression, and whether you store only extracted fields instead of full pages.
• If processing cost dominates, optimize parsing, batching, and avoid heavy headless-browser rendering unless required.

Worked example

Suppose you plan to scrape 250,000 pages. Your proxy provider charges $2.50 per 1,000 requests. You expect 180 KB of stored data per page, storage is $20 per GB, and processing is $0.80 per 1,000 pages.

• Proxy cost = (250,000 / 1000) × 2.50 = 250 × 2.50 = $625.00
• Processing cost = (250,000 / 1000) × 0.80 = 250 × 0.80 = $200.00
• Storage GB = 250,000 × 180 KB = 45,000,000 KB ≈ 45 GB
• Storage cost = 45 × 20 = $900.00
• Total = 625 + 200 + 900 = $1,725.00

Typical rate ranges (sanity-check table)

Assumptions & limitations (what this estimate excludes)

• No retries: assumes 1 request per page. If you expect retries, multiply pages by (1 + retry rate). Example: 25% retry rate ⇒ effective requests = P × 1.25.
• No asset loading: counts the page payload you store, not additional images, scripts, API calls, or bandwidth from headless browsers.
• Storage is treated as a simple per-GB charge: many providers bill monthly and may charge for read/write operations and egress.
• Linear processing model: assumes processing cost scales roughly with page count; heavy rendering, OCR, NLP, or deduplication can be non-linear.
• Compliance & overhead excluded: engineering time, monitoring, QA, legal review, and vendor minimums are not included.