Proxy tier benchmark › Targets
Do you need a proxy for the Pappers Spain company search API?
International registries · minimum viable tier: no proxy needed · measured 2026-08-18
No. The Pappers.es company search endpoint returned the expected JSON on 10 of 10 unproxied requests (100%) and on every datacenter and anti-detect configuration; the only failure in 60 requests was a single HTTP 502 on the residential arm. Measured 2026-08-18.
What was measured
| URL | https://pappers.es/api/search?q=telefonica |
| Content assertion | entity_number |
| Arms | 6 |
| Rounds per arm | 10 |
| Requests | 60 |
| Measured | 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC |
| Benchmark host | DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3) |
A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.
This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.
Results by arm
| Arm | Success | p50 | p95 | Bytes per success | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| direct (no proxy) | 100% | 1,069 ms | 1,334 ms | 291,927 | success 10 |
| datacenter, one pinned exit | 100% | 1,350 ms | 3,961 ms | 291,927 | success 10 |
| datacenter, rotating exit | 100% | 1,317 ms | 3,949 ms | 291,927 | success 10 |
| anti-detect, one pinned exit | 100% | 2,246 ms | 4,128 ms | 291,927 | success 10 |
| anti-detect, rotating exit | 100% | 1,826 ms | 2,212 ms | 291,927 | success 10 |
| residential, rotating exit | 90% | 4,444 ms | 5,437 ms | 291,927 | success 9, server error 1 |
What protects this target
Nothing. No challenge signature appeared on any arm.
The distinguishing feature of this target is size, not defence: at 291,927 bytes per query it returns the largest response in the study -- roughly 1.4 times the heaviest HTML page measured, and eighteen times the SEC EDGAR filing index. That makes it the one benchmarked target where a proxy decision would be a traffic-cost decision rather than an access decision. One thousand queries move about 0.29 GB, which is $0.15-$0.29 of datacenter traffic across the published plan ladder and $1.46-$2.63 of residential. Since the unproxied arm scored 100%, the correct spend is zero.
Median response time was 1,069 ms unproxied against 4,444 ms residential.
robots.txt status
The URL measured is allowed by the host's robots.txt.
| Status | allowed |
| File | https://pappers.es/robots.txt |
| Crawl-delay | not declared |
| Fetched as | the benchmark's own User-Agent |
| Note | robots.txt 233 bytes via benchmark_ua |
Limits of this result
- One search query was measured (
q=telefonica). A query returning many more entities would return a larger payload and could be throttled differently. - Pappers.es is a commercial aggregator of Spanish registry data, not the registry itself. Its own terms govern automated use; the compliance gate here checked robots.txt only.
- Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
- One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
- The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.
Related
- B2B data scraping
- Do you need a proxy for the EPFO India member portal?
- Proxy tier benchmark: full report
Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets
The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,es_pappers_api,' raw.csv.
Test your own target
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