Webshare is the provider people recommend when someone asks where to start without spending money, and that reputation is deserved. It gives away ten working proxies with no card on file, it sells datacenter IPs for pocket change, and its dashboard gets you connected in a couple of minutes. We compete with Webshare and we still send people there for certain jobs.
What gets lost in the recommendation is that Webshare sells three products on two completely different meters, and the cheap headlines everyone quotes belong to the meter most people are not shopping for. We checked every tier on Webshare's own pages on 2026-08-03. Below is what each product costs and which one you are probably looking at.
The free plan, first, because it is the reason most people come
Ten datacenter proxies. Up to 1 GB of bandwidth a month. No credit card. It renews rather than expires, so it is a permanent tier and not a trial that quietly turns into a bill.
That is enough to test a scraper against a real target, run a small monitoring script, or find out whether proxies solve your problem at all before you commit a cent. No other paid provider in this market offers anything comparable, and we say that as a company selling against it. If your first question is whether you can try this without paying, Webshare has the best answer available. We believe in the principle enough to publish a live free proxy list and a free proxy checker ourselves, and we wrote up when free proxies are fine for the jobs where free genuinely is the correct choice.
The ceiling arrives fast, though. One gigabyte a month is a few thousand page loads on a light site, and ten shared datacenter IPs will not survive contact with anything that checks. Treat it as a proper test bench, not a free production tier.
Two meters, three products
This section matters more than any individual price on the page.
Rotating residential is metered per gigabyte, the same way most of the industry sells residential. You buy bandwidth and burn it.
Datacenter proxies and static residential (what most vendors call ISP) are rented per IP per month, with a bandwidth allowance folded in, 250 GB on the standard tiers. You are paying rent on addresses, not buying traffic.
So when you see Webshare advertised at fractions of a cent per IP and another provider advertised at several dollars per gigabyte, those numbers have nothing to do with each other. Both are correct on their own pages. A cheap monthly rental of a shared datacenter address and a gigabyte of residential traffic through real home connections are not substitutable, and price alone cannot tell you which one your target will accept. Our datacenter vs residential proxies explainer covers where each type survives.
What each product costs
| Product | Meter | Advertised "from" | What a new buyer pays | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rotating residential | Per GB | $1.40/GB | $3.50/GB | 2.5x |
| Datacenter | Per IP, monthly | $0.02/IP | $0.03/IP | 1.7x |
| Static residential (ISP) | Per IP, monthly | $0.23/IP | $0.30/IP | 1.3x |
The per-IP figures round awkwardly at that scale, so in plain terms: datacenter starts under three cents per proxy per month and falls under two cents in bulk. The smallest paid datacenter plan is a hundred proxies for under three dollars a month with 250 GB included, which is a remarkable amount of infrastructure for the price of a coffee.
Every "from" price on the site is the bottom of a volume curve, and the volumes are large. The advertised datacenter rate arrives at 100,000 proxies ($1,794.00/month), and the static residential floor at 10,000 IPs ($2,250.00/month). On residential you need a 3,000 GB/month plan ($4,200/month) before the headline applies. Those are enterprise line items quoted as starting prices, which is standard practice across this whole industry and no worse at Webshare than anywhere else. It is simply not what "starting at" suggests.
Static residential has a quirk worth knowing: the rate is completely flat from the 20-IP minimum all the way to 250 IPs. Volume discounts do not begin until 500. Buying 40 addresses instead of 20 gets you nothing on the unit price, so buy the number you need.
Residential is where Webshare is weakest
Everything above is about renting addresses. Rotating residential is the one Webshare product metered like the rest of the industry, and lined up against per-GB competitors it stops looking like a budget option.
Two things about that entry rate. It is a monthly subscription that auto-renews, not a balance you draw down, so a month you do not use is a month you paid for anyway. And it is a promotional price: a standing 50 percent discount applies automatically at checkout with no coupon code, and the undiscounted list rate is double what the table shows. The discount has been running long enough to look structural, but a promotion is still a promotion. If it ever lapses, every residential number on Webshare's site doubles overnight.
Even at the discounted rate, residential is the product where the value argument gets thin. Webshare's entry residential rate is seven times what we charge, and our $0.50/GB is flat at every volume with no promo clock and no subscription to renew. For scale, 50 GB of residential traffic is $25 with us.
One cross-vendor detail we found genuinely interesting: at 500 GB a month, Webshare's rate is $1.75/GB, the exact number IPRoyal puts on its banner as its floor. IPRoyal only grants that rate at twenty times the volume. Same headline figure, wildly different qualifying threshold, which is a decent illustration of why an advertised per-GB rate tells you almost nothing on its own. Our IPRoyal review digs into that side of it.
Where Webshare falls short
Datacenter IPs get caught. The cheapest thing Webshare sells is the easiest kind of address for a site to identify. Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai and PerimeterX filter datacenter ranges before they look at anything else. That is a property of the IP type rather than a failure on Webshare's part, but it decides whether the low price is a bargain or a waste. If your target has a bot wall, cheap datacenter proxies will fail at any price.
It is a subscription, throughout. Every paid Webshare plan renews monthly. Projects that run in bursts pay for the quiet months, and your effective cost per successful request climbs every month you underuse the plan. A pay-as-you-go balance that never expires behaves differently on exactly that workload.
Independence, if it matters to you. Webshare belongs to Oxylabs, which sits inside the Tesonet portfolio alongside Decodo, NordVPN and Surfshark. Nothing about the product got worse for it, and Webshare's own announcement says subscriptions and proxy lists carried on unchanged. It does mean that shortlisting Webshare against Oxylabs is not the two-vendor comparison it looks like. We map the whole cluster in who owns your proxy provider.
Shared by default. The entry datacenter and static residential plans put you on addresses other customers also use, which is most of why they are so cheap. Webshare sells private and dedicated variants of both at higher per-IP rates for when a neighbor's behavior would be your problem.
Who should buy Webshare
Take the free plan if you are testing anything at all. There is no reason not to, and no card to cancel.
Buy the datacenter product if you need a lot of static IPs for undefended targets: internal tools, public APIs, small sites, SEO rank checks, geo-testing your own properties. Per address per month, it is close to unbeatable, and the free tier lets you prove it works on your target before you pay.
Buy the static residential product if you want ISP-quality addresses on a predictable monthly bill and you know how many you need, keeping in mind the flat pricing up to 250 IPs.
Who should skip it
Skip it if your target has real bot defenses and residential traffic is what the job needs. Webshare's residential is its most expensive product relative to the market, it is a subscription, and its current price depends on a promotion continuing. At $0.50/GB flat, pay as you go, with a balance that does not expire, we are the cheaper answer for that specific job, and our HProxy vs Webshare comparison lays both out on the same terms.
Skip it if your usage is irregular enough that paying for idle months would hurt.
Webshare is a good product sold honestly enough, with one of the best on-ramps in the industry and a datacenter offering that is hard to argue with on price. The mistake is assuming that the cheap number on the homepage applies to residential proxies, because it belongs to a different meter and a different product entirely. If you are comparing the field on the rate a new customer genuinely pays, our cheapest residential proxies in 2026 breakdown does that across every vendor, and our full pricing is on one page with no promo attached.