Hourly or Daily: Which Costs Less for Your Job?

We sell the same line four ways: by the hour, by the day, by the week and by the month. The line itself does not change, so the only question is which price fits the length of the job. This page does the arithmetic so you do not have to. It walks through the hourly ladder, finds the exact point where the day pass becomes cheaper, then does the same for the week and the month, and ends with two real jobs and a table of every number we charge.

Four prices for one line

An hourly purchase is $2 on 4G or $3 on 5G for the first two hours, then $2 or $3 for each additional hour, up to four hours in a single purchase. It never renews; when the hours are used the line stops. A day pass is $5 on 4G or $6 on 5G and runs 24 hours from activation. A week is $28 or $31. A month is $65 or $75. All four give you the same dedicated SIM in the same city with the same unlimited rotation and the same unlimited data under the fair use rule. The hourly purchase and the day, week and month plans are all sold in the dashboard, the mobile app and the Telegram bot.

One rule links the hourly and the daily price. If you bought hours and the job keeps going, the dashboard lets you turn the purchase into a day pass and counts what you already paid toward it. You never end up paying more than the day price for a day's worth of hours.

The hourly ladder, hour by hour

On 4G the ladder reads: two hours $2, three hours $4, four hours $6. The day pass is $5. So at one, two and three hours the hourly purchase is cheaper than the day, and at four hours it is a dollar more. The crossover sits between the third and the fourth hour. If you have paid $4 for three hours and need a fourth, the right move is the upgrade: pay $1 more and have the whole day.

On 5G the ladder is steeper: two hours $3, three hours $6, four hours $9. The day pass is $6. The hourly purchase wins at one and two hours, ties the day at three, and loses at four. On 5G the rule is short: two hours or less, buy hours; anything longer, buy the day.

The ladder is deliberately flat at the start. The first two hours are one price because most short jobs take between an hour and two, and we would rather you not watch the clock for the second hour.

Worked example one: a 90-minute check

A marketer needs to see how a set of search results and three ad placements render for a mobile user in Chicago. The pass takes about an hour and a half, including screenshots. On a 4G line that is $2, and the purchase ends on its own 30 minutes after the job does. A day pass would have been $5 for the same work, and a line that sat idle for 22 hours. Hourly wins by $3, and the job never came near the ladder's crossover.

If the same marketer wanted to do the pass from a 5G line, say to record video of the ads loading, the two hours cost $3 against a $6 day. Same answer, same reason: the job is short, so the hour is the cheaper unit.

Worked example two: a scraper that runs all afternoon

A developer has a scraper that fetches a few thousand product pages with a rotation every few hundred requests. From a cold start, including fixing a selector that broke, the run takes about five hours. On the hourly ladder that is impossible in one purchase, because hourly purchases stop at four, and two purchases of two hours plus one extra hour on 4G would come to $6 and then another $2, which is $8 against a $5 day pass. The day wins, and it wins harder on 5G, where the same five hours by the hour would cost $12 against $6.

The honest version of this example is that the developer started by the hour, because they expected the run to finish in two. At the three-hour mark the dashboard offered the upgrade: $4 already paid, $1 more for the day. They took it, the run finished, and the total was $5, which is exactly what the day would have cost if they had guessed right at the start. That is what the upgrade rule is for.

When the day stops winning: week and month

Day passes stack the same way hours do. On 4G, a week is $28, which is the price of five and a bit day passes, so from the sixth day the week is cheaper. On 5G a week is $31 against $6 a day; six days of passes cost $36, so again the week wins from day six. If a job will run Monday to Friday and might spill into the weekend, the week is the safer buy.

A month is $65 on 4G or $75 on 5G. Against day passes, that is 13 days of 4G or twelve and a half days of 5G; past that point the month is cheaper than buying days. Against weeks, four weeks of 4G cost $112 and four weeks of 5G cost $124, so the month is cheaper than any combination of more than two weeks and a few days. A line you expect to use on most days of the month is a monthly line.

Week and month plans can renew automatically if you turn that on, and both have the first-24-hours full refund and pro rata refund after. The hour has none of that, because there is nothing to renew and nothing to refund once it has run.

When each one wins

Buy hours when the job is under three hours on 4G or under two hours on 5G, when you are not sure the job will work at all and want to find out for $2, when you are testing code against the rotation API, or when the line is for a one-off check in a city you do not otherwise need.

Buy a day when the job is an afternoon or a working day, when a scraper or a test suite has an unknown runtime, or when you started by the hour and the dashboard is offering the upgrade for a dollar or two.

Buy a week when the work runs five or more days in a row: a campaign check that repeats daily, a QA cycle, a scraper that runs every evening. Buy a month when the line carries something that lives on it, like an account that should always come from the same city and carrier, or when the daily arithmetic shows you buying more than 13 days anyway.

Every number on one page

Hourly, 4G: $2 for the first two hours, $2 per hour after, four hours maximum per purchase. Hourly, 5G: $3 for the first two hours, $3 per hour after, four hours maximum. Day: $5 on 4G, $6 on 5G. Week: $28 on 4G, $31 on 5G. Month: $65 on 4G, $75 on 5G. Crossovers: hourly to day at four hours on 4G and three hours on 5G; day to week at six days on either; day to month at 13 days on 4G and 13 days on 5G; week to month at just over two weeks on either.

Speeds are the same whichever way you pay: 4G usually 20 to 45 Mbps, 5G 50 Mbps and up, depending on signal at the device. Location moves between our eight cities are free on every plan length and the remaining time comes with you. If your situation does not fit any of the cases above, write to [email protected] with the job length and we will tell you which to buy.

Questions about per-GB pricing