Use cases
Proxies for Price Monitoring
Competitor pricing is only useful if you are looking at what a real shopper in that market sees. A monitoring feed run from the wrong origin is measuring a different storefront.
What breaks without the right network
Retail and marketplace sites routinely segment price, promotions, and stock by geography, and a monitoring job that ignores this ends up comparing prices from different storefronts.
- Prices, promotions, and stock that change by region or by storefront
- Rate limits that cap how many SKUs a single origin can check per hour
- Detection logic that recognises a repeat visitor checking the same product pages
- A skewed sample when every check comes from one part of the world
What changes the outcome
A local vantage point in each market
Residential addresses are assigned by consumer ISPs to real households across 190+ countries, so a price check looks like the local shopper it stands in for.
Sessions long enough for a real shopping flow
Sticky sessions to 60 minutes hold one address through search, filtering, and a product page. A price check often has to repeat that sequence to see the numbers a shopper would.
Billed by what you use
Traffic is billed per GB, rounded to the MB, with no monthly minimum. A monitoring feed that checks a thousand SKUs a day and one that checks ten each pay only for their own traffic.
Mobile commerce, covered separately
Where pricing differs on a carrier connection or inside an app, mobile addresses reach the same target over 310+ carrier networks in 100+ countries.
Which network to put this on
Primary
Residential
Residential addresses see the same storefront a local shopper does, which is what a price and assortment feed needs if it is to reflect real market conditions.
from $2.40 / GB
Alternative
Mobile
When the price or availability check has to run through a mobile app or a carrier connection rather than a desktop browser, mobile addresses reach it the way a phone would.
from $1.75 / GB
A workflow this fits into
- 01Schedule a recurring check per SKU, category, or competitor storefront
- 02Distribute requests across residential addresses so the sample covers each market
- 03Diff each run against the previous one to isolate real price, stock, or promotion changes
- 04Route changes past a threshold to an alert or a pricing system, and archive the rest
Publicly available data, used lawfully
Every recommendation above assumes lawful collection of publicly available data. Our acceptable use policy governs what is and is not permitted on this network, and sourcing and compliance explains where the addresses themselves come from.
Questions we get about this
Can I monitor prices in a specific country?
Residential and mobile give broad coverage across 190+ and 100+ countries respectively, without a per-request country selector at checkout. ISP and datacenter support country-level targeting when a fixed, country-specific origin is what the job needs instead.
How often can I check the same product page?
There is no fixed request cap on our side; the practical limit is what the target site's own rate limiting tolerates, and address rotation is how a feed works within it. Prepaid billing bounds what a job can spend, not how often it checks.
Is there a minimum spend to run a monitoring feed?
No. Order from 1 GB, fund your wallet, and pay only for what a run uses. There is no monthly minimum on residential or mobile.
Does checking a competitor's prices need their permission?
Collecting publicly available pricing and stock information is generally lawful, subject to the target's terms and applicable law. It has to be a use our acceptable use policy permits, so read the policy before scoping a job.
Will the target site see repeated checks as one visitor?
Only if you hold one address for every check. Rotate across the pool, and use sticky sessions only where a flow needs continuity, so a recurring feed does not read as one shopper returning to the same pages.
Other use cases
SEO and SERP Tracking
Measure rankings the way a searcher in that market and on that device sees them.
View use case
Ad Verification
Confirm creatives render where they were bought, from a real consumer vantage point.
View use case
Market Research
Collect a representative sample without one origin defining what you see.
View use case
Ready to run price monitoring on the right network?
Create an account and order from 1 GB or 1 IP, or talk to sales if you want the volume ladder priced against your own numbers first.
One business day, from a named engineer.