Best proxies for scraping at under 100 dollars per month in 2026
If you’re running a scraper on a real budget, most “best proxy” roundups aren’t written for you. They’re written to sell you Bright Data’s enterprise tier or Oxylabs’ six-figure contracts, then bury a footnote about cheaper options at the bottom. This list is the opposite. Every pick here has an entry point that fits inside a $100/month budget, and I’ve either run these providers myself for client scraping jobs or watched them closely enough on forums and support tickets to trust what I’m saying.
This is for solo developers, small agencies, and side-project builders scraping product listings, price data, search results, or public directories, not for people running million-request-a-day pipelines. If that’s you, your budget conversation is different and honestly Bright Data or Oxylabs’ volume discounts start to make more sense at that scale.
I care about three things when I’m the one paying the invoice: whether the pricing page tells the truth about what I’ll pay, whether the proxy pool actually avoids getting blocked on the sites I care about, and whether I can cancel without a fight. Everything below got filtered through that lens.
how I picked
- entry price under $100/month for a usable volume (at least a few GB of residential traffic, or enough datacenter IPs to run a real rotation)
- pay-as-you-go or low-commitment plans, since annual contracts defeat the purpose of a “budget” pick
- transparent bandwidth/IP pricing on the public pricing page, not “contact sales”
- actual rotation and session control (sticky sessions, geo-targeting, protocol support for HTTP/SOCKS5)
- provider reputation based on Trustpilot patterns, r/webscraping threads, and my own support experience
- no fraud or CAPTCHA-farming shortcuts baked into the sales pitch, since some cheap providers cut corners on IP sourcing ethics
the picks
Webshare
Webshare is the easiest entry point in this list and probably the one most people should start with. It has a genuinely free tier (10 datacenter proxies, limited bandwidth) so you can test your scraper’s logic before spending anything, and the paid datacenter plans are the cheapest I’ve used that still had decent uptime. I’ve pointed small scraping jobs at Webshare’s rotating datacenter pool for sites without aggressive bot detection (think internal APIs, less-protected e-commerce catalogs) and gotten reliable results.
Where it falls short is residential proxy quality against harder targets like Amazon or LinkedIn. The pool works, but you’ll see higher block rates than with a dedicated residential specialist, so match the plan to the target site.
Pros: - free tier to test before paying - dashboard and API are genuinely simple to integrate - datacenter plans start under $3/month
Cons: - residential proxy pool is smaller and less effective against aggressive anti-bot systems
Pricing: paid datacenter plans start around $2.99/month; residential bundles start around $7 for the first GB. webshare.io/pricing
IPRoyal
IPRoyal’s pitch is pay-as-you-go residential bandwidth with no monthly commitment, and that’s exactly what makes it useful for scraping projects with unpredictable volume. You buy GB in a package, use it whenever, and it doesn’t expire on a strict monthly cycle the way subscription plans do. For a side project that scrapes heavily one week and barely at all the next, that flexibility is worth more than a slightly lower per-GB rate elsewhere.
I’ve used IPRoyal for geo-targeted scraping jobs (checking localized pricing across country-specific storefronts) and the country-level targeting has been accurate. Support response times are a bit slower than the bigger players, which matters if you hit an account issue mid-job.
Pros: - true pay-as-you-go, no forced monthly renewal - solid country and city-level targeting - SOCKS5 and HTTP both supported
Cons: - support turnaround is slower than premium providers - per-GB cost climbs if you don’t buy in bulk
Pricing: residential bandwidth runs roughly $1.75 to $3.50 per GB depending on package size, no subscription required. iproyal.com/pricing
Proxy-Cheap
The name undersells it a little, but Proxy-Cheap really does offer some of the lowest entry prices for both datacenter and residential proxies I’ve tested. For pure cost-per-GB on smaller scraping jobs, it’s hard to beat. I’ve used it for scraping public real estate listings and classifieds sites where the target wasn’t running sophisticated bot detection, and it held up fine across a few thousand requests a day.
I wouldn’t reach for it first against sites with serious fingerprinting (banking portals, ticketing sites, major social platforms). The pool quality is fine for mid-tier targets, not built for the hardest ones.
Pros: - lowest per-GB residential pricing in this list - datacenter IPs available individually, useful for small fixed rotations - straightforward self-service checkout, no sales call needed
Cons: - less effective against sites with heavy fingerprinting or CAPTCHA walls
Pricing: residential starts around $2.50 to $3/GB; datacenter proxies available from roughly $1 to $2 per IP per month. proxy-cheap.com
Rayobyte
Rayobyte earns its spot mainly on datacenter proxy reliability. If your scraping target doesn’t require residential IPs (internal tools, APIs, sites that key off request patterns rather than IP reputation), Rayobyte’s datacenter pool is one of the more stable ones I’ve run for sustained jobs. They also publish clearer documentation than most budget providers, which matters when you’re debugging why a rotation isn’t behaving the way you expect.
Their residential tier exists and works, but it’s priced closer to the mid-market than the rock-bottom end, so it’s not the reason to pick Rayobyte on a tight budget.
Pros: - strong, well-documented datacenter proxy reliability - responsive support for a budget-tier provider - flexible enough for both scraping and general automation use
Cons: - residential pricing isn’t the cheapest option on this list
Pricing: datacenter plans from around $30/month for bulk IP packages; residential from roughly $7.50/GB. rayobyte.com/pricing
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy)
Smartproxy rebranded to Decodo in 2024, and the product underneath is the same rotating residential and datacenter proxy network that built the original reputation. Decodo sits a notch above the pure budget providers on polish, dashboard usability, and network size, while still keeping an entry plan inside the sub-$100 range. I’ve used it for scraping search engine results pages, where a larger, cleaner residential pool actually reduces the number of retries you need per successful scrape.
It’s not the cheapest per-GB rate here, but the tradeoff is fewer failed requests, which can matter more than sticker price once you calculate the cost of re-running failed scrape batches.
Pros: - larger, cleaner residential IP pool than most budget competitors - clean API and dashboard, good for teams beyond just solo devs - reliable geo-targeting down to city level in major markets
Cons: - entry plans cost more per GB than Proxy-Cheap or IPRoyal
Pricing: subscription plans start around $50/month for roughly 5GB of residential traffic. decodo.com/pricing
SOAX
SOAX’s strength for budget scraping is precision targeting, down to city and even ISP-level selection in a lot of markets, at a price that still fits a starter budget. If your scraping job depends on seeing exactly what a user in a specific city sees (local search results, region-locked pricing, local classifieds), SOAX’s targeting granularity is worth the slightly higher entry cost.
The starter plan’s GB allowance is on the smaller side, so if your job is high-volume rather than high-precision, you’ll burn through it fast and this stops being the budget pick.
Pros: - some of the most granular geo-targeting in the budget tier - both residential and mobile proxy pools available - clean trial period to test before committing
Cons: - entry-tier bandwidth allowance is small relative to the price
Pricing: starter plans run around $55/month for approximately 5GB. soax.com/pricing
NodeMaven
NodeMaven is newer than most names on this list, and it’s built its reputation specifically around sticky session quality, meaning the same IP stays assigned to you for longer, cleaner sessions. That’s genuinely useful for scraping flows that need to hold a login or a multi-step session (checkout flows, paginated results tied to a session cookie) without the proxy rotating out from under you mid-task.
Being newer means the support team and documentation aren’t as mature as the established players. I’d test it on a non-critical job first before trusting it with anything time-sensitive.
Pros: - strong sticky session stability for multi-step scraping flows - competitive pricing for the session quality offered - responsive to feedback since the team is smaller and more hands-on
Cons: - less of a track record than established providers, so due diligence matters more here
Pricing: residential plans start around $50/month for entry-level bandwidth with sticky session support. nodemaven.com
Infatica
Infatica rounds out this list as the option for people who care about sourcing ethics alongside price. They publish information about how their residential IP network is built (opt-in SDK partnerships) more clearly than several cheaper competitors, which matters if you want to avoid proxies sourced from IPs that never actually consented to being part of a network. Pricing stays competitive with the rest of the budget tier, and the pay-as-you-go option keeps you from overcommitting.
Coverage in smaller countries can be thinner than the bigger networks, so check IP availability for your specific target geography before committing.
Pros: - clearer sourcing disclosure than most budget-tier competitors - pay-as-you-go option avoids monthly lock-in - both residential and datacenter tiers available
Cons: - smaller-country IP coverage can be limited compared to larger networks
Pricing: residential proxies from around $1.80/GB pay-as-you-go; subscription plans start near $40/month. infatica.io/pricing
comparison table
| Provider | Entry price | Primary strength | Primary weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Webshare | Free tier, paid from ~$3/mo | Cheapest way to test a scraper | Weaker residential pool for hard targets |
| IPRoyal | ~$1.75-3.50/GB, no subscription | True pay-as-you-go flexibility | Slower support turnaround |
| Proxy-Cheap | ~$2.50-3/GB | Lowest per-GB pricing | Struggles against heavy fingerprinting |
| Rayobyte | Datacenter from ~$30/mo | Datacenter reliability + docs | Residential isn’t the cheapest |
| Decodo (Smartproxy) | ~$50/mo for ~5GB | Cleaner, larger residential pool | Higher per-GB cost than budget rivals |
| SOAX | ~$55/mo for ~5GB | City/ISP-level geo-targeting | Small bandwidth allowance for the price |
| NodeMaven | ~$50/mo entry | Sticky session stability | Newer, shorter track record |
| Infatica | ~$1.80/GB or ~$40/mo | Sourcing transparency | Thinner coverage in smaller countries |
how to choose
Start with what you’re scraping, not with the cheapest price on the page. Datacenter proxies are fine and cheap for sites that don’t fingerprint aggressively, internal tools, APIs, smaller e-commerce catalogs. The moment your target runs real bot detection (rate-limiting by IP reputation, browser fingerprinting, behavioral analysis) you need residential or mobile IPs, and no amount of datacenter volume fixes that mismatch. Figure out which category your target falls into before you pick a plan, because it’s the single biggest driver of whether you’ll actually get usable data.
Second, respect the protocol layer. Most of these providers support both HTTP and SOCKS5, and SOCKS5 is worth using when your scraping stack needs to tunnel non-HTTP traffic or you want lower-overhead connection handling; the SOCKS Protocol Version 5 spec (RFC 1928) is the actual protocol definition if you want to understand what your proxy client is doing under the hood rather than trusting a vendor’s marketing description of it. Similarly, if your scraper needs to route through a proxy for HTTPS traffic, it’s using the HTTP CONNECT method, and knowing that helps you debug tunnel failures instead of assuming the proxy provider is at fault.
Third, don’t skip robots.txt just because a proxy makes you technically harder to block. Bandwidth pricing and IP rotation solve the “will I get blocked” problem, not the “should I be scraping this” problem. Google’s own documentation on robots.txt is worth reading once if you’ve never actually gone through it, because a lot of scraping disputes start with someone ignoring a robots.txt disallow rule that was sitting there in plain text the whole time. This isn’t legal advice, just a practical habit: check what a site’s robots.txt actually says before you build a scraper around ignoring it, and separately understand that terms-of-service violations can carry legal risk independent of what robots.txt allows.
Finally, budget for retries, not just bandwidth. A cheap per-GB rate looks worse once you calculate how many requests you’re re-running because a low-quality IP pool got blocked halfway through a job. This is part of why residential IPs cost more than datacenter ones in the first place, real household IP addresses are a genuinely scarcer resource than datacenter ranges; ARIN’s IPv4 guide explains the underlying address exhaustion problem that makes clean residential IP sourcing a real operational cost for these providers, not just a markup. If you’re also juggling multiple scraper accounts or need to keep sessions from correlating across a proxy pool, the fingerprinting side of that problem is covered separately over on antidetectreview.org’s blog, which is worth a read if your scraping setup touches logged-in sessions rather than just public pages.
If you want more detail on any of these before committing a card number, I’ve got fuller breakdowns of Webshare, Decodo, and Rayobyte as standalone reviews, and the rest of our proxy coverage lives on the blog index.
verdict / top pick
For most people reading this, I’d start with Webshare to prototype the scraper for free, then move budget toward IPRoyal or Decodo depending on what you’re actually scraping. If the target is low-friction (internal tools, lightly protected catalogs, APIs), Webshare’s paid datacenter tier alone might be all you need and you’ll spend closer to $10-20/month than $100. If you’re up against real anti-bot systems and need residential IPs that hold up, split the difference: IPRoyal if your volume is unpredictable and you want pay-as-you-go, Decodo if you want a larger, cleaner pool and don’t mind paying a bit more per GB for fewer failed requests. Either path keeps you well under the $100/month ceiling while matching the tool to the job instead of the other way around.
Written by Xavier Fok
disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-07-12.