Getting provider keys

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

Proxlane has no account system and resells nothing. Requests run on your provider accounts, so before the gateway can do anything you need at least one provider key. One is enough; a second is what gives failover somewhere to go.

All four offer a free trial, so you can see whether Proxlane fits before paying anyone. The sizes differ and change often; each provider's pricing page is the authority.

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 four, alphabetically

Listed A to Z, not best to worst. Which one is best depends on your targets, and the honest answer is that you find out by running them. The measured comparison is not published yet, because there is not enough traffic behind it to be worth trusting.

Bright Data

brightdata.com — the Web Unlocker product.

The cheapest of the four for rendered pages: rendering is included rather than a multiplier. The key has a shape the others do not, <zone>:<token>, because the zone is a property of your account. A bare token reads as an empty zone and comes back as AUTH_FAILED.

bash

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

ScraperAPI

scraperapi.com — the widest set of options.

The only one of the four 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 route images or PDFs here.

bash

SCRAPERAPI_KEY=abc123...

ScrapingBee

scrapingbee.com — the simplest API of the four.

Rendering costs five times a plain request. Geotargeting covers a published list of regions rather than everywhere, and the countries available depend on your plan.

bash

SCRAPINGBEE_KEY=abc123...

Scrapfly

scrapfly.io — the most detailed cost reporting.

Every response carries what it actually cost, so X-Cost from Proxlane is the provider's own number rather than an estimate. Rendering costs six times a plain request. Bodies over about 5 MB are offloaded to a URL, which Proxlane treats as a failure to fail over from rather than handing you a link where a page should be.

bash

SCRAPFLY_KEY=abc123...

Which to start with

Cheapest for rendered pages: Bright Data, where rendering is not a multiplier.
Most options: ScraperAPI, if you need sessions or a residential tier.
Exact costs per request: Scrapfly.
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 you set no key for are left out of the chain entirely. Nothing fails, and nothing is logged about them; they are simply not candidates.

Run proxlane doctor to check what the gateway can see. It reports which keys are set, whether the Bright Data key has the right shape, and what will happen if none are.

Where your keys go

Into the gateway process you run, and to the provider named on each request. Proxlane has no server of its own to send them to. Self-hosted means the whole path is yours: the container, the keys, the logs, and whatever the provider bills you.