Spider vs. Oxylabs: One API vs. a Proxy Empire

Oxylabs runs one of the largest proxy networks on the planet — 175 million residential IPs, 2 million datacenter IPs, coverage across 195 countries. The infrastructure is genuinely impressive. Independent benchmarks from Proxyway consistently put their raw proxy response times under 600ms with 99.8%+ success rates.

The scraping APIs they’ve built on top of that proxy network are a different product. And the AI tools bolted on top of the APIs are yet another product. Each layer adds pricing complexity, latency, and decisions you have to make before you can scrape a page.

Spider takes the opposite approach: one API that handles proxies, rendering, extraction, and anti-bot bypass internally. You never pick between products or manage proxy tiers.

The product sprawl

Oxylabs sells eight distinct products, each with its own API, documentation, and billing model:

Source: oxylabs.io/pricing

The decision tree: Do you need raw proxies, or a managed scraper? If managed, which kind — general web, SERP, or e-commerce? Do you want AI extraction? That’s a separate product (AI Studio) with a separate subscription. Need browser automation? That’s either Unblocking Browser (per-GB) or AI Studio’s Browser Agent (per-credit).

Spider has one endpoint. Static page, JavaScript SPA, anti-bot protected site — same API call, same billing. AI extraction is a parameter, not a separate product.

What Oxylabs costs

Web Scraper API

Their main scraping product uses per-result pricing that varies by what you’re scraping:

Source: oxylabs.io/products/scraper-api/web/pricings

Those are the per-result rates within a subscription. The subscription tiers:

The effective rates look reasonable at higher tiers. The catch: those per-result costs assume the cheapest target type (Amazon, no JS). Scrape general websites with JavaScript rendering and you’re at $1.35/1K — nearly 3x the headline number. And unused results expire at the end of each month.

AI Studio (separate product, separate bill)

If you want prompt-based extraction:

Credits aren’t 1:1 with pages. A scrape without JS costs 1 credit. With JS, 4 credits. Each AI prompt execution costs 10 credits. Each browser interaction (click, form fill) costs 4 credits.

So extracting data from a JS-rendered page with an AI prompt costs 14 credits per page. On the Lite plan ($62/mo), that’s about 7,100 pages — roughly $8.70 per 1K pages.

What Spider costs

Bandwidth ($1/GB) plus compute ($0.001/min). No subscription, no target-based pricing, no credit multipliers. The production average is about $0.65 per 1K pages whether you’re scraping Amazon, a random blog, or a Cloudflare-protected SPA. AI extraction is included — no separate product or subscription.

At 100K pages/month, general websites with JS:

At 10K pages/month the gap is starker. Spider runs about $6.50. Oxylabs requires the $49/mo Micro plan minimum — and if you need AI extraction, add another $12/mo for AI Studio Starter.

The proxy gap vs. the API gap

Here’s the thing about Oxylabs that’s easy to miss: their proxy infrastructure is fast. Proxyway’s independent benchmarks measure residential proxy response times at 0.41–0.6 seconds — among the fastest of any provider tested.

But the Web Scraper API built on top of those proxies is a different story. One independent benchmark from aimultiple.com found 92.52% success rates with 17.5-second average response times. That’s a huge gap between the raw proxy performance and the full API pipeline.

Spider’s average response time is under 1 second. The difference comes from architecture: Spider’s Rust engine handles the entire pipeline — fetch, render, parse, extract — in a single compiled binary with async I/O. There’s no layer of proxy infrastructure sitting underneath a separate API server sitting underneath a separate rendering service.

Note: Oxylabs’ raw proxy performance (0.4–0.6s, 99.8%+) is excellent. These numbers are for their full Web Scraper API product.

AI extraction

Oxylabs added AI features through a separate product called AI Studio, which launched in 2025. It includes five apps: AI-Scraper, AI-Crawler, Browser Agent, AI-Search, and AI-Map. The prompt-based extraction works — you describe what you want and get JSON back.

The issue is billing and integration. AI Studio is a separate subscription from the Web Scraper API. The credit system has multipliers (10 credits per AI prompt, 4 per browser action, 4 per JS render). And connecting AI Studio output to your existing scraping pipeline means bridging two separate APIs.

Spider’s AI extraction is a parameter on the same endpoint you already use:

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/products",
    "limit": 100,
    "return_format": "markdown"
  }'

Want AI extraction? Use the /ai/crawl endpoint and add a prompt. Same auth, same response format, same billing model.

Where Oxylabs wins

Raw proxy infrastructure. If you need residential proxies at scale — city-level geo-targeting, mobile carrier IPs, SOCKS5 support, static residential sessions — Oxylabs has one of the best networks available. 175M+ IPs across 195 countries with sub-second response times is hard to match.

Pre-built parsers for specific sites. Their E-Commerce Scraper and SERP Scraper have domain-specific parsers that return structured JSON for Amazon, Google, Walmart, and 40+ retailers. If you only scrape a handful of known sites and want pre-parsed data without writing extraction logic, these are useful.

Enterprise compliance. ISO 27001 certified, KYC verification, dedicated account managers on business plans. If your procurement team requires checkboxes, Oxylabs has them.

Where Spider wins

Simplicity. One API, one billing model, one set of docs. No choosing between eight products.

Cost. $0.65/1K pages versus $1.35+/1K (with JS) on Oxylabs. No subscription minimum to start. Credits don’t expire.

Speed. Sub-second responses versus 17+ seconds on the full API.

AI extraction included. Not a separate product with separate billing and separate credit multipliers.

Open source. Spider’s core crawler is MIT-licensed. Oxylabs’ SDKs are open source, but all computation is proprietary.

The bottom line

Oxylabs is a proxy company that built scraping tools. Spider is a scraping API that handles proxies internally. If you need raw proxy infrastructure for use cases beyond scraping — ad verification, brand protection, market research with your own tooling — Oxylabs’ network is a strong choice.

If you need a scraping API that gives you clean data quickly and cheaply, Spider does that without the product-selection overhead, the subscription tiers, or the AI extraction surcharge.

Get started with Spider — free credits, no card required.