Server, Proxy, Captcha Bypass, Anti-Bot Response - All Hidden Costs Revealed
Reading Time: 10 minutes | January 2026
Key Summary
| Cost Item | Monthly Cost (Self-Built) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Server/Cloud | 500,000~3,000,000 won | Varies by scale |
| Proxy | 800,000~5,000,000 won | Based on residential proxy |
| Captcha Bypass | 300,000~1,500,000 won | Proportional to the number of sites |
| Anti-Bot Response Development | 2,000,000~5,000,000 won | Cost of professional developers |
| Monitoring/Failure Response | 1,000,000~3,000,000 won | Includes operational staff |
| Total | 4,600,000~17,500,000 won |
Hashscraper Subscription: 300,000~1,200,000 won/month (Includes all the above costs)
"Crawler Costs? Server Costs 50,000 won is Enough"
A junior developer reports this. The team leader nods. The CTO also says, "That much, you can do it yourself."
Six months later, when you add up all the costs related to the crawling infrastructure, it amounts to several million won per month. It's a number that no one expected.
The reason this keeps happening is simple. A significant portion of crawling costs is outside the code. Server costs are just the tip of the iceberg, with proxies, captchas, anti-bot responses, and operational staff hidden beneath the surface.
In this article, we will dissect the five cost items that make up the crawling infrastructure. We will show why each item is necessary, how much it actually costs, and where the costs unexpectedly skyrocket.
1. Server/Cloud Costs: The Trap of "50,000 won is enough for servers"
Minimum Configuration
To run a crawler, you need a server. The most basic setup:
- AWS EC2 t3.medium (vCPU 2, RAM 4GB): Approximately 50,000 won per month
- For small-scale crawling (a few thousand pages per day), this is sufficient
At the point when the report says "server costs 50,000 won," it's a personal project level. But the scale needed by B2B companies is different.
Reality by Company Size
| Scale | Daily Collection | Server Configuration | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 10,000 pages | EC2 t3.medium x1 | ~50,000 won |
| Medium | 100,000 pages | EC2 c5.xlarge x2 + RDS | ~500,000 won |
| Large | 1,000,000 pages | EC2 c5.2xlarge x5 + RDS + ElastiCache | ~2,000,000 won |
| Enterprise | 10,000,000+ pages | K8s cluster + distributed processing | ~3,000,000+ won |
And the costs not shown in the table:
- Data Transfer Costs (AWS egress): 10~50,000 won per month for large-scale
- Storage (S3/EBS): 5~30,000 won per month for storing collected data
- Logs/Monitoring (CloudWatch, Datadog): 10~20,000 won per month
While one server costs 50,000 won, in a corporate environment, it can go up to 500,000~3,000,000 won or more.
Easy to Miss Point: Traffic Spikes
"Normally it's 100,000 pages, but at the end of the quarter, we need to collect 500,000 pages."
This means setting up servers based on 500,000 pages or implementing Auto Scaling. Either way, costs and complexity increase.
2. Proxy Costs: The Most Underestimated Item
Why Proxies are Essential
If you send hundreds of requests from the same IP, you will get blocked. As of 2026, proxies are not an option but a necessity in commercial crawling.
Proxy Types and Prices
| Type | Features | Price per GB | Monthly Estimated Cost (Medium Scale) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter Proxy | Fast but easy to detect | $0.5~2 | 200,000~800,000 won |
| Residential Proxy | Actual residential IPs, hard to detect | $3~15 | 800,000~5,000,000 won |
| ISP Proxy | Actual ISP IP used from data center | $2~5 | 500,000~2,000,000 won |
| Mobile Proxy | Mobile carrier IPs, minimal blocking | $10~30 | 2,000,000~8,000,000 won |
Calculating Actual Costs
For medium-scale crawling (100,000 pages per day), let's calculate:
- Average data per page: 200KB
- Daily traffic: about 20GB
- Monthly traffic: about 600GB
If you use residential proxies here? Calculating at $8/GB with Bright Data, it's around 6,000,000 won per month.
But in reality, it can be lower. Most companies offer volume discounts, and using a mix of datacenter proxies can reduce costs. Realistic range is around 1,000,000~4,000,000 won per month.
The problem is with strong anti-bots. Sites like Coupang, Naver Shopping have high blocking rates, leading to frequent retries and actual traffic can be 2~3 times the planned amount.
Vicious Cycle Structure
Cheap proxies → Increased blocking rates → Increased retries → Increased traffic → Increased costs
Proxies are a textbook case of "cheap is expensive."
3. Captcha Bypass Costs: Gap Between Simple and Complex
Costs by Captcha Type
As of 2026, a significant number of e-commerce and portal sites use captchas.
| Captcha Type | Difficulty | Cost per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| reCAPTCHA v2 (Image) | Normal | $1~3 / 1,000 |
| reCAPTCHA v3 (Score-based) | High | $2~5 / 1,000 |
| hCaptcha | Normal | $1~3 / 1,000 |
| Cloudflare Turnstile | High | $3~6 / 1,000 |
| Akamai Bot Manager | Very High | Cannot be solved with a service |
| PerimeterX/HUMAN | Very High | Cannot be solved with a service |
General Captcha: Cheaper Than You Think
For medium-scale crawling (100,000 pages per day, 30% captcha occurrence):
- Monthly captcha solving: about 900,000 times
- Based on reCAPTCHA v2: around 230,000 won/month
- Based on Cloudflare Turnstile: around 580,000 won/month
- Mixed: average 300,000~800,000 won/month
Up to this point, it's manageable.
Real Problem: Enterprise-level Anti-Bot
Coupang (Akamai), some financial sites (PerimeterX/HUMAN) cannot be solved with services like 2Captcha. To bypass these:
- Browser Fingerprinting Evasion — Customizing Playwright/Puppeteer
- TLS Fingerprint Manipulation — Advanced network engineering
- Behavior Pattern Simulation — Mouse trails, scroll speed, key input intervals
This is not about paying for captcha services. It's a problem that requires senior security developers to invest weeks to months.
Converted to labor costs:
- Initial setup: 5,000,000~20,000,000 won
- Monthly maintenance: 1,000,000~3,000,000 won
4. Anti-Bot Response: Never-ending Arms Race
Rules Changing Every Quarter
Anti-bot companies update detection logic 8~12 times a year. Breaking through once is not the end.
| Time | Update Content | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 Q1 | Strengthen Cloudflare JS Challenge | 1~2 weeks |
| 2024 Q3 | Akamai Browser Fingerprint v3 | 2~4 weeks |
| 2025 Q1 | PerimeterX Behavior Analysis Enhancement | 3~6 weeks |
| 2025 Q3 | Cloudflare Turnstile Major Update | 1~3 weeks |
When updates are released, the crawler stops immediately. If it takes 2 weeks to respond, there will be a data gap for 2 weeks.
People Who Can Do This Work
Skills needed for anti-bot response:
- Reverse Engineering: Decrypting JavaScript obfuscation, analyzing network traffic
- Browser Internals: Understanding at the level of Chromium source code
- Security Evasion: Manipulating TLS/HTTP2 fingerprints
The market salary for such developers is 80,000,000~150,000,000 won. Even if not full-time, dedicating them for updates incurs 200,000~500,000 won per month in labor costs.
Consequences of Delayed Response
For e-commerce companies doing real-time price monitoring, a 2-week data gap is critical. Competitor prices change, and we are unaware. No matter how much money you spend later, you cannot recover past data.
5. Monitoring & Operations: Daily Unseen Costs
Tool Costs
| Item | Tool | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server Monitoring | Datadog / CloudWatch | 100,000~300,000 won |
| Crawling Success Tracking | Custom Dashboard (Development Required) | — |
| Data Quality Verification | Custom Scripts (Development Required) | — |
| Failure Alerts | PagerDuty / Slack Webhook | 50,000~150,000 won |
| Log Management | ELK Stack / Grafana Loki | 100,000~200,000 won |
Total Tool Costs: 25,000~65,000 won per month
But the real costs are not the tools.
People Costs
- Daily crawling status check: 30 minutes
- Weekly data quality review: 2 hours
- Failure response (3~5 incidents per month): 2~4 hours per incident
- Monthly updates/patches: 8~16 hours
Adding up to 40~60 hours per month. Based on a developer hourly rate of 50,000 won, this is 200,000~300,000 won per month.
And there is one more cost that cannot be quantified. 3 AM failure alerts. The developer's sleep, work-life balance, burnout - many companies see this pattern leading to resignation.
Total Cost Simulation
Scenario: Medium-scale B2B Company (100,000 pages/day, crawling 5 sites)
| Cost Item | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server/Cloud | 800,000 won | 9,600,000 won |
| Proxy | 2,500,000 won | 30,000,000 won |
| Captcha Bypass | 500,000 won | 6,000,000 won |
| Anti-Bot Response (Labor) | 3,000,000 won | 36,000,000 won |
| Monitoring/Operations | 2,000,000 won | 24,000,000 won |
| Total | 8,800,000 won | 156,000,000 won |
Operating at the Same Scale with Hashscraper Subscription
Pro Plan: 800,000 won/month (Annual 9,600,000 won)
Includes: Server, Proxy, Captcha Bypass, Anti-Bot Response, Monitoring, Failure Response, Additional Development - all included.
Annual Difference: About 960,000 won (9%)
At first glance, the difference doesn't seem significant. But there are costs not included here:
When Including Unseen Costs
- Initial Setup Cost: 30,000,000~80,000,000 won to set up infrastructure (spread over 3~6 months of development)
- Opportunity Cost: What if the developer working on crawling had built a core product?
- Data Gap: When data collection stops due to anti-bot updates, that data is lost forever
- Job Change Risk: A 3-month gap minimum when the person in charge of crawling resigns
When you add these up, the actual difference is over 50,000,000 won annually.
Break-even Point by Scale
| Scale | Self-Built (Monthly) | Hashscraper (Monthly) | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small (1,000 pages/day) | ~2,000,000 won | 3,000,000 won (Basic) | Self-built is cheaper |
| Medium (10,000 pages/day) | ~8,800,000 won | 8,000,000 won (Pro) | Save 800,000 won per month |
| Large (100,000 pages/day) | ~17,500,000 won | 12,000,000 won (Enterprise) | Save 5,500,000 won per month |
Key: For small scale, doing it yourself is cheaper. But as the scale increases, the cost efficiency of professional services improves dramatically.
The reason is structural. When hundreds of customers share proxy pools, anti-bot response engines, and captcha solving infrastructure, the unit cost drops dramatically. The economic structure is fundamentally different from building it independently.
To Be Honest
Hashscraper is not the answer in all situations.
When self-building is better:
- Crawling targets are 1~2 sites, and anti-bot measures are weak
- Daily collection is less than 10,000 pages for small-scale
- There is an in-house crawling expert, and the risk of that person leaving is low
When Hashscraper is suitable:
- Crawling targets are 3 or more sites
- Sites with strong anti-bots like Coupang, Naver, financial sites
- Data continuity is crucial for business (price monitoring, inventory tracking, etc.)
- Development team needs to focus on core products instead of crawling at this point
Verify the Actual Cost of Our Infrastructure
If you are operating your own crawling infrastructure, add up the following items:
- [ ] Monthly cost of dedicated server/cloud
- [ ] Monthly expenditure on proxy services
- [ ] Cost of captcha solving services
- [ ] Labor cost of crawling-related developers (calculated based on the proportion of crawling to overall work)
- [ ] Monthly failure response time × hourly rate
- [ ] Total time data collection was halted due to anti-bot updates in the past year
- [ ] Total cost incurred in the initial infrastructure setup (depreciated on a monthly basis)
You will likely see a larger number than you think.
Next Steps
- Cost Analysis Request: Let us know the current infrastructure setup at [help@hashscraper.com]. We will provide a cost analysis for each item.
- 1:1 Comparison: We will compare your current monthly costs with Hashscraper subscription side by side.
- 2-Week Free Trial: Operate both your existing crawling and Hashscraper concurrently to compare performance and costs directly.
Hashscraper provides crawling infrastructure to over 500 B2B companies. If you need a more detailed cost analysis, please contact [help@hashscraper.com].
