Bright Data, the Israeli web data platform, has revised the pricing of its mobile proxy network. 

The rates are now identical to Bright Data’s residential proxy product – and also 65% cheaper compared to their previous iteration.

Following the change, Bright Data has become an extremely affordable option for mobile proxies, beating most premium peers and competing neck and neck with mid-market providers. 

Rayobyte, the US-based provider of proxies and web scraping tools, has published a whitepaper that lists the measures it takes to prevent malicious proxy use. 

The paper introduces Rayobyte’s three-pronged approach of prevention, detection, and response. The implementation differs depending on the proxy origin, whether the IPs come from data centers or residential users. 

1. Prevention involves measures like port blocking and rate limiting for datacenter proxies. The residential proxy network requires additional safeguards due to its more anonymous nature, such as a KYC procedure and a blacklist.
2. Detection comprises automated monitoring for potential DDoS activities, unauthorized access to graylist websites, and usage that fails to match the customer’s stated purpose. It also involves manual detection by investigating abuse emails and tracking spam databases.
3. Response actions take place following a complaint – Rayobyte concedes that the step is mostly relevant for datacenter proxies which have a clear business entity assigned to them. In this case, that entity is often Rayobyte. 

All in all, the crux of fighting abuse with residential proxies lies in prevention, while datacenter proxy servers, which are presented as a less attractive tool for misuse, rely more on reactive measures. 

We’re happy to see that proxy server vendors are starting to take ethical proxy use with increasing importance. Despite a few slip-ups throughout the years, Rayobyte has been one of the more vocal voices in the field. 

You can read the whitepaper here.

Bright Data’s web scraping conference, ScrapeCon, took place on April 2. It’s become our tradition to recap major industry events – let this be no exception. The article shares our impressions and provides brief (and often opinionated) summaries of the conference’s talks. If any catches your eye, Bright Data has made the videos available on demand. 

I find ScrapeCon particularly interesting, as it’s Bright Data’s first take at conferences (that we know of). Given how good Zyte’s Extract Summit and Oxylabs’ OxyCon have become over the years, expectations were high. 

Was the host able to meet them? Well, it depends. From the technical side – absolutely. The event felt very well organized and really had no technical issues to speak of. At the same time, there was a lot of product promotion and less interactiveness than we expected.

Infatica, the Singapore-based provider of proxies and web scraping tools, has revised the rates of its residential proxy traffic.

Though the pricing of its plans hasn’t changed, Infatica’s plans now grant significantly more traffic. As a result, they’ve become up to 43% cheaper.

The revision places Infatica among mid-market providers in terms of price, whereas it used to position as a premium company.

Rayobyte, the US-based proxy server provider, has revised the pricing model and rates of its residential proxy network. 

First, the provider has switched to subscription-based pricing. While there remains a pay-as-you-go plan without traffic caps, it no longer scales with volume.

Second, Rayobyte has reviewed its rates. Compared to the previous version without discounts, the prices are now up to 50% cheaper. The difference is starkest in lower ranges; at 1 TB, the largest public plan, Rayobyte’s proxies have actually received a minor price increase.

Bright Data, the Israeli web data platform, has announced the date for ScrapeCon, its virtual web scraping conference. 

The event will take place on April 2, or a week from now. Its allotted time is from 3PM to 7PM CEST. 

These four hours will fit in 10 sessions covering four main topics:

1. Cloud-based web scraping,
2. Data for AI,
3. Scaling scraping, and
4. The future of web data.

The list of speakers includes Bright Data’s staff, representatives from Kaggle, Rakuten, Ixigo, and Claro Analytics, as well as a selection of tech influencers like Tech with Tim and TiffInTech. 

Registration is free of charge. You can select to participate in some or all of the sessions.

The conference was originally planned for November 7. However, it had to be postponed due to the situation in Israel. 

ScrapeCon joins Zyte’s Extract Summit and Oxylabs’ OxyCon as the third major event dedicated to web data collection.

Bright Data, the Israeli web data platform, has reduced the prices of its residential proxy network.

The provider’s rates have become 20% cheaper across the board. This includes both subscription plans and the pay-as-you-go option.

While still not exactly cheap, Bright Data has taken a strong position to compete with other premium providers like NetNut and Oxylabs. However, that’s without enabling premium features like city targeting, which double the price. 

Zyte, the Ireland-based web data extraction platform, has announced the addition of new AI-based functionality to Zyte API. With it, the tool has become a “complete solution for web scraping”, allowing developers to “build new spiders and add data sources in minutes”. 

The solution combines Zyte API and pre-made spider templates accessible through Scrapy Cloud on Zyte’s dashboard. It allows extracting data from websites without creating your own crawling logic, dealing with anti-bot systems, or specifying selectors for data extraction.  

The data extraction step relies on Zyte’s proprietary machine learning model that the company claims to be up to “50x cheaper and 56% more accurate” than large language models like ChatGPT.

For now, the only available template covers e-commerce product pages. Using Scrapy Cloud’s no-code interface, you can quickly create a web scraper by specifying a few parameters: starting URL, geolocation, request count, crawling strategy, and browser rendering. The scraper then automatically crawls the website and returns structured data.

Developers who need more functionality can make quick customizations on the dashboard or use the provided Python library. This way, it’s also possible to build completely new scrapers that make use of Zyte’s AI tech.

Smartproxy, the international provider of proxies and web scraping tools, has reduced the rates of its residential proxy network. It’s also introduced two new enterprise plans.

The price reduction affects all packages and varies between 12% and 25%. What’s interesting is that the changes are more pronounced at 250 GB and up – usually, it’s the entry plans that see the biggest cuts. 

Furthermore, Smartproxy has added additional enterprise plans for two and five terabytes of data. This suggests that the provider is looking to attract more large-scale clients, in addition to making its offering more attractive overall. 

The updated pricing table looks as follows:

Compared to other mid-range providers like IPRoyal or SOAX, Smartproxy’s rates are now among the lowest:

Bright Data, the Israeli provider of web data extraction tools and services, has officially won the case against Meta. 

On February 23, Meta filed a motion to dismiss its claim against Bright Data. The motion follows the U.S. district court’s decision a month before, where Judge Edward Chen denied that Bright Data had breached Meta’s contract terms by scraping data off Facebook and Instagram.

The remaining argument involved tortious interference with Meta’s contractual terms and focused on customer use of Bright Data’s services. 

In a LinkedIn post, Bright Data’s CEO Or Lenchner emphasized that the outcome wasn’t the result of a settlement, but rather that Meta dropped the case conceding its loss. The motion also means that Facebook’s owner won’t be able to file for an appeal. In other words, it’s a complete win for Bright Data.

The broader web scraping industry received an important clarification that scraping Facebook and Instagram is contractually illegal only if done through a logged in account used for this purpose. This rules out far-fetched and borderline ridiculous arguments that merely having a company account creates an obligation not to scrape the platforms whatsoever. 

Having said that, the court’s line of reasoning focused on Meta’s terms in particular. At this point, it would still be dangerous to extend it to all cases of similar nature. One of them is currently taking place with the same Bright Data and Elon Musk’s X. Corp. 

In any case, this is a big win for Bright Data and the whole web data collection community. Well done.