Rayobyte Scale: Proxies at $0.0095/GB - What's the Catch?

On October 6, 2026, Rayobyte launched its Scale residential proxies priced from $0.015 to $0.0095 per gigabyte. This is tens of times cheaper than the usual market, where residential traffic is sold for dollars, not cents. Proxyway reviewer called the new offering significantly cheaper than anything seen on the market, except perhaps for unlimited plans. Let's break down what exactly is being sold for such prices, why the price per gigabyte here says almost nothing about the actual cost, and who this plan is suitable for and who it is not.

What Rayobyte Launched

Rayobyte is an American proxy and scraping tools provider. According to Proxyway, the company has once again changed its positioning and now refers to itself as a web data collection company, "valued for the AI era." Its thesis is that AI is becoming part of every company, the load on AI collection is incomparably higher than that of human collection, and the market still evaluates access to the web by old standards. Rayobyte explains its low price by owning its own network, keeping computations on dedicated servers (bare metal), obtaining wholesale prices for hosting, and using its own gateway written in Go.

The new product is called Scale Residential. The previous residential proxies have been renamed to Premium Residential and are sold in the old way: from $0.70 to $3.50 per GB with pay-as-you-go or from $0.50 per GB through the sales department.

Scale Residential Rates

• $100 per month — 6,600 GB, $0.0150 per GB, 100 simultaneous requests;
• $500 per month — 40,000 GB, $0.0125 per GB, 500 simultaneous requests;
• $1,500 per month — 136,000 GB, $0.0110 per GB, 1,500 simultaneous requests;
• $5,000 per month — 526,000 GB, $0.0095 per GB, 5,000 simultaneous requests.

Rayobyte also sells rotating ISP proxies (from $0.0085 per GB) and rotating datacenter proxies (from $0.0080 per GB) under the same scheme — with the same limitations. Additionally, the company has added filters by ZIP code and ASN for the premium product, support for UDP and HTTP/3, and launched a cloud stealth browser: up to five browsers simultaneously for free for 48 hours, after which it is available through the sales department.

Where the Catch Is: Five Conditions in Fine Print

The price itself is fair — it is published by the provider and confirmed by Proxyway's review. But alongside it are conditions that change the meaning of the number.

1. Subscription fee, not pay-as-you-go. The minimum plan is $100 per month, with no payment for the consumed volume. Gigabytes that you do not use simply expire at the end of the month.
2. Parallelism limit. One simultaneous request for each dollar of the plan. On the $100 plan, you have 100 streams — and no more, regardless of how many gigabytes remain.
3. No targeting. No country, city, or operator: the IP is chosen by the network. Sticky sessions are supported, but you cannot choose the source of the address. If you need a specific country, that’s already Premium at the regular price.
4. Only verified businesses. Access to Scale is granted after an application and compliance check with the rules, before the first request. While the application is being reviewed, a trial Premium is offered.
5. Reselling is prohibited. Rayobyte explicitly states that resold access carries too great a risk of abuse and contradicts its ethical policy.

Additionally, standard prohibitions for ethical networks apply: banks, government sites, login pages, and sites that complain about abuse are blocked, and unusual activity triggers customer identity verification.

Why $/GB Means Almost Nothing Here

The key detail is the combination of "volume + parallelism." Let's calculate what is needed to actually utilize 6,600 GB on the $100 plan.

• 6,600 GB over 30 days means about 2.5 MB/s continuously, around the clock, approximately 20 Mbps without pauses.
• On 100 streams, that’s about 66 GB per stream per month, or roughly 25 KB/s for each stream all the time.

This is the load of an industrial crawler that operates 24/7. If your actual consumption is different, the fair price is calculated differently — by dividing the subscription fee by what you actually used:

• used 6,600 GB — $0.015 per GB, as advertised;
• used 300 GB — about $0.33 per GB;
• used 50 GB — $2 per GB;
• used 10 GB — $10 per GB.

The point at which Scale becomes more advantageous than its own Premium Rayobyte with pay-as-you-go ($0.70 per GB at the lower end) is approximately 143 GB per month. Below this volume, the subscription loses even to the more expensive product from the same provider. We discussed this trap in detail in our article on why the price of proxies per gigabyte is misleading and how to calculate the cost of a successful request.

The second limitation is the ceiling on collection speed. With 100 streams and heavy pages, you will hit the parallelism limit before the volume limit. To increase streams, you will have to upgrade the plan, even if the gigabytes are sufficient. Essentially, Scale is the sale of simultaneous slots, and the price per GB is derived from it.

Context: The Market is Getting Cheaper, but Collection is Getting More Expensive

The launch of Scale coincided with OxyCon 2026 — the annual Oxylabs conference on scraping. According to Proxyway, an interesting contradiction emerged: traffic is getting cheaper, but data collection itself is becoming more expensive.

• Panel participants agreed that there are now more bots on the web than people, and most expect that scraping will become more difficult and expensive.
• Engineers from Centric Software reported that Akamai consumed half of their feeds and over 50% of their proxy expenses, and in 2025, it broke thousands of their crawlers.
• Oxylabs noted an increase in restrictions in robots.txt and user agreements, and the number of copyright lawsuits nearly tripled over the year — to about 150.
• Oxylabs itself, according to its engineer, scrapes about 700 million pages a day.

The conclusion is simple: when cheap traffic hits anti-bot protection, the final cost is determined by the share of successful requests, not the price per gigabyte. An unsuccessful request through the cheapest IP still costs money — and time for a retry.

A separate question is the origin of the addresses. Rayobyte claims voluntary participation from users through applications with consent screens, the ability to opt-out at any time, EWDCI certification, and compliance with GDPR and CCPA. This is important in light of 2026, when law enforcement agencies repeatedly shut down large proxy networks built on infected devices. We explored how this looked in practice in our article about the shutdown of NetNut and the Popa botnet by the FBI: clients of such a network lose access in one day without warning.

Who is Scale Suitable For and Who is Not

Suitable

• Teams that collect datasets for training and evaluating models — Rayobyte explicitly names this as a primary scenario.
• Mass monitoring of catalogs, prices, and product availability, where the exit country is not important.
• Companies with their own crawler that can evenly load hundreds of streams around the clock and utilize a significant portion of the paid volume.

Not Suitable

• Multi-accounting and working with social media. Without the ability to choose the country and operator, the account address will jump around the world — a red flag for anti-fraud systems.
• Local results and geo-checks. SEO monitoring by cities, ad verification, regional pricing — all of this requires targeting, which is absent in Scale.
• Small volumes. If you consume tens of gigabytes per month, the subscription for $100 makes the gigabyte more expensive than regular pay-as-you-go pricing.
• Private users and freelancers. Access is only for verified businesses, with an application and compliance check.

How to Choose a Payment Model for Your Task

1. Calculate your actual monthly consumption. Take logs from the past month: how many gigabytes did you actually use, not how many you planned.
2. Estimate peak parallelism. How many streams are running simultaneously at the busiest hour? If the plan limits streams, calculate from that number.
3. Determine if targeting is needed. If the outcome depends on the country or city, plans without geo-targeting are immediately off the table, no matter the price.
4. Calculate the cost of a successful request. The price per gigabyte multiplied by the share of retries and CAPTCHAs — that’s the real cost of data.
5. Check the origin of the pool. Certifications, consent policies, response to complaints — today, this is a matter of business stability, not just ethics.

For tasks with uneven loads and a need for geo-targeting, pay-as-you-go is more convenient: for example, ProxyCove residential proxies are billed per gigabyte without a subscription fee, with country selection, and purchased traffic does not expire as long as the account is active. For simple sites without serious protection, it makes sense to start with cheaper datacenter proxies and switch to residential ones only where the share of blocks increases.

Conclusion

Rayobyte Scale is a telling signal to the market: residential traffic for AI collection is no longer sold by gigabytes but by simultaneous slots, and in this model, the price of $0.0095 per GB is real. But only for those who extract hundreds of terabytes without choosing a country and can pass verification as a business. For everyone else, the fair price is the subscription fee divided by the actual volume used, plus the share of unsuccessful requests. Before switching to the "penny" rate, calculate your consumption and check if you need targeting: these two numbers will determine whether you save or overpay.