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Billing & Usage

This page explains how billing works at Charted Sea: wallet usage, volume discounts, proxy costs, and how to monitor consumption.

Wallet Model​

Charted Sea operates on a prepaid wallet model.

  • You add funds to your wallet.
  • Each successful scraping request deducts credits.
  • Proxy traffic (if using managed proxies) is metered separately.
  • When your wallet balance reaches zero, new scraping tasks are rejected.

All top-ups are final (no refunds).

We charge only for successful requests. This creates a strong incentive alignment: when success rates drop, our priority is to restore stability as quickly as possible.

Pricing Per Successful Request​

Scraping requests are billed per successful request.

  • SUCCESS → billed
  • ERROR, BLOCKED, CANCELLED, ERROR_TOO_MANY_TIMES, BLOCKED_TOO_MANY_TIMES → not billed

Automatic retries are included and do not incur additional scraping charges.

Some specific APIs (e.g. certain Shopee product detail endpoints with strong anti-bot protection) may have adjusted pricing due to significantly higher maintenance and operational costs. See the Pricing page for details.

Volume Discounts​

Volume discounts apply based on your total wallet top-up amount.

Important characteristics:

  • The discount thresholds are the same for all scrapers.
  • Credits can be used across all supported scrapers.
  • The amount deducted per request depends on the selected scraper and endpoint.

This means you can distribute your balance freely across Shopee, Lazada, and future platforms without fragmentation.

Proxy Traffic (Managed Proxies)​

By default, scrapers use proxies managed by Charted Sea.

If you use managed proxies:

  • Proxy traffic is metered separately.
  • We provide proxies at near cost, with a small margin to cover payment gateway fees and measurement variations.
  • We do not profit from reselling proxy traffic.

If you prefer full control over proxy costs, you can configure your own proxies.
See the Proxy Configuration section for details.

Anti-Bot Updates & Success Rate Monitoring​

E-commerce platforms frequently update their anti-bot protections.

During such events:

  • Scraping success rates may temporarily drop.
  • Failed requests are not billed.
  • However, proxy traffic is still consumed.

For this reason, you should:

  • Monitor your success rate.
  • Automatically pause or reduce scraping if the success rate becomes abnormally low.
  • Resume normal traffic once stability is restored.

Charted Sea actively maintains scrapers to restore reliability as quickly as possible after platform updates.

When Pricing Changes​

If pricing is updated:

  • Credits purchased before the change retain the old price.
  • The new pricing applies only to future wallet top-ups.

This ensures predictability and fairness for existing balances.

How to Top Up​

Currently:

  • Contact us to receive a payment link.
  • Funds are added to your wallet after payment confirmation.

Self-service wallet top-ups via Stripe are coming soon.

Usage Visibility​

You can monitor:

  • Wallet balance
  • Scraping request volume
  • Task statuses
  • Proxy consumption

in the Console.

We recommend integrating monitoring on your side as well (e.g., alerting on abnormal success rate or cost patterns).

Public Data Only​

Charted Sea scrapes publicly available data only.

  • No user accounts
  • No login-required endpoints
  • No bypassing of private or restricted content

We are committed to maintaining compliant, production-grade scraping infrastructure.