Watching a single competitor’s pricing page once a day sounds like a job that should cost almost nothing. It usually does, but the vendors selling proxy and scraping infrastructure do not price it the way a reader coming from ordinary SaaS tools expects, and that mismatch is where a bill goes wrong.
Why this pricing model looks unfamiliar
Most software a small team buys is priced per seat: one person, one login, one monthly fee, and the number of people using the tool is the whole story. Proxy and scraping infrastructure does not work that way. There is no seat to buy. The unit being sold is either a gigabyte of bandwidth moved through a proxy network, or a request that came back with usable data, and the plan names on the page do not describe team size at all.
This piece uses two of those meters as they are actually published today. Bright Data prices its residential proxy network per gigabyte of bandwidth, cited from brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network (fetched September 9, 2026). ZenRows prices its scraping API per successful request, spent as a credit, cited from zenrows.com/pricing (fetched September 9, 2026). Neither meter has an equivalent in seat based software, and treating one as a stand in for the other is the mistake this piece is trying to head off.
What Bright Data actually charges for residential proxy bandwidth
Bright Data’s residential proxy pricing runs a pure pay as you go rate on top of several fixed monthly plans. Pay as you go lists at $8 per gigabyte, discounted to $4.00 per gigabyte under the page’s current promotion, with no monthly commitment attached.
Above pay as you go, the page lists three tiered plans, each billed monthly under the same current promotion. The first includes 141 GB at a discounted $3.50 per GB for $499 a month. The second includes 332 GB at $3.00 per GB for $999 a month. The third includes 798 GB at $2.50 per GB for $1,999 a month. Each tier lowers the per gigabyte rate as included volume rises, the standard shape of a bandwidth based rate card: buy more, pay less per unit.
The detail most likely to surprise a team sizing a light job is the billing rule on the entry level Proxy Starter plan. It carries a $500 minimum monthly commitment, charged from the day the plan is activated, pro rated only for a partial first calendar month. The page’s own example is an account started on June 25, billed for six days of that partial month before the full $500 applies from the next cycle. A team that activates Starter and uses ten dollars of bandwidth that month still owes the $500. The commitment is not a cap on spending, it is a floor.
What ZenRows charges per request instead of per gigabyte
ZenRows meters differently. Instead of billing for bytes transferred, it bills per successful request, drawn from a pool of monthly credits. Its pricing page, fetched the same day as Bright Data’s, lists five tiers.
| Plan | Price | Credits per month | Concurrent requests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo | 5,000 | 5 |
| Build | $16/mo | 45,000 | 20 |
| Launch | $57/mo | 250,000 | 50 |
| Growth | $165/mo | 1,200,000 | 100 |
| Scale | $456/mo | 5,000,000 | 200 |
The Free tier requires no card on file. Every paid tier is a fixed monthly price for a fixed credit allowance, and the page differentiates tiers mainly by concurrency and support level rather than a lower per credit rate, a different curve than Bright Data’s declining per gigabyte pricing.
The point worth isolating is that “credits” and “gigabytes” do not translate into each other from either pricing page alone. Bright Data bills for bandwidth moved. ZenRows bills for requests that came back successfully. Both fall under the general label of scraping infrastructure, but a team cannot take a Bright Data quote and infer a ZenRows one, or the reverse, without a separate figure for how much bandwidth or how many credits a specific page actually consumes.
Working the numbers for one page, checked once a day
Take the job this piece is about: a handful of public pages, checked once a day, for competitor monitoring, not a crawl of a site or a pipeline pulling thousands of pages an hour. What does each vendor’s own rate card say that costs?
On ZenRows’ credit meter, the Free tier includes 5,000 credits a month at no cost. If each check consumes one credit, a handful of daily checks (five pages once a day is 150 checks a month) stays well inside that ceiling. But that “if” is doing real work. The pricing page states the credit allowance per tier; it does not state how many credits a single request against a given page actually costs, and that varies by which product tier handles the request: a plain fetch versus a JavaScript rendered page versus a page behind bot defenses. [EVIDENCE NEEDED: ZenRows’ documented credit cost per request type, by endpoint, from its own docs rather than the pricing page]. Without that number, the honest statement is that a low volume job is very likely to fit inside Free or the $16/month Build tier’s 45,000 credits, and the actual per check cost is the $16 divided across whatever credit count the job turns out to consume, not a number this piece can state without that lookup.
On Bright Data’s per gigabyte meter, the arithmetic runs the other direction. A handful of daily page checks is a trivial amount of bandwidth by any reasonable estimate, almost certainly a small fraction of a gigabyte across a month. But Bright Data does not sell fractions of a gigabyte on the Starter plan without the $500 minimum attached. Put a light job on Proxy Starter and the bill is $500 that month, regardless of how far under the included 141 GB it falls. The only way around that floor is pure pay as you go, at $8 per GB list or $4.00 under the current promotion, with no plan and no minimum attached.
That is the actual shape of the decision. A small team’s real question is not “what is the headline per unit rate,” since both vendors publish clean rates. It is “does this vendor’s entry point have a floor, or a free or pay as you go tier that absorbs low volume without one.” ZenRows’ entry tiers carry no fixed monthly minimum below Free. Bright Data’s plan tiers do, with pay as you go as the only route around it.
What these tools are actually for, and what a small monitoring job does not need
Both pricing pages are visibly built for a buyer larger than a team watching a few pages. Bright Data markets SOC and ISO certification and a dedicated account manager, its listed contact point for larger accounts, not something a light monitoring job needs to weigh. ZenRows scales concurrency from 5 requests at once on Free to 200 on Scale, a number that matters to a high volume pipeline and is irrelevant to a job firing one request a day per page.
The practical implication: size the decision against the free tier or lowest paid tier’s allowance, not against the enterprise language both pages lead with. A dedicated account manager, a 200 concurrent request ceiling, and formal compliance certifications describe a different buyer than the one this piece is written for.
Questions to answer before picking either one
- Does the target page need JavaScript rendering or CAPTCHA handling to load correctly, or does a plain fetch of the HTML suffice. That decides which product tier applies at all: ZenRows separates a basic Fetch API from its Browser Sessions product, and Bright Data separates a plain proxy connection from its Unlocker API built to get past blocks and CAPTCHAs, each priced differently from the base rate quoted above.
- Is the job’s actual monthly volume closer to a free tier ceiling, like ZenRows’ 5,000 credits, or a paid plan’s minimum, like Bright Data’s $500 floor on Proxy Starter. That comparison, not the headline per unit rate, decided the worked example above.
- Does the job need concurrency, several pages fetched at once, or is a scheduled once a day check for a handful of pages fine running one at a time. It does not need the higher concurrency tiers either vendor sells.
Get more coverage like this from followed
followed tracks pricing moves, plan changes, and how infrastructure tools actually meter what they sell, across the tools a social media team ends up relying on that are not themselves social media management software. Check back for the next entry in this series.
FAQ
What does Bright Data charge per gigabyte for residential proxies?
As published on brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network, the pay as you go rate lists at $8 per GB, discounted to $4.00 per GB under the current promotion. The tiered plans bring that rate down further with volume: $3.50/GB on the 141 GB plan, $3.00/GB on the 332 GB plan, and $2.50/GB on the 798 GB plan, all under the same promotion. These are usage based rates; the tiered plans also carry a fixed monthly price and, on the entry tier, a minimum commitment on top of the per gigabyte figure.
Is there a minimum Bright Data charges even for light proxy usage?
Yes, on the Proxy Starter plan. The pricing page states a $500 minimum monthly commitment, charged from the first day the plan is active. It is pro rated only in a partial first calendar month, per the page’s own example of a plan started on June 25. It is not waived for a month of low usage. Pure pay as you go, with no plan attached, avoids that floor.
Sources
- Bright Data, Proxy Network pricing, fetched September 9, 2026, HTTP 200.
- ZenRows pricing, fetched September 9, 2026, HTTP 200.
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