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Before committing to a 10,000-page scrape, you want a credible estimate of how many credits it’ll consume. This guide shows you how to produce one.

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The simple formula

cost = (number of pages) × (credits per page for the mode)
Credits per page:
  • standard: 1
  • stealth: 3
  • auto: 1 or 3 depending on whether Reader escalates (see below)
Cache hits are 0 regardless of mode, so if you’ve scraped a URL recently and it’s still within the 24h TTL, that specific page is free.

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Estimating for standard

Trivial. If you know the page count, you know the cost. 
1,000 URLs × 1 credit = 1,000 credits
Force proxyMode: "standard" in your request if you want the cost guarantee. Reader will error on a blocked page instead of silently escalating.

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Estimating for stealth

Also trivial, just 3x: 
1,000 URLs × 3 credits = 3,000 credits
Force this mode only when you know the target site needs it. See Choosing a proxy mode.

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Estimating for auto

The hard case. auto only costs 3x for the subset of pages that actually escalate. You need an escalation rate: the fraction of requests that fall back to stealth. 
auto cost = (pages × 1) + (pages × escalation_rate × 2)
         = pages × (1 + 2 × escalation_rate)
Typical escalation rates by site type:
Target typeExpected escalationEffective cost per page
Blogs, docs, news sites0–5%~1.0–1.1
Marketing pages, public APIs0–10%~1.0–1.2
E-commerce (general)20–50%~1.4–2.0
E-commerce (Amazon, Walmart, etc.)80–100%~2.6–3.0
LinkedIn, booking sites, aggressive anti-bot95–100%~2.9–3.0
When in doubt, assume 2x (effective cost 1.5 credits per page) for mixed workloads.

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Pilot first

For any batch above a few hundred URLs, run a pilot on a representative subset of 50–100 URLs, then measure the real escalation rate: 
const pilot = await client.read({ urls: sampleUrls });
let escalated = 0;
let total = 0;

if (pilot.kind === "job") {
  for (const page of pilot.data.results) {
    if (page.error) continue;
    total += 1;
    if (page.proxyMode === "stealth") escalated += 1;
  }
}

const escalationRate = escalated / total;
const estimatedCost =
  allUrls.length * (1 + 2 * escalationRate);

console.log(
  `Pilot escalation: ${(escalationRate * 100).toFixed(0)}%, ` +
    `estimated total cost: ${estimatedCost.toFixed(0)} credits`,
);
Now you have a real number grounded in the actual site you’re targeting, not a guess.

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Crawl cost

Crawls charge crawlPerPage (flat 1 credit per page discovered) plus the scrape cost per page: 
crawl cost ≈ (pages discovered) × 1 credit
Crawls are single-credit-per-page because they run in a mode optimized for link discovery. The trick with crawls is that pages discovered is hard to predict without running the crawl; set maxPages as a hard cap so worst-case spend is bounded.

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Reading the bill afterwards

After the run, /v1/usage/history shows per-request cost broken down by proxyMode. The sum of the credits column is your actual spend. 
const logs = await client.request("GET", "/v1/usage/history?limit=100");
const total = logs.data.reduce((sum, entry) => sum + entry.credits, 0);
console.log(`Last 100 requests: ${total} credits`);

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