Server, Proxy, CAPTCHA Bypass, Anti-bot Response - Revealing Hidden Costs
Reading Time: 10 minutes | January 2026
Key Summary
| Cost Item | Monthly Cost (Self-built) | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Server/Cloud | ₩500,000~₩3,000,000 | Varies by scale |
| Proxy | ₩800,000~₩5,000,000 | Based on residential proxies |
| CAPTCHA Bypass | ₩300,000~₩1,500,000 | Proportional to number of sites |
| Anti-bot Response Development | ₩2,000,000~₩5,000,000 | Professional developer salary |
| Monitoring/Fault Response | ₩1,000,000~₩3,000,000 | Includes operational staff |
| Total | ₩4,600,000~₩17,500,000 |
Hashscraper Subscription: ₩3,000,000~₩12,000,000 per month (includes all the above costs)
"Crawler Costs? Server for ₩50,000 is Enough"
A junior developer reports this. The team leader nods. The CTO also says, "That should be enough to do it yourself."
Six months later, when all the costs related to the crawling infrastructure are totaled, it amounts to monthly costs in the millions. It's a number that no one expected.
The reason this keeps happening is simple. A significant portion of the crawling costs are outside the code. Server costs are just the tip of the iceberg, with proxies, CAPTCHA, anti-bot responses, and operational staff hidden beneath the surface.
This article dissects the five cost items that make up the crawling infrastructure. It explains why each item is necessary, how much it actually costs, and where unexpected costs can skyrocket.
1. Server/Cloud Costs: The Trap of "₩50,000 for a Server is Enough"
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 per month
- This is sufficient for small-scale crawling (a few thousand pages per day)
At the point where "₩50,000 for a server" is written in the report. However, up to this point, it's at a personal project level, and the scale required by B2B companies is different.
Reality Based on Company Size
| Size | Daily Collection | Server Configuration | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small | 10,000 pages | EC2 t3.medium x1 | ~₩50,000 |
| Medium | 100,000 pages | EC2 c5.xlarge x2 + RDS | ~₩500,000 |
| Large | 1,000,000 pages | EC2 c5.2xlarge x5 + RDS + ElastiCache | ~₩2,000,000 |
| Enterprise | 10,000,000+ pages | K8s cluster + distributed processing | ~₩3,000,000+ |
And the costs not shown in the table:
- Data Transfer Costs (AWS egress): ₩100,000~₩500,000 per month for large-scale
- Storage (S3/EBS): ₩50,000~₩300,000 per month for storing collected data
- Logging/Monitoring (CloudWatch, Datadog): ₩100,000~₩200,000 per month
While one server costs ₩50,000, in a corporate environment, it can easily go up to ₩500,000~₩3,000,000 or more.
Easily Missed Point: Traffic Spikes
"It's usually 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
Sending hundreds of requests from the same IP will get you blocked. As of 2026, proxies are not an option but a necessity in commercial crawling.
Proxy Types and Prices
| Type | Features | Price per GB | Estimated Monthly Cost (Medium Scale) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter Proxy | Fast but easily detected | $0.5~2 | ₩200,000~₩800,000 |
| Residential Proxy | Real residential IPs, hard to detect | $3~15 | ₩800,000~₩5,000,000 |
| ISP Proxy | Uses actual ISP IPs from data centers | $2~5 | ₩500,000~₩2,000,000 |
| Mobile Proxy | Mobile carrier IPs, minimal blocking | $10~30 | ₩2,000,000~₩8,000,000 |
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 using residential proxies? Calculating at $8/GB based on Bright Data, it would be around ₩6,000,000 per month.
However, the actual cost could 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 per month.
The problem arises with strong anti-bot sites. Sites like Coupang, Naver Shopping have high blocking rates, leading to frequent retries and actual traffic being 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: Disparity Between Simple and Complex
Costs by CAPTCHA Type
As of 2026, many e-commerce and portal sites use CAPTCHA.
| 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 | Not solvable with services |
| PerimeterX/HUMAN | Very High | Not solvable with services |
Regular CAPTCHA: Cheaper Than Expected
For medium-scale crawling (100,000 pages per day, 30% CAPTCHA rate):
- Monthly CAPTCHA solves: about 900,000
- Based on reCAPTCHA v2: around ₩230,000 per month
- Based on Cloudflare Turnstile: around ₩580,000 per month
- Average with a mix: around ₩300,000~₩800,000 per month
Up to this point, it's manageable.
Real Issue: Enterprise-level Anti-bot
Coupang (Akamai), some financial sites (PerimeterX/HUMAN) can't 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 isn't about paying for CAPTCHA services. It's a problem that requires senior security developers to invest weeks to months.
Converted to salary:
- Initial setup: ₩5,000,000~₩20,000,000
- Monthly maintenance: ₩1,000,000~₩3,000,000
4. Anti-bot Response: Endless Arms Race
Rules Changing Every Quarter
Anti-bot companies update detection logic 8~12 times a year. Breaking through once isn't the end.
| Period | Update Details | Response Time |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 Q1 | Strengthening Cloudflare JS Challenge | 1~2 weeks |
| 2024 Q3 | Akamai Browser Fingerprint v3 | 2~4 weeks |
| 2025 Q1 | PerimeterX Advanced Behavior Analysis | 3~6 weeks |
| 2025 Q3 | Major update to Cloudflare Turnstile | 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.
Person Capable of Doing This
Skills required for anti-bot response:
- Reverse Engineering: Deobfuscating JavaScript, 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. Even if not full-time, allocating resources for each update incurs monthly costs of ₩2,000,000~₩5,000,000.
Consequences of Delayed Response
For e-commerce companies doing real-time price monitoring, a 2-week data gap is critical. Competitors' prices change, and we are unaware. No matter how much money you spend later, you can't recover past data.
5. Monitoring & Operations: Daily Invisible Costs
Tool Costs
| Item | Tool | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server Monitoring | Datadog / CloudWatch | ₩100,000~₩300,000 |
| Crawling Success Tracking | Custom Dashboard (Development needed) | — |
| Data Quality Verification | Custom Scripts (Development needed) | — |
| Fault Alerts | PagerDuty / Slack Webhook | ₩50,000~₩150,000 |
| Log Management | ELK Stack / Grafana Loki | ₩100,000~₩200,000 |
Total Tool Costs: ₩250,000~₩650,000 per month
But the real cost is not in the tools.
Personnel Costs
- Daily crawling status check: 30 minutes
- Weekly data quality review: 2 hours
- Fault 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, this amounts to ₩200,000~₩300,000 per month.
And there is one more cost that cannot be quantified. 3 a.m. fault alerts. The developer's sleep, work-life balance, burnout — a pattern that leads to resignation is seen in many companies.
Total Cost Simulation
Scenario: Medium B2B Company (100,000 pages per day, crawling 5 sites)
| Cost Item | Monthly Cost | Annual Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Server/Cloud | ₩800,000 | ₩9,600,000 |
| Proxy | ₩2,500,000 | ₩30,000,000 |
| CAPTCHA Bypass | ₩500,000 | ₩6,000,000 |
| Anti-bot Response (Personnel) | ₩3,000,000 | ₩36,000,000 |
| Monitoring/Operations | ₩2,000,000 | ₩24,000,000 |
| Total | ₩8,800,000 | ₩156,000,000 |
Operating at the Same Scale with Hashscraper Subscription
Pro Plan: ₩8,000,000 per month (₩96,000,000 per year)
Included items: Server, Proxy, CAPTCHA Bypass, Anti-bot Response, Monitoring, Fault Response, Additional Development — all included.
Annual Difference: Approximately ₩960,000 (9%)
At first glance, the difference doesn't seem significant. However, there are costs not included in this:
When Including Hidden Costs
- Initial Setup Cost: ₩30,000,000~₩80,000,000 to set up infrastructure (3~6 months of development)
- Opportunity Cost: What if the developer working on crawling had worked on a core product?
- Data Gap: Whenever there's a 2-week halt due to anti-bot updates, the data for that period is lost forever
- Employee Turnover Risk: A 3-month gap minimum when the person in charge of crawling resigns
When adding these up, the actual difference is over ₩50,000,000 annually.
Break-even Points by Scale
| Scale | Self-built (Monthly) | Hashscraper (Monthly) | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|
| Small (1,000 pages/day) | ~₩2,000,000 | ₩3,000,000 (Basic) | Self-built is cheaper |
| Medium (10,000 pages/day) | ~₩8,800,000 | ₩8,000,000 (Pro) | Save ₩800,000 per month |
| Large (100,000 pages/day) | ~₩17,500,000 | ₩12,000,000 (Enterprise) | Save ₩5,500,000 per month |
Key: For small-scale, doing it yourself is cheaper. But as the scale grows, the cost efficiency of professional services improves dramatically.
The reason is structural. When hundreds of customers share proxy pools, anti-bot response engines, CAPTCHA solving infrastructures, the unit cost drops dramatically. The economic structure is fundamentally different from building it independently.
Frankly Speaking
Hashscraper is not the answer in every situation.
When self-building is better:
- Crawling targets are 1~2 sites, and anti-bot measures are weak
- Daily collection is below 10,000 pages for small-scale
- There's an in-house crawling expert, and the risk of them leaving is low
When Hashscraper is suitable:
- Crawling targets include 3 or more sites
- Strong anti-bot sites like Coupang, Naver, financial sites are included
- Data continuity is crucial for business (price monitoring, inventory tracking, etc.)
- The development team needs to focus on core products instead of crawling
Verify the Actual Costs of Our Infrastructure
If you are currently operating a self-built crawling infrastructure, calculate the following:
- [ ] Monthly cost of crawling-dedicated servers/cloud
- [ ] Monthly expenditure on proxy services
- [ ] Monthly cost of CAPTCHA solving services
- [ ] Developer salary for crawling-related tasks (calculated based on the proportion of crawling work to total workload)
- [ ] Hourly rate × time spent on fault response per day
- [ ] Total downtime due to anti-bot updates in the past year
- [ ] Total cost allocated to initial infrastructure setup (amortized on a monthly basis)
You'll likely find larger numbers than you expected.
Next Steps
- Cost Analysis Request: Let us know your current infrastructure setup at [help@hashscraper.com]. We will analyze the costs for each item.
- 1:1 Comparison: We will compare your current monthly costs with Hashscraper subscriptions side by side.
- 2-Week Free Trial: Operate alongside your existing crawling setup to directly compare performance and costs.
Hashscraper provides crawling infrastructure to over 500 B2B companies. For a more detailed cost analysis, please contact [help@hashscraper.com].
