Traffic and balance

What counts#

Everything that passes through the proxy, including what a program does on its own. Generating lines costs nothing.

Why the balance can go faster than expected#

A full browser downloads much more than the page you look at. Chrome and antidetect browsers fetch updates, safe-browsing lists, extensions, fonts, video previews and tracking scripts, and all of it goes through the proxy. On a small balance that can be most of it.

• Block images, video and fonts in automated browsers when you do not need them.
• Turn off browser and extension updates in the profiles that use residential traffic.
• Call the site's own JSON endpoints instead of rendering whole pages, where you can.
• Ask for compressed responses (Accept-Encoding: gzip, br) and reuse connections.
• Send the heavy, non-sensitive part of a job through a datacenter proxy with unlimited traffic.

When it runs out#

The gateway answers 402 Payment Required and stops passing traffic. Buy more on the Buy traffic tab: the gigabytes are added to the same balance and the lines you already have start working again, nothing needs to be regenerated.

Keeping an eye on it#

• The remaining balance is shown in the dashboard and on the residential order.
• Traffic alerts by email can be switched on in Settings.
• Support can pull a per-site usage report for your account if you need to see where the gigabytes went.