Luna Residential Traffic — Crypto Purchase

Metered residential traffic is the right purchase for breadth and the wrong one for continuity. Getting that distinction right matters more than which coin you pay with.

Metered Against Per-Address

Per-gigabyte plans buy reach: a large pool, many exits, priced by what you move through them. Per-address plans buy persistence: a named exit that is still yours next week. Crawling belongs firmly in the first category and account work in the second. The costly error is running logged-in sessions over metered traffic, where you pay by volume for something whose value is stability.

Sizing Without Guessing

Convert the workload into bytes rather than into money first. Pages per day, times realistic page weight, times running days, with images and scripts included in the weight. Compare that figure against the tiers. Because balances do not expire, the prudent choice is the tier covering a typical month rather than a peak one — topping up is easy, reclaiming over-purchase is not.

Cost Per Useful Page

The number worth tracking is not gigabytes consumed but gigabytes per successfully parsed page. It falls sharply once images are blocked and repeated requests are cached, and it rises when a target starts serving altered responses — which makes it an early warning as well as a cost metric.

When Traffic Is The Wrong Unit

Metered pricing stops being efficient when the work is dominated by a small number of long sessions rather than by many short fetches. At that point you are paying by volume for something whose value is continuity, and a per-address plan covering the same work is usually cheaper as well as more reliable. The crossover is easy to spot in the usage: a handful of destinations accounting for most of the transfer, repeatedly, over weeks.