Webshare vs Rayobyte: Budget Datacenter Proxy Plans Compared

Need a large number of throwaway addresses for volume collection on targets that do not fight back hard? Webshare. Their published per-proxy rate is the lowest real entry point in this pair by a factor of more than thirty, and the free tier of 10 proxies with no card lets you prove your target works before any money moves.

Need specific addresses that stay yours, on a network whose diversity is actually documented? Rayobyte. Their datacenter product page publishes 300,000+ IPs across 9+ ASNs and 20,000 unique C-class subnets in 29+ countries, along with unlimited bandwidth and threads and automatic 30-day replacements. That is more disclosure than almost anyone in this price bracket offers.

Need neither addresses nor gigabytes but a fixed monthly bill that does not move when a target gets heavier? Neither of these plan shapes does that, and the last section of this article says what does.

One thing to settle early: these two vendors are not competing for the same purchase. Reading their price lists as if they were is the mistake that produces a bad buy.

Both companies file their cheapest offer under "datacenter proxies". The products underneath are different in kind.

Webshare sells quantity of addresses at the lowest achievable unit price. Their published pricing page, read September 2026, lists $0.0299 per proxy at 100 addresses, $0.0269 at 1,000, $0.0239 at 5,000 and $0.0179 at 60,000, with yearly terms advertised at 33% to 60% below the monthly rate. The datacenter product page shows 100K+ shared proxy IPs, 50+ countries, HTTP and SOCKS5 endpoints, a 100+ Gbps aggregate network claim and a 99.97% uptime claim. Bandwidth is a second axis on the plan, published as a range from 250 GB up to unlimited.

Rayobyte sells addresses with provenance. Their pricing page lists static datacenter IPs "From $1/IP" with subscription discounts of 5% at three months, 10% at six and 15% at twelve. Their datacenter product page is unusually forthcoming about the network behind that price: 300,000+ IPs, 9+ ASNs including self-owned infrastructure, 20,000 unique C-class subnets "spread over thousands of A- and B-classes", 29+ countries, unlimited bandwidth and threads, HTTP(S) and SOCKS protocols, automatic 30-day replacements and instant individual replacements.

Read those two paragraphs as answers to a question and the question is different each time. Webshare answers "how cheaply can I hold a lot of IPs". Rayobyte answers "how defensible is the address I am holding". You cannot rank them on one axis because they are not on one axis.

Here is the part of this comparison that matters more than any price.

When a target blocks a datacenter proxy, it very rarely blocks a single address. It blocks the prefix, usually the /24, and often the whole ASN. That means the useful measure of a datacenter pool is not how many IPs it contains but how many independent /24 blocks and how many distinct ASNs it spans. A pool of 100,000 addresses living in 400 subnets behaves, against a competent anti-bot system, like a pool of 400.

Rayobyte publishes both numbers. 20,000 unique C-class subnets and 9+ ASNs, on their own product page. Divide their published 300,000+ IPs by 20,000 subnets and you get roughly 15 addresses per /24, which is a genuinely dispersed pool by datacenter standards.

Webshare does not publish a subnet or ASN count that we could find on their pricing or datacenter pages as of September 2026. Neither do most vendors, which is exactly why the disclosure is worth something. This is not an accusation of a bad pool. It is an observation that one vendor lets you evaluate the property that determines your block rate and the other asks you to find out after purchase.

If that mechanism is new to you, our explainer on what a datacenter ASN is covers how targets classify hosting ranges, and mixed subnet datacenter proxies covers why dispersion beats raw pool size.

Every row is that vendor's own published material, read 23 September 2026. Verify before you buy.

Two rows deserve a second look. The ISP line differs by more than 16x on entry price, which is a wider gap than the datacenter line and points at genuinely different supply arrangements. And Rayobyte's residential floor of "as low as $0.50/GB" at 5,000+ GB is aggressive for that product category, which tells you where their volume business actually sits.

The most informative comparison on this page is not between the two vendors. It is inside one of them.

Rayobyte publishes two datacenter products. Static IPs from $1 each per month with unlimited bandwidth and threads, and rotating datacenter bandwidth from $0.30/GB, falling to $0.28/GB in the 51 to 150 GB band and $0.25/GB from 151 to 350 GB.

Take a concrete workload. One million page requests at an assumed 150 KB average response is roughly 150 GB. That is an illustrative assumption we chose to be plausible, not a measurement from any test we ran; substitute your own average response size before you trust the arithmetic.

On Rayobyte's rotating datacenter line, 150 GB lands at the top of the $0.28/GB band, so about $42 for the month. On Rayobyte's static datacenter line, doing that same million requests without hammering any single address means holding on the order of a thousand IPs, which at $1 each is about $1,000 for the month.

Same vendor, same network family, same workload, roughly 20 to 24 times the price depending on how many addresses you decide you need. Nobody is being overcharged. The two products are sold for different jobs, and the static line is not priced for volume collection at all. It is priced for holding an address.

That single observation is the most useful thing on this page, because it generalises. When a vendor's own two products differ by more than an order of magnitude on your workload, the expensive one is not a premium version of the cheap one. It is a different product. The same logic explains why Rayobyte's ISP line at $5 per IP is not "Rayobyte datacenter, but better", and our breakdown of rotating versus static datacenter proxies works through when each shape is the right purchase.

Most buyers comparing these two are trying to decide whether Rayobyte's price premium buys enough extra success to be worth it. There is a clean way to settle that, and the answer surprises people.

The metric you actually care about is cost per successful request:

cost_per_success = monthly_plan_cost / (requests_attempted * success_rate)

Now put the two plans in. Holding 1,000 addresses costs about $26.91 a month on Webshare's published 1,000-proxy tier and about $1,000 a month on Rayobyte's published "from $1/IP" static line, a ratio of roughly 37x.

For the expensive plan to win on cost per success, its success rate would have to be more than 37 times the cheap plan's. Success rates are bounded at 100%. So Rayobyte static only wins that comparison if Webshare's success rate on your target is below about 2.7%, which is not a plausible outcome for any target worth scraping. On pure cost per successful request, at these published prices, the cheap plan wins on essentially every workload.

That is not a verdict against Rayobyte. It is a demonstration that cost per success is the wrong test for this pair, and reaching for it is how buyers end up disappointed in both directions. The right questions are the ones that price cannot answer:

• Does the address need to stay the same across sessions, for a login, an allowlist, or an account that will be flagged if it moves?
• Is your target one that blocks whole ASNs, in which case a documented 9-ASN spread is worth real money and a cheap single-ASN pool is worth nothing?
• Is anyone going to be awake at 3am to swap out dead addresses, or do you need a replacement policy to do it?
• Do you need a support relationship with a named account, or is a dashboard enough?

Answer yes to two or more of those and Rayobyte's premium is buying something specific. Answer no to all four and you are paying 37x for nothing. Our wider ranking of the best datacenter proxy providers applies the same reasoning across six vendors.

Datacenter addresses die. Not occasionally, continuously. A target blocks a /24 and takes 15 of your addresses with it. A subnet picks up an abuse reputation from an unrelated tenant. An address lands on a blocklist that three of your targets subscribe to.

What happens next is a contract question, and it is where these two vendors are most clearly different.

Rayobyte publishes automatic 30-day replacements plus instant individual replacements on their datacenter product page. In practice that means a dead address is a support action, not a re-purchase, and the pool you paid for stays roughly the size you paid for.

Webshare does not publish an equivalent replacement policy on the pages we read. With per-proxy pricing at three cents, the economic answer is that you buy more addresses, and at that price buying 20% more is a trivial cost. The operational answer is that somebody has to notice, and your success-rate monitoring has to be good enough to catch a slow decay rather than a sudden outage.

That is the honest shape of it. The cheap plan pushes pool maintenance onto you and makes it affordable. The expensive plan absorbs it and charges for the absorption. Neither is wrong; they are the same trade you make everywhere else in infrastructure. Just be sure you know which one you bought. Our guide to shared versus dedicated datacenter proxies covers the other half of that trade, which is who else is using your address.

Both plans on this page bill you for a thing that scales with your workload. Webshare bills per address plus a bandwidth axis. Rayobyte bills per address or per gigabyte. If your traffic doubles, something on your invoice moves.

There is a third shape that neither sells. Flat monthly pricing by concurrency, with no traffic meter at all. SparkProxy sells that: a fixed number of simultaneous connections against a rotating pool, unlimited bandwidth, 30 days validity.

The speed figures are fair-usage ceilings rather than promised rates. The pool behind them is 1M+ datacenter IPs across 80+ countries including 50,000+ US addresses, reached at gateway.sparkproxy.io on port 11000 for HTTP and HTTPS, 11002 for sticky sessions and 13000 for SOCKS5, with random per-request rotation and a 5-minute auto-rotation option.

Where this shape wins is exactly where the other two hurt: a workload whose page weight or retry rate you cannot forecast. Where it loses is small volume. $75 a month is poor value for 20,000 requests, and Webshare's free tier or entry tier is the obviously correct purchase at that size. SparkProxy sells datacenter proxies and a Scraping API only; there is no residential or mobile plan here, so if your target demands residential exits, this section is not for you and Rayobyte's residential line is the relevant one in this pair.

For a credit-metered alternative, the SparkProxy Scraping API starts at 1,000 free credits with no card, then $49 a month for 250,000 credits at 50 concurrency, with a plain fetch costing 1 credit, JavaScript rendering 5 and a screenshot or PDF 10. Residential exits on that API are requested with premium_proxy=true.

Do not decide this from price lists, including this one. Three numbers, collected in an afternoon, settle it properly.

One: your success rate on each vendor's cheapest tier, on your actual target. Webshare's free 10 proxies need no card. Rayobyte offers a free trial on account creation. Run the same 500 URLs through both, count HTTP 200s with the content you expected, not just status codes. A 403 with a challenge page is a failure even when it returns 200.

Two: how many distinct /24s you were actually served. Pull 200 exits, map each to its prefix, count unique /24s and unique ASNs. This is the single measurement that turns a vendor's pool claim into a fact about your account. Do it on both.

Three: bytes per useful record. Total bytes transferred divided by records successfully extracted. That number decides whether a per-GB line is cheap or ruinous for you, and it is the input almost nobody measures before signing up for gigabyte pricing.

Once you have those three, the choice usually makes itself, and it frequently is not the vendor you expected going in. If neither fits, webshare alternatives and rayobyte alternatives widen the field.