I Need Cheap Proxies

Cheap proxies fail in two ways: they don't work on the target, or they work but return bad data. The second failure is harder to detect. A shared datacenter pool at $2/GB looks cheap until you realize 40% of requests are silently returning degraded responses.

Quick answer

Unprotected targets — public data, directories, open APIs→ Webshare datacenter — lowest entry cost, sufficient when IP type doesn't affect access

Targets with ASN filtering where residential is required at lowest cost→ Webshare residential — entry-level residential pricing, smaller pool with cleanliness tradeoffs

Mid-tier targets where pool cleanliness matters more than absolute lowest price→ Decodo residential — better pool quality at accessible pricing without enterprise commitment

This fits you if

Target has no ASN filtering — datacenter proxies at the lowest price tier work identically to residential
Operation is early-stage or experimental — validating the scraping approach before committing to quality infrastructure
Request volume is low — small pools are sufficient when per-IP rate limits aren't a constraint

When it matters

Target has no ASN filtering — datacenter proxies at the lowest price tier work identically to residential
Operation is early-stage or experimental — validating the scraping approach before committing to quality infrastructure
Request volume is low — small pools are sufficient when per-IP rate limits aren't a constraint
Data quality tolerance is moderate — some degraded responses are acceptable in the dataset

Datacenter proxies on unprotected targets are genuinely cheap and genuinely effective. The cost-quality tradeoff only matters when the target has detection systems that differentiate between IP types.

When it fails

Target uses ASN blocking — cheap datacenter proxies produce zero successful requests, not cheap requests
Shared pool has high contamination — block rate on residential targets is indistinguishable from datacenter
Operation requires high data accuracy — cheap pools with degraded response rates produce datasets that require expensive manual cleaning
Scale increases over time — cheap providers without volume tiers become more expensive per GB at scale than mid-tier providers

The cheapest proxy is the one that works on the target. A $2/GB pool with 60% success rate costs more per successful request than a $8/GB pool with 95% success rate.

How providers fit

Webshare fits for unprotected targets or early-stage operations where cost is the primary constraint. Datacenter and residential pools at the lowest entry pricing available. The limitation: pool cleanliness varies — residential success rates on protected targets are inconsistent compared to mid-tier providers.

Decodo fits when budget is constrained but target protection requires better pool quality than entry-tier providers deliver. Mid-range pricing with significantly better residential pool cleanliness. The limitation: not the absolute cheapest option — the price gap versus Webshare is justified only when target detection is moderate or higher.

IPRoyal fits for dedicated residential IPs at lower cost than major providers. Fixed IP assignment without minimum volume requirements. The limitation: pool depth and geo coverage are narrower — not viable for large-scale or multi-market operations.

Webshare vs Decodo — budget proxy comparison→Datacenter proxies — when cheap is the right choice→Residential proxies — minimum viable option for protected targets→I need rotating proxies — rotation on a budget→

What's your situation?

Also covered by

residential-proxies datacenter-proxies i-need-static-proxies