Webshare Review: Affordable Proxies for Web Scraping and How to Set Them Up

What is Webshare

Webshare is a US proxy provider founded in Silicon Valley in the late 2010s. Since 2022 it has been owned by Oxylabs, one of the largest proxy providers in Europe, but it still runs as a separate service. Everything is self-service: sign up, choose how many proxies you need and get a list of addresses within a minute, with no sales calls or contracts.

People choose Webshare for its low prices and free plan. We use it in price and catalog scrapers, so this review comes from hands-on experience.

Why a scraper needs proxies

When a scraper sends hundreds or thousands of requests from a single IP address, the site notices: it shows a CAPTCHA, slows down its responses or simply blocks the address. Proxies spread the requests across many IPs, so to the site they look like ordinary visitors. Proxies also let you see a site the way a visitor from another country does: prices, stock and search results for a specific region.

Proxy types at Webshare

• Datacenter (Proxy Server). IP addresses of servers in data centers. The cheapest and fastest, but large sites easily recognize them as server addresses. They come as shared, used by several customers at once, and dedicated, reserved for you alone.
• Static residential (ISP). Addresses owned by internet service providers but running on fast servers. The IP never changes, and to a site it looks like a home connection. A good fit when you need a stable address for a long time.
• Rotating residential. Addresses of real home connections from a pool of tens of millions of IPs in almost 200 countries. The address changes automatically, so your requests come from different IPs. They get past bot protection best, but you pay per gigabyte of traffic.

All proxies work over HTTP and SOCKS5, and you can authenticate with a username and password or by your server's IP address.

Plans and pricing

As of October 2026:

You build your plan in a configurator: choose the number of proxies, countries, traffic and concurrent connections separately, and the price updates. Paying yearly is noticeably cheaper, while dedicated proxies cost several times more than shared ones.

Pros

• A free plan with no card required. 10 proxies with no time limit: you can check whether the site you need accepts these addresses before you pay.
• Low prices. A hundred datacenter proxies cost as much as a coffee, and the price per address drops with volume.
• Quick start. Your proxy list is ready right after sign-up; you can download it as a file or fetch it via the API.
• Flexible plans. You pay only for what you need: number of addresses, countries, traffic.
• A reliable owner. Webshare is backed by Oxylabs, so the service won't vanish along with your money.

The downsides you should know about

• Datacenter IPs are easy to spot. Google, Amazon, large marketplaces and social networks often block server addresses or show them a CAPTCHA. Those sites need residential proxies, which cost more.
• Shared proxies have a "history". Other customers use the same addresses, and if one of them misbehaved, a site may already be blocking that IP. For important jobs, take dedicated or ISP proxies.
• Residential traffic runs out quietly. A browser-based scraper loads images, fonts and scripts, and a gigabyte goes fast. Below we show how to limit that.
• The free plan is only enough for testing. 1 GB a month is a few thousand lightweight pages without images.
• Strict refund terms. Refunds are only possible within a short window and with low usage, so test everything on the free plan first.
• Support isn't always quick to reply. Count on the documentation and your own skills, or on a developer.

Which proxies to choose for the job

We always start with the cheapest datacenter proxies and switch to residential ones only for the sites where the cheap ones don't get through. That keeps the proxy bill for a typical price scraper within a few dollars a month.

How to connect Webshare to a scraper

1. Sign up at Webshare: your 10 free proxies appear in the account right away.
2. In the dashboard, open the proxy list (Proxy List) and copy the address, port, username and password. You can also download the whole list as a file there.
3. If the scraper runs on a server with a fixed IP, you can add the server's address to the allowed list (IP authorization) instead of using a username and password.
4. Put the details into the code in place of HOST, PORT, LOGIN and PASSWORD.

Python and requests, for regular pages:

import requests

proxy = "http://LOGIN:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT"
r = requests.get("https://httpbin.org/ip", proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=30)
print(r.json())  # should show the proxy's IP, not your server's

Python and Playwright, for sites that load their data with scripts:

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

with sync_playwright() as p:
    browser = p.chromium.launch(proxy={
        "server": "http://HOST:PORT",
        "username": "LOGIN",
        "password": "PASSWORD",
    })
    page = browser.new_page()
    # skip images and fonts: saves residential proxy traffic
    page.route("**/*.{png,jpg,jpeg,webp,gif,svg,woff,woff2}", lambda route: route.abort())
    page.goto("https://httpbin.org/ip")
    print(page.inner_text("body"))
    browser.close()

Even with proxies, add delays between requests and timeouts: a hundred IPs are no reason to send a site a thousand requests a second. The more politely a scraper behaves, the longer its addresses last.

Our verdict

Webshare is the simplest way to give a scraper proxies: a free plan to test with, a hundred addresses for $3 for most jobs, and residential proxies for sites with serious protection. For enterprise volumes there are pricier providers with more options, but for small and mid-sized businesses Webshare is more than enough.