Accounts are bought once and paid for continuously. The gap between those two views explains why back-of-envelope models come out roughly twice as optimistic as reality.
Three lines
- Purchase. Price follows age and country. Fresh is cheaper, ramps slower and dies more often.
- Proxies. One per account. Residential and mobile cost more than datacentre IPv4 and are meaningfully safer.
- Attrition. Some accounts get limited or banned. That is statistics, not misfortune, and it belongs in the plan.
Converting to a monthly number
Divide the account price by its expected life in months and add the monthly proxy cost. That gives you the honest monthly cost of one working account — a figure you can compare with revenue.
Expected life is the great unknown at the start. Use a conservative estimate for the first months, then replace it with your own data: how many of the accounts you bought are still alive at the end of the quarter.
The one thing not to save on
Proxies. Several accounts on one address is the fastest way to lose all of them: Telegram links them and the restriction lands on the group. The saving is always smaller than the accounts it costs you.
Own or rent
Accounts can be bought or registered yourself. The second is cheaper in money and more expensive in time and risk: a fresh registration means a full ramp and higher early attrition. There is a third option people forget — the client's accounts, if you work as a contractor. Then the fleet leaves your cost base entirely, and so does your control over its quality. Turning attrition into a number is covered in this piece.