Pay as you go
Buying bandwidth as a top-up rather than a monthly subscription. You pay for a quantity and draw it down; some providers expire it, some do not.
Why it costs you money
Scraping work is rarely steady, and a subscription bills the same whether you used three gigabytes or three hundred. The per-gigabyte rate is usually higher, so the question is whether your idle months cost more than the premium. Check the expiry before buying: bandwidth that expires monthly is a subscription wearing a different label.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Bandwidth overageWhat a provider charges once you pass the gigabytes your plan includes. Often several times the headline rate.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- Every term we define