Bright Data Archives - Proxyway

Bright Data Launches a Lineup of Tools for AI

Adam Dubois — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 08:34:22 +0000

Bright Data

Deep Lookup transforms search queries into datasets, while Browser.AI and MCP server enable AI to roam the internet uninterrupted.

Adam Dubois

Published: July 3, 2025

Bright Data, the Israeli provider of web scraping infrastructure and services, has introduced a lineup of AI-based and AI-oriented tools.

Deep Lookup allows anyone to generate datasets without code, using the whole internet as a source.
Browser.ai aims to serve the booming industry of AI agents by giving them access to stealth web browsers.
Bright Data’s MCP server allows LLMs and other apps to access web resources through a standardized protocol.

Deep Lookup is currently in beta, accessible for companies to try out. The other two are available for all customers.

Deep Lookup

Introduced on July 2, Bright Data’s newest product aims to become an insight generation engine for non-technical teams. It accepts plain language queries and produces structured datasets, using the whole internet as the source.

Deep Lookup uses Bright Data’s archive of over 200 billion web pages, which is expected to reach 500 billion by next year, as well as live retrieval capabilities.

In the end, users get a structured table of data points. They’re free to include more columns (either enriching the dataset or defining conditions to be met) at any point.

Compared to similar deep research tools, Deep Lookup has the benefit of speed and structure. In addition, it transparently shows the sources and reasoning behind the results.

Bright Data lists a wide range of use cases for its tool. For example, financial analysts can use it for market mapping, corporate strategists can screen targets for M&A, while B2B sales teams can look for leads.

Browser.ai

Browser.ai is Bright Data’s new brand that offers serverless web browsers. Its target audience is AI agents needing to access websites without blocks and other disruptions.

Browser.ai relies on the provider’s unblocking infrastructure: it integrates proxies, CAPTCHA solving capabilities, and cookie management, among other things.

Furthermore, the tool accepts plain language prompts, which should prevent scripts from breaking upon website changes.

Browser.ai’s plans start from $39 per month for 10 GB of data. There’s also a free plan with two gigabytes included.

MCP Server

Bright Data’s MCP server gives AI tools a standard interface for interacting with the provider’s infrastructure. For example, Claude can use it to run Google searches without encountering CAPTCHAs.

Bright Data’s list of MCP tools include a general-purpose web scraper, browser interactions, as well as a collection of specialized scrapers covering search engines and other popular targets.

The server integrates with most AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and LangChain.

The Bottom Line

By now, Bright Data has fully embraced AI as a way forward.

Deep Lookup is probably the most interesting of the three. It builds upon all of Bright Data’s infrastructure layers to challenge services like ChatGPT.

While the protocol is still fresh out of the oven, the MCP server makes a lot of sense, especially knowing that our industry stands at the frontier of AI developments.

Browser.ai actually repackages Bright Data’s existing Scraping Browser product, likely cutting some corners to reduce price. As recent investments into Browserbase ($27M) and Browser-Use ($17M) show, there’s much perceived demand for this product category. Admittedly, Bright Data also managed to snatch a perfect domain name.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data Changes Scraper Prices, Calls Web Unlocker an API

Adam Dubois — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 12:52:49 +0000

Bright Data

The provider’s products now cost either 50% more or 50% less, depending on which you use.

Adam Dubois

Published: January 9, 2025

Bright Data, the Israeli web data platform, has made significant changes to the pricing of its scrapers. The provider is also shifting the positioning of Web Unlocker from a proxy tool to an API.

Prices Changes

The rates for Web Unlocker and SERP API, Bright Data’s proxy-like scrapers, have been cut by 50%. On the other hand, the beta-level Scraper APIs, which scrape and structure individual websites, will now cost 50% more. As a result, customers will get a unified line-up when it comes to price:

Plan	Web Unlocker, SERP API (old)	Web Scraper APIs (old)	New rates
PAYG	$3	$1	$1.5
$499	$2.55	$0.85	$1.27
$999	$2.25	$0.75	$1.12
$1,999	$2.10	$0.70	$1.05

The change will make Bright Data’s scrapers significantly more competitive in an already very cutthroat market. However, the pricing model remains rigid, which makes Bright Data economical primarily for harder to reach and JavaScript-dependent websites.

Web Unlocker as an API

For the past few years, Web Unlocker has been Bright Data’s poster-child scraper product. It was specifically made as an upsell to the provider’s proxy networks, taking the same proxy-like integration format and sharing most of the same conventions. Web Unlocker inspired a whole category of unblocker products that stood alongside web scraping APIs – sometimes with little technical justification.

Lately, however, Bright Data has been making significant changes to its prized product. The provider started off by exposing more parameters, such as device selection. It then introduced an alternative integration method: a REST API. And beginning with 2025, Web Unlocker has turned into Web Unlocker API, with API integration as the recommended method for using it.

For now, Bright Data’s implementation is still rather basic, with most parameters remaining in the username. That said, it’s already become the default option in the dashboard.

We don’t know what exactly prompted this change, but the ground below proxy APIs has been shaky for a while. SOAX did away with proxy-like integration, and Nimble discontinued its Unblocker Proxy altogether last autumn.

Maybe proxy-like scrapers don’t have as much demand compared to more standard API integration methods – at least not enough to form a separate product category? Quite a few APIs are able to integrate as proxies already.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data Equalizes Residential and Mobile Proxy Rates

Adam Dubois — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 11:19:16 +0000

Bright Data

In essence, the provider’s mobile proxies just got 65% cheaper.

Adam Dubois

Published: April 26, 2024

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.

	Pay as you go	$500	$1,000	$2,000
New price/GB	$8.40	$7.14	$6.30	$5.88
Old price/GB	$24	$20.40	$18	$16.80
Difference	-65%	-65%	-65%	-65%

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.

After the second price decrease within a year, Bright Data’s mobile IP network now costs one fifth of the price compared to this time in 2023.

The move shows how ruthlessly proxy providers have been cutting costs in an effort to push out their competition. We also interpret this as a signal that peer-to-peer mobile proxies are losing their premium aura: SOAX chose the same pricing strategy last August, and it’s also been adopted by multiple minor providers like AnyIP and ASocks.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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ScrapeCon 2024: A Recap

Adam Dubois — Thu, 11 Apr 2024 06:57:57 +0000

Bright Data

Our impressions from Bright Data’s first virtual conference on web scraping.

Adam Dubois

Published: April 11, 2024

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.

Organizational Matters

ScrapeCon was initially planned to take place on November 7, 2023. Unfortunately, it had to be delayed due to events in Israel. No news was given for a while, and then Bright Data announced a new date some time in March.

Registration was free, which is nice and, by now, an industry standard for online events. You had to fill out a form with basic details like name, surname, and email. The application also asked to select which sessions you expected to attend. (Was it to gauge interest? Were you unable to watch the presentations you didn’t choose? I ticked all the boxes, so I couldn’t test what happened in that scenario.) Then, ScrapeCon’s team would verify your application and manually approve (or deny?) entry.

I believe Bright Data used a platform called Cvent to host the conference. The hub was well-made, with notifications and chat boxes for Q&A. Unlike Extract Summit or OxyCon, each session had a different page with a description and Vimeo player. Some talks took around 15 minutes, so you had to jump in and out constantly.

Bright Data opted to host the conference between 3PM and 7PM CEST. For us – and quite a few businesses in Europe – the time was unusual, but it was likely chosen to include both European and American audiences. All sessions were on the dot. The schedule had no formal breaks, but you’d typically get between five and ten minutes before the next talk.

One feeling I couldn’t shake throughout the event was that I acted much more as a viewer rather than an active participant. Sure, you were free to ask questions. But all answers were given in text, and speakers never actually interacted with the audience directly. Everything might as well have been pre-recorded, and you wouldn’t have missed much.

The Talks

The conference comprised six presentations, three panels, and a six-minute introduction by Bright Data’s CEO Or Lenchner. Let’s go through them one by one.

Here’s a quick navigation for the headline divers:

Opening Speech: The State of Public Web Data
Cloud-Native Scraping Made Simple
Decoding Scraping Strategies: Build, Buy, or API?
Panel 1: The Future of Data for AI: Balancing Legal and Operational Challenges
From AI-Powered Insights to Training LLMs
A Blueprint for Building a Reliable Dataset
Panel 2: The Executive Playbook
From Clicks to Captures: Mastering Browser Interactions for Scrapers
Beyond IP Bans & CAPTCHAs
Panel 3: From Initial Request to Final Analysis

Opening Speech: The State of Public Web Data

Or Lenchner kicked off the conference with Bright Data’s narrative of the status quo. It pepped up the event and gave a good idea of what to expect.

In brief, the demand for data is growing exponentially, and like drinking water, it’s poised to shape the future of humanity. AI is the next big revolution, and naturally, it requires data to train. Big corporations are gating off, but Bright Data secured some important victories (mostly notably against Meta), and regulation is the next frontier.

Or mentioned something called the scraping cloud – I assume this is how Bright Data will position itself from this point on. He also teased Bright Shield, a two-pronged product currently in beta:

Bright Data’s clients can use it to track and enforce their web scraping policies, while
Webmasters are able to see which parts of their properties are scraped and – to an extent – influence data collection activities on those domains.

Talk 1: Cloud-Native Scraping Made Simple

In the first presentation, Itzhak Yosef Friedman, Head of R&D at Bright Data, spoke about serverless web scraping infrastructure. More precisely, he introduced Bright Data Functions, previously called Web Scraper IDE, previously called Data Collector.

In brief, Functions is a cloud-based development environment accessible through Bright Data’s dashboard. It includes pre-built code functions, templates for popular websites, and uses the provider’s unblocking infrastructure in the backend. There are other neat features built in, such as tools for debugging and monitoring. If needed, Functions can run headless browsers, also in the cloud.

Itzhak then quickly built an interactive scraper to collect data from Lazada to show off the product. I found it nice that Functions separates the scraping and parsing stages and caches pages, so you can adjust the parser without reloading the URL. This was the first product advertisement of the day.

A few sidenotes. It’s interesting to see how Functions evolved. The initial iteration, Data Collector, was actually marketed as a no-code tool: the templates had a UI layer, and there was an extension for visually building scrapers . Bright Data then pivoted toward developers, leaving the no code part to datasets.

This was also the first presentation to feature Bright Data’s diagram of the modern web pipeline. It would appear time and time again throughout the conference.

Talk 2: Decoding Scraping Strategies: Build, Buy, or API?

Nir Borenshtein, Bright Data’s COO, spoke about the considerations of building a scraper in-house versus outsourcing parts of the process. The presentation was once again very much focused on Bright Data’s tooling, but in a more general, here’s what our platform (scraping cloud) looks like, kind of way.

Nir began by elaborating on the web data pipeline we saw in the previous session, speaking about the challenges that arose throughout the years and how they led to the creation of Web Unlocker. He then characterized three models for data collection: in-house, hybrid, and data-as-a-service. Afterwards, Nir illustrated his points with several case studies and finally presented Bright Data platform’s layers.

Overall, it was a decent high-level overview, perhaps more from a business executive’s point of view. I’m not sure why this talk didn’t go after the intro – maybe that was the original design, but it got rearranged somewhere in the process.

Panel 1: The Future of Data for AI: Balancing Legal and Operational Challenges

Bright Data’s CEO Or Lenchner, Jo Levy from Norton Law Firm, and Anthony Goldbloom, Co-founder of Kaggle, discussed the role of web data in AI, the challenges collecting this data raises, and how to navigate them in the day-to-day. Jennifer Burns from Bright Data moderated the discussion.

Being accustomed to specialist panels, I found this intersection interesting, but it turned out to provide useful insights. Anthony, whose company uses web data to fine-tune LLMs, outlined a framework for data collection. It includes knowing your sources, depth of coverage, and the possible legal implications.

Or raised thought-provoking points about the inherent bias in selecting datasets for LLMs and the increasing importance of data freshness. Jo’s most valuable argument, in my opinion, was that lenses like copyright or bias should be addressed in the curation rather than the selection stage. Other topics were touched upon as well, such as self-regulation.

All in all, I enjoyed the discussion and recommend watching it. I also found it amusing how self-effacing Bright Data appeared compared to the other sessions: Or suggested that their services may not be necessary at first, and Anthony admitted using multiple vendors to mitigate risk.

Talk 3: From AI-Powered Insights to Training LLMs

Lior Levhar from Bright Data ran through the best practices for creating datasets for large language models. The target audience was probably business types looking to get into LLM training, as most advice turned out pretty basic: tailor the dataset for your use case, don’t make it too big or small, remove duplicates, and validate unreliable sources like social media.

Throughout the session, Lior subtly referred to Bright Data’s datasets several times and whipped up a practical demonstration with Snowflake as the analytics tool. Although the session has limited value for data professionals, it’s a decent introduction for others.

Talk 4: A Blueprint for Building a Reliable Dataset

Itamar Amramovich from Bright Data continued the topic of datasets, diving deeper into how they’re crafted at his company. The presentation was heavily sales-driven, leaning on marketing lingo and rhetorical techniques.

In brief, Itamar went through what he called the pillars of data reliability. The first, data collection, relies on proxies and unblocking infrastructure and applies various strategies, such as discovering sources through search engines and scraping internal APIs. Schema design requires defining core elements and cleaning raw output, while data validation looks into fill rate, uniqueness, min-max thresholds, and other metrics.

Marketing aside, the talk delivered on its promise of providing a blueprint, all the while letting us gleam into Bright Data’s internal tooling, such as its universal schema for datasets.

Panel 2: The Executive Playbook

The second panel featured Ernesto Cohnen from Ixigo, Michael Beygelman from Claro Analytics, and Ganesh Kumar from Rakuten. It was hosted by Bright Data’s CCO Omri Orgad. The discussion’s professed aim was to discuss the best practices for operational and financial aspects of real-time data collection.

In reality, it touched upon many topics, including but very much not limited to LLMs and their impact on business operations. The participants brought expertise from their respective fields, sharing individual challenges that sometimes intersected around the topics of multimodality of data, the growing importance of real-time decisions, and the need to discern data originators from regurgitators.

To give you some examples, Ernesto encountered that around 10% of new Google Images are now AI-generated, which is a problem for a travel portal. Ganesh has found it crucial to understand the references that customers use to shop for products, and sometimes, you need to search in unlikely places (such as ticketing websites). And Michael emphasized that we live in an era of just-in-time where businesses require prescriptive data.

Ernesto concluded with a beautiful thought that the value of data lies in the stories you build with it. All in all, I found the panel to be one of the highlights of the conference.

Talk 5: From Clicks to Captures: Mastering Browser Interactions for Scrapers

Aviv Besinsky and Ilya Kolker from Bright Data introduced the challenges of scraping dynamic websites and their approach to solving them. Some of the roadblocks include maintaining headless browser infrastructure, avoiding blocks, and parsing rendered content. Hard, right?

Well, you can always use Scraping Browser to overcome them. It scales automatically and has unblocking built in. Aviv provided a case study where a customer saved $5,000 by switching, and Ilya proceeded to demonstrate a scenario where he programmed a scraper to visit Amazon, type in Laptop, and download the page. All in all, it was a product pitch if you’re in the market for it.

Talk 6: Beyond IP Bans & CAPTCHAs

Another presentation by the Aviv Besinsky and Ilya Kolker duo. This time, they discussed the challenges stemming from website protection against web scraping. These range from simple IP blocks to sophisticated behavior tracking.

Aviv first showed a timeline with the evolution of anti-bot technologies. He then overviewed the main anti-scraping methods in order of difficulty and provided some ways to overcome them. The guidelines were on a pretty high level (e.g. emulate real user interactions), which serves more as a starting point for further research than directly applicable advice.

In the second part, Ilya demoed how datacenter and residential proxies fare in two scenarios: accessing Amazon and G2. He used a basic scraper without and then with headers. After both failed with G2, Ilya switched to Bright Data’s Web Unlocker (which runs headless browsers and solves CAPTCHAs if needed) and successfully scraped the page.

Panel 3: From Initial Request to Final Analysis

A panel with five tech influencers: Tech with Tim, Coding with Lewis, TiffinTech, Python Simplified, and Tech Bible. I expected a discussion format, but it looked like the participants were given a list of questions and recorded their answers individually.

In any case, they covered a variety of topics, ranging from the very basics like what is web data? to the challenges developers face while scraping and their favorite tech stacks. I wouldn’t consider this panel crucial to watch, but it was entertaining and ended the conference on a lighter note.

Conclusion

That was ScrapeCon. Despite being heavier on sales than we’re used to, I believe it was a success. Congratulations to Bright Data on their first online conference!

If you’ve reached this far and would like to read up on other major industry events, here’re our recaps of 2023’s Extract Summit and OxyCon.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data’s ScrapeCon to Take Place on April 2

Adam Dubois — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 07:54:28 +0000

Bright Data

The rescheduled web scraping event will proceed in a week.

Adam Dubois

Published: March 26, 2024

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:

Cloud-based web scraping,
Data for AI,
Scaling scraping, and
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.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data Reduces Residential Proxy Prices by 20%

Adam Dubois — Fri, 08 Mar 2024 10:01:36 +0000

Bright Data

The second round of price cuts continues.

Adam Dubois

Published: March 8, 2024

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.

	Micro ($10)	>$500	$500+	$1,000+	$2,000+
New /GB	$5.04	$8.40	$7.14	$6.30	$5.88
Old /GB	$6.30	$10.50	$8.92	$7.78	$7.35
Change	-20%

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.

This is Bright Data’s second price revision in a year, following the 30% reduction in September. It comes on the heels of Smartproxy’s pricing changes and will likely fuel a new round of discounts in the market. 2024 is shaping to be a great year for proxy shopping.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Meta Drops the Case Against Bright Data

Adam Dubois — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 11:47:17 +0000

Bright Data

The dispute results in a complete win for the data collection infrastructure provider.

Adam Dubois

Published: February 27, 2024

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.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Judge Sides with Bright Data in the Case against Meta

Adam Dubois — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 12:39:13 +0000

Bright Data

Meta fails to prove that Bright Data scraped data while logged in.

Adam Dubois

Published: January 25, 2024

January 23 brought a victory for Bright Data and the web scraping community. Headed by Judge Edward Chen, a U.S. district court denied Meta’s claims that Bright Data breached its contract terms by scraping content off Facebook and Instagram. The dispute started approximately a year ago, when Meta and Bright Data sued one another. The social media giant asserted that Bright Data improperly scraped data from Meta’s websites, enabled others to scrape its data, and attempted to sell the scraped information, thus violating Meta’s terms of service. The court, however, found no proof that any of the data was collected while signed in. Even though Bright Data had profiles on Facebook and Instagram, they were used for marketing purposes, rather than to extract data from the platforms. And while Meta’s terms are constructed to affect users with an account, they can’t be extended to visitors that are logged out or have no account in the first place. Furthermore, the court opined that technical measures to prevent unauthorized access, such as CAPTCHAs, can’t be equated to gated content. And finally, the fact that Bright Data offers services capable to scrape data behind a login doesn’t mean that such usage took place or was endorsed. The court’s decision comes as a big win for the web scraping community. Breach of contract is currently the main avenue for fighting automated access. In another lawsuit with Bright Data, X Corp. tries to assert that merely having an account by a company or its employees prohibits all web scraping activity on the platform. In our opinion, this line of thought is both dangerous and far-fetched, and we’re happy that the court took a big step towards shutting it down. Having said that, Bright Data’s fight with Meta isn’t over yet. The social media giant can further litigate on the basis of tortious interference with contract, and it’s reasonable to expect an appeal. Still, a win is a win, and today we celebrate.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data to Host a Web Scraping Conference

Adam Dubois — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 13:48:01 +0000

Bright Data

ScrapeCon will take place online on November 7.

Adam Dubois

Published: October 12, 2023

ScrapeCon has been postponed due to the military conflict in Israel.

Bright Data, the Israeli web data platform, has announced a web scraping conference called ScrapeCon. The one-day virtual event will take place on November 7. Registration is free of charge. Bright Data calls ScrapeCon the definitive event of the industry that’s been opened to the public for the first time. I’ve never heard of it before, so I assume it was either a well-kept secret or took place in-house. In any case, ScrapeCon will have two tracks:

Thought leadership track aimed at company executives. It will explore the operational and financial aspects of data collection, as well as potential uses of AI in our field. There will also be a keynote speech overviewing the state of web data and its future trajectories.
Developer track that will make up the bulk of the conference. Its presentations will cover a variety of topics covering the lifecycle of a web scraping project: from choosing the tooling, avoiding blocks, handling interactive content, building reliable datasets to a Q&A session addressing the challenges of complex projects.

ScrapeCon will be dominated by Bright Data’s developers and executives. However, the line-up also includes a healthy selection of industry professionals from companies like Rakuten, Kaggle, Ixigo, and more. In addition, you’ll find familiar faces like Pierluigi Vinciguerra from Web Scraping Club and Tiffany Janzen from Tiff in Tech. You can see the full line-up, agenda, and register for the event on ScrapeCon’s official website. ScrapeCon will join the two other major conferences of the year: OxyCon and Zyte’s upcoming Web Data Extraction Summit.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data Drops Residential Proxy Prices by 30%

Adam Dubois — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 13:22:00 +0000

Bright Data

The reduction affects all plans, including pay as you go.

Adam Dubois

Published: September 7, 2023

Bright Data, the Israeli provider of data extraction tools and services, has significantly reduced the prices of its residential proxy network.

The rates have become 30% cheaper throughout all plans, including the pay-as-you-go option:

	Pay as you go	$500	$1,000	$2,000
New	$10.50	$8.92	$7.87	$7.35
Old	$15	$12.75	$11.25	$10.50
Change	-30%	-30%	-30%	-30%

The change makes Bright Data significantly more competitive with other premium providers. It’s especially affected the lower end of the range, where the company now outprices rivals like Oxylabs and NetNut.

However, if enabled, Bright Data’s premium functionality (such as city or ISP targeting) still makes it the most expensive option in the market

It seems like the price wars haven’t ended. So far, we’ve seen price cuts by Smartproxy, Webshare, and a limited time offer by SOAX, not to mention a slew of mobile proxy price decreases. We’ll be curious to watch if Bright Data’s competitors see the need to answer the call this time or if they’ll choose to save their profit margins.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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X Corp. (Former Twitter) Sues Bright Data

Adam Dubois — Fri, 28 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bright Data

Elon Musk’s pet social media network accuses the Israeli company of breaching its terms of service.

Adam Dubois

Published: July 28, 2023

X Corp., which until recently was known as Twitter, has filed a lawsuit in California against Bright Data, the Israeli provider of data extraction tools and services.

The social media network has accused Bright Data of “illegally” scraping and selling millions of records from the platform. According to X Corp., Bright Data offered data services, as well as a tool for extracting data en masse.

Twitter’s successor bases the complaint on alleged breaches of terms of service. Bright Data had an account on the platform, so did its top executives and other employees. As such, X Corp. claims that the Israeli company violated a binding contract that prohibited web scraping without prior consent.

X Corp. aims to receive damages, prevent the defendant from further scraping the platform, and make it disclose who received the data extracted from Twitter.

This isn’t Bright Data’s first clash against social media platforms. In January 2023, the company filed and received a lawsuit from Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. Both then and now, the arguments revolve around terms of service violations, which seem to have replaced the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as the main battlefield.

Social media platforms, including Microsoft’s LinkedIn, have been among the most aggressive opponents of web scraping. According to Bright Data CEO Or Lenchner’s statement to Bloomberg Law, this new lawsuit “is an effort to build a wall around publicly available data on Twitter”. Similar things can be said about the many other related disputes that have taken place over these past few years.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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Bright Data Cuts Mobile Proxy Prices by 40%

Adam Dubois — Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bright Data

If permanent, this change makes the provider among the cheaper options for premium mobile IPs.

Adam Dubois

Published: July 7, 2023

Bright Data, the provider of data extraction tools and services, has significantly reduced the prices of its mobile proxy network.

To be precise, the rates are now cheaper by 40% throughout the pricing range:

	Pay as you go	Growth ($500+)	Business ($1,000+)
New price	$24/GB	$20.40/GB	$18/GB
Old price	$40/GB	$34/GB	$30/GB
Difference	-40%	-40%	-40%

Bright Data used to have by far the highest rates, even among premium providers. The reduction, if permanent, makes it cheaper than most alternatives in the segment and competitive with mid-range providers like Smartproxy.

Having said that, the graph above fails to account for features that Bright Data considers premium, such as city or carrier targeting, which effectively double the base rate.

In any case, lower prices are always good for us, the customers.

Adam Dubois

Proxy geek and developer.

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