BEST-FOR GUIDE · 9 PROVIDERS COMPARED
If you run your own scraper, residential bandwidth is usually your biggest variable cost. We compared nine providers on what a cost-conscious developer actually pays, the billing small print, the features scrapers use and what independent tests found, and made a pick for each common job.
How to read this: prices come from each vendor's pricing page (checked 17 Oct 2026); performance figures come from Proxyway's published reviews, with test dates (Proxyway uses affiliate links). NetNut is not listed: its domains were seized by the FBI on 2 July 2026 (KrebsOnSecurity).
01 / PROXIES FOR WEB SCRAPING
Developers running their own scrapers (Scrapy, Playwright, Crawlee) who pay for residential bandwidth by the GB. Each pick is for a specific job and comes with the facts behind it. How we chose them.
$1.00/GB flat for rotating and sticky traffic; prepaid from $50, balance never expires (as of October 2026)
$4/GB pay-as-you-go; plans from $3.75/GB (3 GB) to $2.75/GB (100 GB) (as of October 2026)
Runner-up: Oxylabs. If a subscription is fine: 99.93% success, 0.60 s and the largest measured pool (3.2M+ unique IPs) in Proxyway’s testing, from $30/mo.
$7.35 for 1 GB, $5.51/GB at 10 GB, $1.84/GB at 10 TB+; never expires (as of October 2026)
$8/GB pay-as-you-go list ($4 with a 3-month promo); $7–$5/GB on $499–$1,999/mo plans (as of October 2026)
Runner-up: Oxylabs. City, ZIP, coordinates and ASN targeting, on a subscription from $30/mo with monthly traffic expiry.
Evomi Core is $0.99/GB pay-as-you-go from 15 GB ($0.49/GB on the $49/mo 100 GB plan) with city and ISP targeting included, and reached 99.91% in Proxyway's July 2026 test; Proxyway measured a smaller pool (about 1.5M unique IPs), ASN targeting costs 4× and there is no IP whitelisting or sub-users. Rayobyte falls to $0.70/GB at 1–5 TB and supports UDP and HTTP/3, but Proxyway measured slow residential responses (1.86 s) and residential access needs SumSub KYC. SOAX reached 99.78% (0.89 s) in Proxyway's April 2026 test and has fine rotation controls, but credits expire after 60 days and support is now weekdays only. Webshare has cheap monthly plans and a good API (99.28% in Proxyway's test), but is subscription-based with a 2-day refund window. All four appear in the tables below.
If your targets sit behind Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome or Kasada, a better proxy may not be enough. Compare a managed unblocker in our scraping API guide and the build vs buy guide.
A self-built scraper has three running costs: servers, proxies and your time. Servers are a roughly fixed cost. Your time is mostly spent once, plus maintenance (the Web Scraping Club estimates about 30 minutes a month per simple scraper in 2026, down from two hours in 2023). Residential proxies are different: they are billed per gigabyte, so cost grows linearly with every page and every byte on it. At scale, that line dominates.
The formula is short: page size × pages × price per GB. That makes two levers matter far more than anything else:
route.abort(), Crawlee's blockRequests()) is the cheapest optimisation
you will ever ship. See the open-source tools guide for code.
Retries are the third, smaller multiplier. Proxyway's 2026 research found a median 74.43% success rate on Amazon, Google and Instagram for residential proxies; if a quarter of requests fail and you retry them, you transfer up to about 1.34× the bytes (an upper bound, since failed responses are usually smaller than real pages).
Entry price per GB × page weight, bandwidth only (no retries, servers or CAPTCHA solving). Most providers publish lower volume prices; PacketStream publishes one flat $1 rate. Try your own numbers in the cost calculator.
| Provider (entry $/GB) | 22 KB bare HTML document | 100 KB HTML-only fetch | 500 KB render, assets blocked | 2 MB full render |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Evomi Core ($0.99) | $0.02 | $0.10 | $0.49 | $1.98 |
| PacketStream ($1.00) | $0.02 | $0.10 | $0.50 | $2.00 |
| Rayobyte Premium ($3.50) | $0.08 | $0.35 | $1.75 | $7.00 |
| Webshare ($3.50) | $0.08 | $0.35 | $1.75 | $7.00 |
| Decodo ($4.00) | $0.09 | $0.40 | $2.00 | $8.00 |
| SOAX ($5.00) | $0.11 | $0.50 | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| Oxylabs ($6.00) | $0.13 | $0.60 | $3.00 | $12.00 |
| IPRoyal ($7.35) | $0.16 | $0.73 | $3.67 | $14.70 |
| Bright Data ($8.00) | $0.18 | $0.80 | $4.00 | $16.00 |
Our arithmetic: KB × 1,000 ÷ 1,000,000 × $/GB. At 1 million full renders a month, the gap between $1/GB and $8/GB is roughly $2,000 versus $16,000.
Most scrapers need four things from a residential network: rotation for stateless page fetches, sticky sessions for logins, carts and paginated flows, geo-targeting for country-specific prices and search results, and a protocol your stack speaks (SOCKS5 matters for some HTTP clients and non-HTTP traffic). Everyone here supports SOCKS5. The differences are in session length, targeting depth and authentication.
| Provider | Targeting | Sticky max | SOCKS5 | Pool claim | PAYG | Traffic expiry | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PacketStream | Country | Rolling 60-min idle timeout | Yes | — | Yes | Never | $50 |
| Evomi Core | Country, city, region, ISP included; ASN 4× | 120 min | Yes | 54M+ claimed; 1.5M unique measured | Yes | Never (PAYG) | 15 GB (~$14.85) |
| Rayobyte Premium | City, ZIP, ASN, OS | 60–120 min (sources differ) | Yes (+UDP, HTTP/3) | 50M+ opted-in devices/month | Yes | Not stated (Proxyway: never) | 1 GB |
| Webshare | City | Not published | Yes | 80M+, 195 countries | Not confirmed (subscriptions shown) | Resets monthly (not confirmed) | 1 GB |
| Decodo | City, ZIP, ASN | 24 h | Yes | 115M+, 195+ locations | Yes | PAYG 12 months; plans don’t roll over | 3 GB plan $11.25 (or PAYG) |
| SOAX | City, ISP | Not published | Yes | 191M+ residential + mobile | Yes (credits) | Credits expire after 60 days | None (Sandbox credits) |
| Oxylabs | City, ZIP, coordinates, ASN | 24 h | Yes (+HTTP/3) | 175M+, 195 countries | No | Monthly | $30/mo |
| IPRoyal | City, ISP | 7 days | Yes (TCP only) | 64M+ | Yes | Never | 1 GB |
| Bright Data | City, ZIP, ASN, carrier | Not confirmed | Yes | 400M+ monthly IPs, 195 countries | Yes | Not confirmed | None on PAYG; plans from $499/mo |
Pool claims are marketing numbers measured in different ways ("monthly IPs", "opted-in devices", combined residential and mobile). Proxyway's measured unique IPs are more comparable: 3,241,404 for Oxylabs, 2,853,543 for Decodo, 1,499,867 for Evomi and 885,512 for Bright Data (2024). Evomi Core has no IP whitelisting or sub-users.
Proxyway is the only source that tests most of these networks the same way. Proxyway uses affiliate links, so read its reviews as third-party tests, not gospel. Test dates matter, so each result is shown with its date.
| Provider | Test date | Success rate | Avg response | Unique IPs seen |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PacketStream | — | — | — | — |
| Evomi Core | Jul 2026 | 99.91% | 0.70 s | 1,499,867 |
| Rayobyte Premium | Not stated | — | 1.86 s | 1,887,661 |
| Webshare | Not stated | 99.28% | — | 1,745,672 |
| Decodo | Apr 2026 | 99.92% | 0.53 s | 2,853,543 |
| SOAX | Apr 2026 | 99.78% | 0.89 s | 1,670,306 |
| Oxylabs | Not stated | 99.93% | 0.60 s | 3,241,404 |
| IPRoyal | Apr 2026 | 96.11% | P95 4.13 s | 2,330,578 |
| Bright Data | Mar 2024 | 98.96% | 1.12 s | 885,512 |
The pattern is clear. Oxylabs, Decodo, Evomi and SOAX all cleared 99.7% (Decodo and SOAX tested in April 2026, Evomi in July 2026).
Identity checks decide how fast you can start. Bright Data is the strictest: residential access is only for verified companies after a human-reviewed KYC, Gmail and Outlook addresses are rejected, and an ID check or video call is possible, with decisions "within 48 hours". Rayobyte runs KYC through SumSub for residential, IPRoyal asks for it to unlock more ports, PayPal and some domains, and Oxylabs may ask before enabling advanced filters (it also publishes a list of refused targets such as banks, government and ticketing sites). Decodo has no mandatory KYC for standard use, Webshare asks only if activity looks suspicious, and Evomi has none at signup but may request it later. PacketStream's terms describe no up-front ID check.
Support differs just as much: Decodo, Evomi and IPRoyal offer 24/7 support (Evomi with live chat and Slack), Webshare is 24/5, and SOAX has cut back to weekdays 7am–7pm UTC.
NetNut is unavailable. On 2 July 2026 the FBI seized hundreds of NetNut domains alongside a Google/Lumen/FBI action against the "Popa" botnet of roughly two million infected smart TVs and streaming boxes (KrebsOnSecurity, BleepingComputer). Parent Alarum disputed the allegations and paused services on 4 July; a 13 July update said the root cause was unknown, and netnut.io still shows the seizure banner. We cover it as news only.
Several "competitors" share a parent. Webshare has been owned by Oxylabs since late 2022; Smartproxy rebranded as Decodo in April 2025; and on 13 October 2026 Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Honeygain were grouped under a new umbrella, Source.ai (Proxyway news). The brands keep their own products and pricing, but if you are spreading risk across vendors, three of the nine providers here are now one company.
It depends on the job. Our first pick is PacketStream for the simplest bill: $1/GB flat for rotating and sticky traffic, no subscription, and a balance that never expires. For the best-tested pay-as-you-go network: Decodo ($4/GB, 99.92% in Proxyway’s April 2026 test). For long sticky sessions: IPRoyal (up to 7 days, and traffic never expires). For ZIP, ASN and carrier targeting: Bright Data.
Not always. Many sites can be scraped from datacenter IPs or no proxy at all. Residential proxies matter when a site rate-limits or blocks datacenter ranges, or when you need country-specific results. They are billed by the gigabyte, so keep page weight down.
It depends on what you download. An HTML-only fetch is roughly 100 KB per page; a headless-browser render with images, fonts and CSS blocked is around 500 KB; a full render can be 2 MB or more (HTTP Archive puts the median inner page near 1.8–2 MB). 1,000 full renders at $4/GB cost about $8 in bandwidth alone.
No. The FBI seized hundreds of NetNut domains on 2 July 2026 alongside an action against the Popa botnet; its parent Alarum disputed the allegations and paused services. We do not cover it.
Not entirely. Webshare has been owned by Oxylabs since late 2022, and since 13 October 2026 Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare and ScrapingBee sit under one umbrella company, Source.ai. The brands keep their own products and prices.