Comparing accounts on unit price is like choosing a car by the price of its fuel tank. What you want is the cost of the work, not of the purchase.
What to count instead
The cost of one working day: purchase price divided by the number of days it survives. An account twice the price that lives three times as long wins — and that is the ordinary case, not a rare one.
Add the proxy: it is needed for the whole term and costs the same for a cheap account as for a good one. The shorter the account's life, the larger the share of its cost the address eats.
The hidden part: your time
Every lost account means a replacement, an upload, a warm-up and a proxy to configure. Half an hour each. On a fleet of fifty with high attrition that becomes a job.
The hidden part: interrupted work
Accounts die at inconvenient moments. Half the list is processed, half is not, and the whole result is smeared. Those losses never appear in the expense table, and they are usually the biggest.
When cheap is right
When the account is deliberately disposable: a short task after which it is not needed. Then age and idle time are not worth paying for — only surviving to the end of the job is.
How to work it out for yourself
Take the last two months: accounts bought, accounts lost, proxy spend. The method is in what a fleet costs and pricing the risk of a ban. Without those two numbers the «cheap or expensive» argument cannot be settled at all.
Buy accountsaged, with full session files