# Residential exits

Some sites read the address a request came from and serve a server farm less than they serve a person. Add one parameter and URLpipe fetches the page from a home broadband line instead.

Any endpoint takes it

```
{ "url": "https://example.com", "residential": true }
```

It works on every endpoint, including [/scrape](https://urlpipe.dev/docs/scrape), and it changes nothing else about the request: the same response, the same headers, the same sync and async modes. It defaults to `false`, so nothing you already run is affected.

## When it helps

Try without it first. Most pages come back complete on the standard network, and when a site puts a bot check in front of us we work it and retry before you ever hear about it. Reach for a residential exit when that isn't enough:

- The response is `The page asked us to complete a bot check before it would load.` — a site that will not clear for a datacentre address, however long we wait.
- The page loads but comes back thin: a paywall stub, a consent wall, or a product page with the prices missing.
- You need what a real visitor sees — regional pricing, local inventory, the page a household connection is served rather than the one a bot is.

It is not a guarantee, and nothing is. A site that blocks every automated visitor blocks this one too. What changes is the single signal most sites act on first.

## What it costs

A residential exit adds **25 credits** to a request — charged once per **page fetch**, not once per operation. Residential bandwidth is bought by the gigabyte and a page visit spends a page's worth of it, which is the whole of why it is priced separately from the work done on the page afterwards.

Request

Operations

Exits

Total

`/html`

1

25

26

`/summarize`

17

25

42

`/scrape — html, markdown, meta`

3

25

28

`/scrape — html, lighthouse`

3

50

53

That is the one place a [/scrape](https://urlpipe.dev/docs/scrape) is cheaper than the same operations called one at a time: it visits the page once and reads every operation off that single visit, so it pays for one exit however many results come back. A `/lighthouse` runs its own audit on its own engine, so a scrape that includes it fetches twice and pays twice.

The usual rules hold. A result served from [cache](https://urlpipe.dev/docs/caching) fetched nothing, so it costs nothing — exit included. A failed analysis costs nothing either, even though the fetch was attempted. And `X-Quota-Cost` on every response reports the whole figure, exit and operations together.

## Residential results are kept apart

The point of asking for a home address is that the page may answer differently, so a residential result is stored under its own key. A residential request is never handed a result fetched from the datacentre, and an ordinary request is never handed a residential one. Repeat the same residential call inside your `max_age` window and it is a free cache hit like any other.

## When no exit is free

Residential capacity is finite and, unlike the rest of the network, it has no stand-in: answering from a datacentre address would be the one thing the request asked us not to do. So when nothing is free the request fails, plainly and for free:

422 Unprocessable Entity

```
{
  "error": "No residential exit was free to load this page. Retry shortly, or send the same request without residential to use our standard network."
}
```

Nothing is spent. Retry in a moment, or drop the parameter and take the standard network's answer — which for most pages is the same answer.

## Trying it out

Point it at the targets that are giving you trouble and compare. A [free API key](https://urlpipe.dev/auth/sign-up/new) comes with 1,000 credits a month — enough to fetch 38 pages through a residential exit and find out whether it changes what they send back, before you build anything on it.

No code needed to try it: the in-app Playground has a Residential switch, billed exactly as the API bills it. The free [tools](https://urlpipe.dev/tools) always use the standard network.

[See what everything else costs](https://urlpipe.dev/docs/credits)

Source: https://urlpipe.dev/docs/residential