Getting provider keys

Which provider to start with, where to get a key, and what to set.

Proxlane has no accounts of its own. Requests run on your provider accounts, so you need at least one provider key before the gateway can do anything. One is enough. A second one gives failover somewhere to go.

All five have a free trial. The sizes differ and change often, so check the pricing pages.

Some links on this page are referral links. If you create a provider account through one, Proxlane may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. It changes nothing about how requests are routed, how providers are measured, or what gets published.

The five providers

Listed alphabetically. Which one works best depends on your targets, and the only way to know is to run them. A measured comparison will be published once there is enough traffic behind it.

Bright Data

brightdata.com, the Web Unlocker product.

Rendering is included in the price, so this is the cheapest of the four for rendered pages. The key is <zone>:<token>, because the zone belongs to your account. A bare token is read as an empty zone and comes back as AUTH_FAILED. So does a suspended account, with Bright Data's own reason in the attempt's providerMessage.

bash

BRIGHTDATA_KEY=my-unlocker-zone:abc123...

Firecrawl

firecrawl.dev, built for feeding pages to LLMs.

One credit per page whether or not it renders, which makes it the cheapest of the five for rendered pages alongside Bright Data. Proxlane asks it for the raw page bytes, not the markdown it is known for. It has no residential tier and cannot forward a POST.

Rendered pages come back with Firecrawl's ad and cookie-banner blocking applied. That is their default, and turning it off makes them skip the browser engine, so it stays on.

One thing it cannot do: say why a page failed. A 404, a 503 and a block page all come back as the same error, so Proxlane reports TARGET_ERROR and moves to the next provider, which then says which it was. Its free plan is 1,000 credits a month.

bash

FIRECRAWL_KEY=fc-abc123...

ScraperAPI

scraperapi.com, the one with the most options.

It is the only one of the five that keeps a session across requests (sessionId), and it sells residential and stealth tiers. Rendering costs ten times a plain request. Binary responses come back decoded, so Proxlane does not send images or PDFs here.

bash

SCRAPERAPI_KEY=abc123...

ScrapingBee

scrapingbee.com, the simplest API of the five.

Rendering costs five times a plain request. Geotargeting covers a fixed list of regions, and which countries you get depends on your plan.

bash

SCRAPINGBEE_KEY=abc123...

Scrapfly

scrapfly.io, the one with exact cost reporting.

Every response says what it cost, so X-Cost from Proxlane is Scrapfly's own number, not an estimate. Rendering costs six times a plain request. Bodies over about 5 MB come back as a URL instead of a page; Proxlane treats that as a failure and moves to the next provider.

bash

SCRAPFLY_KEY=abc123...

Which to start with

If you render a lot of pages, Bright Data and Firecrawl are the cheapest. If you need sessions or a residential tier, ScraperAPI. If you want the exact cost of every request, Scrapfly. If you want the fewest decisions, ScrapingBee.

Setting the key

Pass it as an environment variable, the same way Quickstart does:

bash

docker run -p 8787:8787 \
  -e PROXLANE_API_KEY="$(openssl rand -hex 32)" \
  -e SCRAPERAPI_KEY=... \
  -e BRIGHTDATA_KEY=... \
  ghcr.io/proxlane/gateway:latest

Providers with no key are left out of the chain. Nothing fails and nothing is logged about them.

Run proxlane doctor to see what the gateway sees: which keys are set, whether the Bright Data key has the right shape, and what happens if none are set.

Where your keys go

To the gateway you run, and from there to the provider named on each request. Proxlane has no server of its own. The container, the keys, the logs and the provider bill are all yours.