Two stealth browsers just dropped. Also, your proxy provider might be overcharging you.
Use the new TWSC tools to discover proxy prices and news in the web scraping industry
A few things landed on my desk this week that I did not want to wait until the next issue to share. So here is a quick bonus edition: an update to a tool I have been building, and two projects from the scraping world that caught my attention.
The Proxy Price Benchmark is now updated weekly
If you haven't checked it yet, the Proxy Price Benchmark is the tool I built to answer a simple but important question: how much should you actually be paying for your proxies?
Every week, I (or better, my fleet of agents) update the pricing data directly from the vendors, so you always have a reliable reference to compare offers or negotiate with your current provider.
This week, we added two new vendors: Dataimpulse and AnyIP, bringing the total number of monitored providers to 27.
Check the latest prices
If you use proxies at scale and would find API access to this data useful, I am considering a paid API plan. If you are interested, join the waitlist and tell me about your use case. I want to understand demand before I build it.
This week on Scraping News: stealth browsers are getting serious
The Scraping News feed has been tracking an interesting trend this week: two new stealth browser projects worth watching.
Owl Browser is a purpose-built browser engine for automation at scale. Not a Playwright wrapper but a full engine built on Chromium (CEF) with a custom C99 HTTP server, 256 parallel contexts, and sub-12ms cold start. Self-hosted, Docker-ready, with Python and TypeScript SDKs. If you are running high-volume scraping and hitting the limits of standard headless setups, this is worth a closer look.
Rayobrowse is Rayobyte's open-source stealth Chromium browser, released from their production scraping infrastructure. It handles fingerprint randomization at the browser level (user agent, WebGL, fonts, screen resolution, timezone) and connects via CDP, so it works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, or any custom script. Runs on headless Linux with no GPU required.
Both address the same problem from different angles: standard headless Chromium is detected, and the solution is now moving from patch-level evasion to full browser-level stealth. We will be covering both in depth on TWSC soon.
See all the latest news on Scraping News
Keep in mind that both the Proxy Price Benchmark tools and Scraping News are in an early version; feel free to suggest improvements and bug fixes.
Floppydata says $1 per but they do the classic bait n switch. Once you sign up the price changes to $2.95 per gb. I’d remove them just based off that shady practice.
Stealth browsers are leveling up fast, and tools like proxy benchmarks are making it easier to spot where you might be overpaying