Webshare alternative for residential proxies and prepaid usage

What Webshare does well

Webshare was founded in 2018 and has been owned by Oxylabs since late 2022, while continuing to operate as a separate brand. Its positioning is unusually clear for this market: self-serve, developer-first, priced at the budget end, with no sales call between you and a working proxy list. That combination is why it has one of the larger and more positive public review bases among proxy vendors.

Its centre of gravity is datacenter proxies sold as lists of individual IPs — shared, semi-dedicated or dedicated — billed per IP per month. Static residential (ISP) IPs follow the same per-IP model. Rotating residential exists and is billed per gigabyte, but it is the younger side of the business rather than the thing Webshare is known for. If you want a large, cheap, stable set of addresses you can paste into a scraper and forget about, that is a well-solved problem there and Nefo does not compete for that work at all.

Two practical strengths are worth naming. Webshare offers a permanent free tier with no card required, which is a genuinely low-friction way to test integration. It also supports IP whitelisting alongside username and password authentication; Nefo accepts an IP allowlist too.

• Large per-IP datacenter and ISP proxy lists at the low end of market pricing
• A free tier that requires no payment details, useful for integration testing
• Both username/password and IP-whitelist authentication
• HTTP and SOCKS5 available across plans
• Fully self-serve signup, dashboard and API with no sales process

Where Nefo differs from Webshare

The clearest difference is scope. Webshare spans datacenter, ISP and residential; Nefo now spans residential, mobile, datacenter proxies, static IP proxies, IP Vault addresses, and even servers and marketplace APIs. It also sells static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries, so the question is whether its country list and per-IP terms fit your job. The whole account model for residential traffic is still built around consuming bandwidth rather than renting address lists.

The second difference is the billing clock. Webshare is subscription-shaped: plans renew monthly or annually, bandwidth allowances are set per month, and unused bandwidth does not roll over into the next cycle. Changing proxy type generally means cancelling and repurchasing, and where multiple plans coexist they share a single renewal date. Nefo is prepaid: you buy a volume of bandwidth, it sits in the account until it is consumed, and flexible plans carry no expiry. Nothing renews unless you choose to top up.

The third is targeting and session depth on the residential side. Nefo targets 227 countries and territories, drills to state and city level in the United States, offers region and city targeting in several other countries, and supports ASN/ISP targeting so you can pin traffic to a specific network operator within a country. Sticky sessions are configurable per credential from one minute up to roughly 24 hours, or you can rotate on every request.

The fourth is mobile. Nefo sells carrier-grade 4G/5G proxies on time-rented ports — one live mobile IP per port, changed on demand, with US state and carrier targeting, rented by duration rather than by gigabyte. Webshare does not publish a mobile proxy product, so this is not a like-for-like comparison so much as a category Webshare does not cover.

How Nefo prepaid proxies work

You buy bandwidth up front, starting at 5GB ($0.90/GB), and the per-gigabyte rate falls as volume rises. Generating credentials costs nothing and there is no cap on how many you create — only traffic passing through them draws down the balance. That inverts the per-IP mental model: you are not paying for addresses sitting idle, and an idle month costs nothing.

Each credential is configured at creation with its protocol, geography and session behaviour, so a single account can run one credential pinned to a Texas cable ASN with a 30-minute sticky session and another rotating per request across Europe, without touching a plan or a subscription. Usage is visible in the dashboard and exportable as CSV.

Authentication is a username and password or an IP allowlist across HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, so a stack that depends on IP whitelisting can keep that approach.

• Prepaid bandwidth from 5GB; flexible plans do not expire
• Unlimited free credential generation — only traffic is metered
• HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, with username/password or IP allowlist authentication
• 227 countries and territories; US state and city; ASN/ISP targeting within a country
• Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to about 24 hours
• Separate 4G/5G mobile line on real carrier modems, rented by duration

How to migrate from Webshare to Nefo

If you are moving residential traffic, the change is mostly a credentials swap. Both providers use the same standard shape — host, port, username, password — so the integration surface is the endpoint string and whatever geo parameters you encode into the username. The work is in re-expressing your targeting: if you were selecting by country on Webshare, you can carry that across directly; if you want to tighten to a US city or a specific carrier ASN, that is new configuration rather than a translation.

If you are moving datacenter or static ISP work, the distinction is product fit rather than total absence. Nefo sells datacenter proxies, fixed static IP proxies and static residential ISP IPs in 24 countries. Residential bandwidth is also metered and costs materially more per unit of traffic than a flat-rate datacenter IP, so a high-volume, low-defence scraping job usually belongs on datacenter or static IPs rather than being forced onto residential.

A sane sequence is to buy the smallest bandwidth increment, run one representative workload against your actual targets, compare block rates and latency against your current Webshare numbers, and only then decide how much to move. Because the bandwidth does not expire, a test purchase that turns out to be unnecessary is not wasted — it simply remains in the account.

• Inventory which workloads are genuinely residential and which are datacenter work
• Confirm how your tooling authenticates: username and password or an IP allowlist both work
• Re-express geo targeting; add state, city or ASN constraints only where they earn their keep
• Set sticky session duration deliberately — long sessions for logins and checkouts, rotation for wide collection
• Benchmark on a small prepaid volume before shifting production traffic

When to stay with Webshare

Stay with Webshare if you need static ISP addresses outside Nefo's 24 countries, or if the permanent free tier is central to how you test and onboard. It also remains a very comfortable fit when your volume is steady enough that a monthly allowance is consumed reliably rather than left on the table. A predictable subscription against a predictable workload is cheaper and simpler than metered residential bandwidth, and the free tier makes evaluation cost nothing.

Consider Nefo if your work is residential by nature — localised pricing checks, ad verification, SERP monitoring in specific markets — and particularly if your usage is irregular. Prepaid, non-expiring bandwidth suits campaigns that run in bursts, because a quiet month does not burn an allowance. It also suits teams that need targeting below country level, long configurable sticky sessions, or genuine 4G/5G mobile IPs, none of which are what Webshare is built around.

Neither answer is universal, and running both is a legitimate outcome: cheap datacenter lists for high-volume, low-defence targets, and metered residential or mobile for the requests that need to come from ordinary consumer connections.

Related proxy guides

• Rotating Residential Proxy
• Rotating proxies
• Pricing
• Use cases

Frequently asked questions