Webshare review: cheap proxies, a generous free tier, and a few things to read before you pay

What Webshare is

Webshare is a self-service proxy provider. You sign up, pick a plan, and get a list of proxy addresses and credentials in a dashboard. There is no sales call and no contract, and in the free case no credit card. According to the trade site Proxyway, the company was founded in 2019 by Utku Zihnioglu and grew on cheap datacenter proxies sold through an automated system.

In September 2022 Oxylabs, a large enterprise proxy company, acquired it. Webshare's own announcement said the product and prices would stay as they were, and Proxyway reported that Webshare would keep operating as a separate entity. In plain terms: a scrappy budget seller got a big, well-funded parent, and the budget part of the pitch survived.

New to proxies? Our guide to VPN vs. proxy is a five-minute refresher.

Three kinds of proxy, in plain English

Webshare sells three product families. The difference between them is the single most important thing to understand before you spend a dollar, because it decides what websites think of you.

• Proxy Server (datacenter). The address belongs to a hosting company. Fast and cheap, and easy for websites to recognise as a server. This is the family with the free plan. Think of it as a delivery van with the company logo on the side: quick, efficient, obviously a business. See datacenter proxies.
• Static Residential, also called ISP proxies. Webshare describes these as ISP-issued static IPs, naming providers such as AT&T, Sprint and Cox. The address does not change, so you keep the same identity for as long as you keep the proxy. Think of the same van repainted plain white and wearing a convincing uniform. See residential proxies.
• Rotating Residential. A gateway that hands you addresses from a large pool of residential IPs, priced per gigabyte. Webshare says the pool is 80 million or more addresses in 195 countries, and that you can target by country, city, state, ZIP code or ASN. This is the family for sites that dislike hosting addresses, and it costs far more per request. See rotating proxies and our guide to residential vs. datacenter proxies.

Within the datacenter and static residential families Webshare sells three levels of exclusivity. According to its FAQ, shared proxies are used by more than two other customers, private proxies are shared with one or two others, and dedicated proxies are yours alone. Shared is the cheapest and the most like a flat share: you do not choose the housemates.

Webshare pricing: what the pricing page says

The table below is copied from Webshare's pricing and product pages as they appeared in October 2026, using the monthly billing view. Webshare shows some prices as a discount from a list price, and we show the price you would pay.

At the top end, Webshare's pricing page lists 60,000 shared datacenter proxies at $1,076.40 per month, or about $0.0179 each, and its rotating residential page lists 3,000 GB at $4,200 per month, or $1.40 per GB. Unlimited bandwidth is an upgrade on larger plans: Webshare's FAQ says it starts at 1,000 shared datacenter IPs for $80.73 per month and at 100 shared ISP IPs for $90 per month.

What the money actually gets you

Numbers on a pricing page mean little until you convert them into a job. These are our own arithmetic, built on Webshare's published prices and a round assumption that a typical page costs about 2 MB to load. That 2 MB is our assumption, not a Webshare figure, and your pages will differ.

• $2.99 per month buys 100 shared datacenter proxies. For a hobby project that checks a few hundred pages a day, that is a coffee's worth of money for a pool you will not exhaust.
• $26.91 per month buys 1,000 of them, a little under 3 cents each. That is a sizeable rotation pool for a small project.
• $27.50 for 10 GB of rotating residential is $2.75 per GB. At 2 MB a page, that is around 5,000 page loads. Residential is where the budget disappears quickly, so use it only where datacenter addresses fail.
• The free plan's 1 GB per month is about 500 page loads at the same assumption. Enough to learn on, not enough to run a business on.

Resist buying the biggest plan first: prove the proxies work on your own targets. See current Webshare plans (Affiliate link).

The free plan, examined

The free plan is the reason many people try Webshare, and it is real. According to Webshare's free proxy page, you get 10 proxies, 1 GB of bandwidth each month, HTTP and SOCKS5 support and no credit card, and Webshare says the plan stays free. Its FAQ adds that the free tier covers datacenter Proxy Servers only: ISP plans have no free tier and start at $6.00 per month for 20 proxies.

Webshare also says free users get all paid features, which we cannot verify from the outside.

What does 10 shared datacenter proxies and 1 GB teach you? Quite a lot. You can learn how proxy authentication works, test whether a target site blocks datacenter addresses, practise rotating between IPs, and run your first checks in our proxy checker. What it will not give you is volume, or the reputation of a private address. Free is a test drive, not a fleet.

Features, dashboard and API

On paper the feature list is generous for the price. Webshare documents HTTP and SOCKS5 endpoints on all three product families and two ways to authenticate: username and password, or IP whitelisting. Proxies are provisioned automatically, with no waiting period after purchase, according to its FAQ.

Rotating residential uses a single gateway, p.webshare.io on port 80 in Webshare's own code sample, and you choose country, city, state, ZIP or ASN by editing the username.

For developers there is a documented REST API with token authentication. Its docs list rate limits of 240 requests per minute for the general API and 30 per minute for proxy list download links. There is also a Chrome extension, which Webshare calls top rated and one Proxyway commenter called terrible. We have not tested the extension, so treat both opinions with equal suspicion.

Performance: what Webshare claims, and what users report

Here is the awkward part of any review that does not run benchmarks: we can tell you what is claimed, but not what is true on your connection. So, claims first. Webshare's pricing page says its network has 100+ Gbps of aggregate capacity and 99.97 percent uptime. Its homepage says 99.7 percent success rate and more than 650 billion proxy requests a month. These are Webshare's numbers about Webshare's network. We did not verify any of them.

Webshare's pages also disagree with each other, which is worth knowing when you read marketing figures. Its homepage cites 64,773 customers in one line and more than 90,000 paying customers in another, and product pages carry a banner saying 256,000. Location counts differ too: 195 countries for the residential pool, 50 or more on the pricing page. Different products may have different footprints, so check the dashboard for the location you need.

Now the user side. Trustpilot's listing for webshare.io showed a 4.1 rating and about a thousand reviews in search results in late October 2026, with Webshare replying to 98 percent of negative reviews, per the listing. That is a decent score for a budget proxy provider. Trustpilot is not a lab, and it invites reviews, so read it as a mood, not a measurement.

Limitations and gotchas

Every provider has fine print. Webshare's is mostly sensible and mostly in the terms, which is the polite way of saying that few people read it. These are the points that matter.

• Verification and pauses. The terms of service say you agree to complete ID verification if Webshare suspects prohibited activity, and that failing to do so results in suspension. User comments on Proxyway describe proxies paused soon after purchase, repeated verifications and some suspensions. Webshare's replies there say verification is automated, triggered when activity exceeds limits on rate-limited websites, and that suspensions follow clear terms violations and can be appealed. Both sides are on the record, so treat it as a real risk if you hit rate-limited sites hard.
• A two-day refund window. Under section 8.2, Webshare may, at its sole discretion, refund a subscription cancelled within 2 days of payment, if usage is under 1 GB for datacenter or static residential plans, or 0.1 GB for rotating residential, and fewer than 1,000 proxies are used. One Proxyway commenter points out the catch: if you spend your first hour proving the proxies work, you can burn through the allowance. The terms also let Webshare decline any refund.
• Auto-renewal. Subscriptions renew monthly until cancelled, and a cancellation takes effect the following month, according to section 8.3 of the terms.
• Shared means shared. On shared datacenter plans other customers use the same addresses, so you inherit their reputations. Private and dedicated tiers cost more and reduce the risk.
• Big sites may block datacenter addresses. That is true of every datacenter proxy, not just this one. Webshare's own FAQ says datacenter proxies suit targets that do not aggressively block them. Its help centre also notes that some sites are blocked on Webshare's end, shown as a client_connect_forbidden_host (403) error, and suggests switching from residential to datacenter or static residential in that case.
• Static residential reports. Several r/proxies users have posted that static residential addresses behaved like hosting addresses, with one poster saying all of eight tested subnets were flagged by several IP databases. We could not verify those claims, and they are individual reports, but they are the reason the test section below exists.
• Rules of use. The terms ban ticket-buying bots, ad fraud, collecting data that is not public, reselling the service, and putting an unreasonable load on a target site. They also contain a mandatory individual arbitration clause, with an opt-out.

Who Webshare suits, and who should look elsewhere

Webshare makes the most sense at the start of the proxy curve: developers building a scraper who want an API and a free sandbox, SEO people checking results from another country, hobbyists monitoring prices on permissive sites. If your tolerance for a temporary pause is high and your budget is low, the value is hard to argue with.

It is a poorer fit if your project cannot survive an account hold, if you need an enterprise contract with support commitments and guaranteed results, or if your targets are the kind that treat every non-residential address as hostile. In that last case the answer is usually a better proxy type rather than a different logo, so read our guide to proxies for web scraping before you pay anyone. And whichever provider you choose, make sure your use is permitted by the target site's terms and the law.

Test it yourself: a six-step check after you sign up

This is the part nobody else can give you, because the only proxy that matters is the one on your own setup. GlobeProxy's tools are free and run in your browser. Do this with the free plan before you spend anything. Open a free Webshare account (Affiliate link) and take one proxy from the dashboard.

• Step 1: Note your real address. Open What's my IP without any proxy and write down the address and country. That is your baseline.
• Step 2: Run the proxy through the proxy checker. Enter the host, port and login from the Webshare dashboard. Confirm it connects, that the exit country matches what you chose, and that your real address is not passed in the headers.
• Step 3: Look at the network behind the address with the IP lookup. Who owns the address block? A hosting company for datacenter, or a consumer ISP for static residential? If you bought static residential and the owner reads like a hosting company, you have learned something worth knowing.
• Step 4: Ask how it looks to a website with the VPN detector. It shows how the address is classified, and why. A static residential address that is classed as a datacenter is the exact complaint users report.
• Step 5: Check the reputation with the IP blacklist check. If a shared address already sits on spam lists, some targets will treat you badly before you send a single request.
• Step 6: If you use the proxy in a browser, also run the WebRTC leak test and the DNS leak test. A browser proxy setting does not always cover everything. Our guide to fixing a DNS leak explains the repairs.

Repeat steps 2 to 5 for a handful of the ten free proxies, not just one, because quality varies address by address. If the results are clean on your own targets, that is a far better reason to upgrade than any review, ours included. One caution: these tools describe your connection at one moment, as explained on how we test, so a clean result is a snapshot, not a promise.

Final verdict: 4.0 out of 5

Webshare earns its place by doing something rare in this market: it lets you test before you pay, and then it does not charge much. Three product families sit under one login, and a Trustpilot score near 4.1 suggests most customers are content.

The score drops for the reasons that came up from users and from the terms: the verification process can pause paying customers, the refund window is narrow, and shared addresses carry shared reputations. None is hidden, but all are easy to miss at checkout.

That score is an editorial opinion built from documents and user reports. It is not a measurement of speed or reliability, because we did not take one. If you want to try Webshare, start with the free plan and the six checks above. Start free with Webshare (Affiliate link). If it works on your targets, buy small, and set a reminder to review the plan before the next billing date.