Webshare vs Rayobyte: Datacenter and ISP Proxies for Crawl Fleets (2026)

A thousand datacenter IPs cost roughly $18 to $30 a month at Webshare and at least $1,000 at Rayobyte. Same product name, same self-serve signup, no sales call at either. That gap is the reason this comparison is worth writing at all. Webshare and Rayobyte own the cheap end of the proxy market, which is where large crawls actually run: per-gigabyte residential pricing turns a routine million-page day into a five-figure line item, so fleets that can get away with datacenter and ISP addresses do.

Webshare sells cheap addresses in bulk. Rayobyte sells fewer addresses with more provenance behind them. Working out why the gap runs to two orders of magnitude is most of the buying decision.

All figures below were read from each vendor's own pages on 2026-07-27. Proxy pricing moves, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a rate card.

Who each is for

Webshare, founded in 2018, sells three lines: datacenter proxies, static residential (ISP) proxies sourced from providers it names as AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Sprint and RCN, and a rotating residential pool it describes as 80 million or more IPs across 195 countries. The entry point is a free tier of 10 datacenter proxies with no card required. Access is a REST API, a dashboard, a downloadable proxy list and a Chrome extension. There is no anti-bot layer on top, which matters later.

Rayobyte, operated by Sprious LLC out of Lincoln, Nebraska, sells a wider surface: static and rotating datacenter, static and rotating ISP, rotating residential, mobile, a Web Unblocker endpoint, a Web Scraping API with a free monthly tier, and a self-hosted browser tool. Its datacenter product page claims more than 300,000 IPs across 29 or more locations and 9 ASNs, "including some of our own." That last clause is the pitch.

Both are self-serve. Neither requires a sales call to start, which already separates them from Bright Data and Oxylabs, whose comparison is a different kind of decision involving quotes and account managers.

Head to head

Two rows in that table do most of the work: the price row and the subnet row.

The price gap, and what explains it

At a thousand IPs the arithmetic is stark. A thousand Webshare datacenter proxies, at the per-proxy band the pricing page advertises, costs somewhere in the low tens of dollars per month. A thousand Rayobyte static datacenter IPs at its published $1 floor is near a thousand dollars per month before term discounts. That is a difference of roughly thirty to fifty times for a product with the same name.

Three things account for most of it, and only one of them is marketing.

The first is dedication. Webshare's datacenter page distinguishes shared, private and dedicated tiers, and quotes a shared pool of 100,000 or more IPs against 400,000 or more for dedicated. The headline per-proxy price is not the dedicated price. A shared IP has been used by other Webshare customers against targets you did not choose, which means some fraction of your fleet arrives already burned on your specific site. You will not know which fraction until you run it.

The second is bandwidth. Webshare treats bandwidth as a separate purchase axis: the base configuration includes 250 GB, and unlimited is available on higher tiers at higher cost. Rayobyte advertises unlimited bandwidth and unlimited connections on both its static datacenter and static ISP plans. For a text-only crawl pulling small HTML documents, Webshare's allowance is generous and the cheap per-IP price stands. For a fleet rendering full pages with images, fonts and third-party scripts, bandwidth becomes the binding constraint and the effective Webshare price rises toward the tier that removes the cap. Anyone sizing a browser fleet should read the headless Chrome fleet economics post before assuming bandwidth is free.

The third is concurrency. Webshare's plans list thread limits between 500 and 3,000 depending on tier. Rayobyte advertises unlimited connections on its datacenter line. A crawler that fans out hard against a small IP set hits a thread ceiling long before it hits an IP ceiling, and buying more IPs to raise a thread limit is an expensive way to buy concurrency.

None of this makes the gap disappear. Even after adjusting for all three, Rayobyte's static datacenter IP is a genuinely more expensive unit. The difference buys a fourth thing, which never appears as a line on an invoice.

Subnet diversity

Anti-bot systems rarely ban a single address. They ban ranges. A /24 gets flagged, an ASN gets scored down, and every IP you own inside that block goes dark at once. This is the failure mode that turns a cheap thousand-IP fleet into a dead thousand-IP fleet in an afternoon, and it is the mechanism our guide to why scrapers get blocked spends most of its length on.

Rayobyte publishes numbers here. Its datacenter page claims 20,000 unique C-class subnets "spread over thousands of A- and B-classes," across 9 ASNs, some of which it says it owns. Whether those numbers are audited is not something we can verify from the outside, and they are the vendor's own claim, but they are specific, falsifiable and stated in public. A buyer can spot-check them by pulling ASN and netblock data on a sample of delivered IPs during a trial. That is a reasonable evaluation task and takes about an hour.

Webshare publishes no equivalent figure on any page checked on 2026-07-27. Pool size is published, locations are published, subnet and ASN spread are not. That absence is not proof of concentration, but it does mean the same spot-check is the only way to find out, and you would be running it without a stated number to compare against.

For a crawler, this is the whole argument. Thirty thousand dollars a year of price difference is irrelevant if the cheap fleet correlates into a handful of blocks that your target bans as a unit. It is a large and pointless expense if your targets never look at ASN reputation at all. Which case you are in depends entirely on the sites you hit, which is why matching proxy type to target comes before vendor selection rather than after it.

ISP proxies: a narrower gap, same shape

The static ISP comparison is tighter. Webshare's pricing page lists static residential at $0.30 per proxy dropping to $0.225 at 10,000 units, with a 20-proxy minimum, while its product page advertises "starting at $0.23/IP." Those two numbers do not agree, so trust the configurator over the marketing page. Rayobyte lists $5 per IP for 5 to 99, $4.80 for 100 to 999, $4.60 for 1,000 to 4,999, and custom pricing above that.

So the ISP gap is roughly fifteen to twenty times rather than thirty to fifty. The same explanations apply, plus one more: Webshare names the upstream ISPs its static residential addresses come from, and Rayobyte describes distribution across 9 or more ASNs without naming carriers on the page checked. Named carriers are useful when a target is known to treat a specific ISP's ranges differently, which is common in retail and travel. Both approaches are defensible; they just give you different information to plan with.

An ISP proxy is worth the premium over datacenter only when the target scores ASN reputation. If it does not, the ISP line is a tax. Vendors on both sides of this market have been repricing these lines as the per-gigabyte model comes under pressure, a shift covered in proxy pricing after per-GB and unpacked further in the proxy pricing models guide.

Ban handling

Neither vendor guarantees access to any named site, and both would be lying if they did. What they offer is replacement policy, and the two policies have different shapes.

Rayobyte's datacenter page advertises automatic 30-day replacements alongside instant individual replacements, and its static ISP page lists free replacements as a standard feature across tiers. The automatic 30-day cycle is the more interesting half: it churns the fleet on a schedule whether or not you noticed a problem, which limits how long any single burned address stays in rotation.

Webshare's approach is allowance-based. The plans reviewed on 2026-07-27 show 10 proxy replacements included, and the vendor notes that allowances vary by plan. Against a fleet of a thousand, ten replacements is one percent per month, which is not a working ban-recovery mechanism if your target is actively burning addresses. The mitigating detail is that Webshare's API exposes proxy replacement as first-class endpoints, listed in its documentation as create, list and get replacement operations, so whatever allowance you have can be driven programmatically from your crawler's own health checks rather than clicked through a dashboard. Automation quality and allowance size are separate questions, and Webshare is better on the first than the second.

Rayobyte's policy is more generous and Webshare's plumbing is easier to automate against. Neither removes the need to build your own health-check and quarantine loop. That loop, plus a second vendor to fail over to, is the pattern described in multi-proxy vendor failover, and it is what keeps a bad week from turning into a 3am page.

What sits on top

Webshare sells addresses and nothing above them: there is no unblocker and no scraping API. Our directory entry records no JavaScript rendering capability for it, and that is accurate: the anti-bot stack is entirely your problem, which is fine if you already run Scrapy or Crawlee with your own retry and fingerprint logic, and a real gap if you do not.

Rayobyte sells the layers above the IP too. Its Web Unblocker is priced from $6/GB down to $2.50/GB by volume, and its Web Scraping API advertises a free tier of 5,000 scrapes, business pricing at $0.0018 per scrape, and custom rates it describes as low as $0.00004 per scrape above 500,000. Whether a bundled unblocker from a proxy-first vendor competes with a dedicated one is a separate question, covered in web unblocker vs scraping API and in our look at the unblocker category in 2026. Buying it from the same vendor as your IPs is convenient. It is not automatically the best version of that product.

The breadth cuts both ways. Rayobyte spreads across seven or eight product lines with roughly 50 staff by its own account. Webshare does three things. A narrow surface usually buys better documentation and better edge-case handling; a wide one buys you one invoice instead of four.

What each one is bad at

Webshare's weak points are concentrated and real. Shared datacenter IPs arrive with unknown history. Subnet and ASN spread are not published, so the diversity question can only be answered empirically. A ten-per-month replacement allowance does not scale with fleet size. Bandwidth and thread caps are a second and third pricing axis that the headline per-proxy number hides. There is no anti-bot layer at all. And it is hosted only, with no self-hosted option, so a team that wants proxy infrastructure inside its own perimeter has nothing to deploy.

Rayobyte's weak points are different. The per-IP entry price is high enough that a bulk fleet is a serious budget line. "From $1/IP" is a floor rather than a price: the static datacenter page prices by country selection, so the number you actually pay is not visible until you configure it. Term discounts are described inconsistently between the pricing page and the product page, which is a small thing that signals a larger one. The rotating datacenter and rotating ISP lines revert to per-gigabyte billing, so a buyer who thought they were escaping metered pricing meets it again one product over. And there is little independent coverage of the company and no disclosed funding round, so a team weighing multi-year vendor stability has less outside signal to work with than it would for a larger name.

Both vendors' capability claims here are self-reported. Independent proxy testers such as Proxyway publish periodic market tests covering datacenter, ISP and shared proxies, and those are worth reading, though we have not verified either vendor's current placement in them and are not repeating any ranking we did not read. Our own guidance on treating vendor numbers skeptically is in reading scraping benchmarks. We run no first-party tests.

Pick Webshare when, pick Rayobyte when

Pick Webshare when volume is the requirement and your targets are tolerant. Public data sources, sites you have an agreement with, internal monitoring, localized SERP collection at scale, anything where the block risk is low and the IP count is high. The free tier means you can find out whether your targets care about datacenter ASNs before spending anything, and that test is worth running first regardless of which vendor you expect to pick.

Pick Rayobyte when the fleet keeps dying and you have worked out that it dies in blocks rather than one address at a time. Published subnet spread, dedicated ranges, unlimited bandwidth and connections, and a replacement policy that churns on a schedule are the correct answers to that specific failure, and they are worth many times the per-IP premium when that failure is what you have. It is also the better fit if you want proxies, an unblocker and a scraping API on one invoice.

Webshare is the wrong buyer's choice for a team hitting hard commercial targets that score ASN reputation, or one running a browser fleet where bandwidth caps and thread limits will reprice the plan upward until the cheap per-IP number stops meaning anything.

Rayobyte is the wrong buyer's choice for a team that needs tens of thousands of addresses against sites that never check where the request came from. Paying a dollar an IP for subnet diversity nobody is inspecting is a large recurring bill for an insurance policy against a risk you do not have.

Neither is a residential replacement. When the target genuinely requires consumer IPs, that is a different purchase with different sourcing questions, and the directory's full proxy network category is the place to start on it.