If you are blocked mid-project and choosing between Bright Data Web Unlocker and Oxylabs Web Unblocker, the decision is really a billing-model decision: at published list prices (July 2026), Bright Data charges $1.50 per 1K successful requests with a 5,000-request free monthly tier, while Oxylabs charges per gigabyte, from $9.40/GB on its 8 GB tier down to $7.50/GB at 88 GB. The break-even sits at an average page weight of roughly 160 KB — heavier pages favor Bright Data, lighter ones favor Oxylabs. And two options the vendor-dominated search results will not show you: IPRoyal Web Unblocker undercuts everyone per request at $1.00 down to $0.70 per 1K, and Decodo's Site Unblocker survived the Smartproxy rebrand as a proxy-format per-GB product from $10.00/GB.
Key takeaways
- Bright Data Web Unlocker is per-request: $1.50 per 1K pay-as-you-go billed only on success, a free tier of 5K requests/month with no card, and a $499/mo Scale plan with 383K requests included plus $1.30 per 1K overage (July 2026).
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker is per-GB: $9.40/GB (8 GB), $8.60/GB (38 GB), $7.50/GB (88 GB). The WU40 code cuts 40% for six months — treat it as a promo and budget list rates. The 1-week, 1 GB free trial needs no card.
- The per-request vs per-GB break-even is arithmetic: at $1.50 per 1K vs $9.40/GB, the crossover is about 160 KB average page weight. Measure your real transfer per page before picking a billing model.
- IPRoyal Web Unblocker is the cheapest per-request option we could document: $1.00 per 1K down to $0.70 per 1K at 100K requests, billed per successful request per its help center, with JS rendering carrying no documented surcharge and a $1.00 minimum purchase.
- Decodo Site Unblocker survived the rebrand as a standalone per-GB product ($10.00/GB at 1 GB down to $6.75/GB at 100 GB, plus VAT, 14-day money-back); its old URL now 404s, so older third-party coverage of it is stale.
- Every success-rate figure here (98-99.99%) is a vendor claim, and unblockers are for public pages that block automated traffic — not for login walls, paywalls, or personal data.
Web Unlocker vs Web Unblocker: the comparison table
The naming collision is real — Bright Data says Unlocker, Oxylabs and IPRoyal say Web Unblocker, Decodo says Site Unblocker — but the products compete for the same job: fetching public pages that block ordinary proxy traffic. All figures below come from each vendor's own pages as displayed on July 17, 2026, in USD.
| Bright Data Web Unlocker | Oxylabs Web Unblocker | Decodo Site Unblocker | IPRoyal Web Unblocker | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per 1K requests | Per GB, monthly tiers | Per GB, monthly tiers | Per 1K requests |
| Entry cost | $1.50 per 1K pay-as-you-go | $75/mo for 8 GB ($9.40/GB) | $10/mo for 1 GB ($10.00/GB, plus VAT) | $1.00 for 1K requests — the cheapest paid entry here |
| Volume pricing | Scale $499/mo: 383K requests included, $1.30 per 1K over | $7.50/GB at 88 GB ($660/mo); WU40 promo takes 40% off for 6 months | $6.75/GB at 100 GB ($675/mo, plus VAT) | $0.70 per 1K at 100K requests |
| Free tier / trial | 5K requests per month free, no card | 1-week trial: 1 GB or 10K results, no card, capped at 10 req/s | Unverified (not shown on the page fetched 2026-07-17); 14-day money-back instead | Unverified (not shown on the pages fetched 2026-07-17); $1.00 minimum purchase |
| JavaScript rendering | Full browser rendering built into all plans | Server-side rendering included | Unverified (not shown on the page fetched 2026-07-17) | On-demand headless-browser rendering via a password flag, no documented surcharge |
| CAPTCHA handling | Automatic CAPTCHA solving (vendor claim) | Auto-retry that rotates client device parameters (vendor claim) | Advertises 0 CAPTCHAs (vendor claim) | Built-in handling with retries on a new IP or fingerprint (vendor claim) |
| Success-based billing | Yes — billed only for successful requests | Described as pay only for successfully extracted data (vendor claim), metered in GB | Not stated — per-GB allowance | Yes — per successful request, per the official help center |
Sources: Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing, Oxylabs Web Unblocker pricing, Decodo Site Unblocker, IPRoyal Web Unblocker pricing (as displayed July 17, 2026).
Engineer’s take (Hinata): The only number in this table you can act on immediately is your own average page weight, and most teams do not know it — I would fetch a few hundred real target URLs through Bright Data's free 5K tier or the Oxylabs trial, divide bytes transferred by successful pages, and only then choose a billing model, because at 160 KB per page the two leaders literally cost the same. I would also budget Oxylabs at its list rates: WU40 is a six-month promo, and a pipeline sized against $5.64/GB inherits a 67% cost jump at month seven. Per-request pricing is the safer default when you cannot predict page weight; per-GB only wins when you know your pages are light.
How unblockers differ from raw proxies and scraping APIs
An unblocker is the middle layer of the managed-scraping stack. Raw residential proxies give you IP addresses billed per gigabyte, and everything else — rotation, retries, browser fingerprints, block detection — is your problem; our guide on how to scrape without getting blocked shows how much engineering that "everything else" actually is. Full scraping APIs sit at the other extreme, adding parsing, templates, and structured output on top; we rank those in best scraping APIs.
Unblockers do exactly one job: given a URL on a public site that rejects datacenter or naive automated traffic, return the page. They bundle proxy selection, fingerprint management, JavaScript rendering, and CAPTCHA handling behind a single endpoint — Decodo's and IPRoyal's even present as ordinary proxy endpoints, so existing scraper code can adopt them by changing a config line. You keep your own parsing and orchestration. If you are unsure whether you need this layer at all, scraping API vs proxy walks through the build-vs-buy decision from both ends.
Pricing deep-dive: where per-request beats per-GB
The two billing models meter different things, so comparing them requires your average page weight. The algebra: 1,000 requests at an average transfer of W MB per page move 1,000 × W MB = W GB of traffic. A per-GB unblocker therefore charges W × (rate per GB) for the same work a per-request unblocker does for its flat per-1K fee. Set them equal and solve for W:
| Per-request rate | Per-GB rate | Break-even average page weight |
|---|---|---|
| Bright Data $1.50 per 1K | Oxylabs $9.40/GB (8 GB tier) | ~160 KB |
| Bright Data $1.30 per 1K (Scale overage) | Oxylabs $7.50/GB (88 GB tier) | ~173 KB |
| IPRoyal $1.00 per 1K | Oxylabs $9.40/GB | ~106 KB |
| IPRoyal $0.70 per 1K (100K tier) | Decodo $6.75/GB (100 GB tier) | ~104 KB |
Below the break-even weight, per-GB is cheaper; above it, per-request wins. Modern JavaScript-heavy product and search pages routinely exceed 160 KB once rendering traffic counts against your meter, which is why per-request billing is the safer blind default. Here is the same math as a worked scenario — 100,000 successful requests in a month:
| Average page weight | Traffic | Bright Data ($1.50 per 1K, first 5K free) | IPRoyal ($0.70 per 1K) | Oxylabs (cheapest listed route) | Decodo Site Unblocker |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 KB | 10 GB | $142.50 | $70 | $325 (Starter 38 GB flat, 10 GB used) | $85 plus VAT (10 GB plan) |
| 500 KB | 50 GB | $142.50 | $70 | $660 (Advanced 88 GB flat, 50 GB used) | $375 plus VAT (50 GB plan) |
| 1 MB | 100 GB | $142.50 | $70 | $660 plus a 12 GB top-up at an unpublished rate | $675 plus VAT (100 GB plan) |
Two caveats keep this honest. Oxylabs allows top-ups (up to 73 GB on Micro, 143 GB on Starter and Advanced) that could soften the tier-boundary jumps, but the top-up rate was not published on the page we fetched, so the table uses flat plan prices. And the per-GB column is not always the loser: flip the scenario to 1,000,000 requests against 40 KB JSON endpoints (40 GB of traffic) and Oxylabs' Starter tier plus top-ups or Decodo's 50 GB plan at $375 plus VAT beat both Bright Data ($1,492.50 after the free 5K) and IPRoyal ($700). Oxylabs' own customer case study — a 98%+ success rate at an effective $0.60 per 1K requests (vendor claim) — is exactly this light-page regime. Per-GB rewards teams that know their traffic; per-request protects teams that do not. Our web scraping cost estimation guide covers how to measure page weight, retry overhead, and render ratio before you commit.
Provider-by-provider detail
Bright Data Web Unlocker is the turnkey per-request option: $1.50 per 1K requests pay-as-you-go, billed only for successful requests, with a free tier of 5,000 requests per month requiring no credit card, per its pricing page (July 17, 2026). The Scale plan is $499/mo with 383,000 requests included (an effective $1.30 per 1K) and $1.30 per 1K overage; Enterprise is custom. All plans include full browser rendering and automatic CAPTCHA solving, with unlimited concurrency on paid tiers, and Bright Data advertises a 98% success rate (vendor claim). A first-deposit match up to $500 is promotional and may lapse. The catch is upstream of pricing: Bright Data runs the strictest KYC of the four, geared to registered companies. Details in our Bright Data review.
Compliance: what unblockers are for — and what they are not
Unblockers exist for one legitimate problem: public pages that indiscriminately block datacenter IPs and automated traffic, even when the visitor is collecting data lawfully — price monitoring, SEO rank tracking, ad verification, market research, AI training corpora. That is the use ProxyFacts covers, and it is the use these vendors' own compliance programs are built around. They are not tools for getting behind login walls or paywalls, harvesting personal data, or automating purchases — activities excluded from our coverage and prohibited by every provider here. Decodo goes furthest, actively blocking high-risk target categories including banking, government portals, streaming, app stores, and ticketing, per its published security policy.
The KYC gradient is a genuine selection criterion, and I read it as a feature: providers that verify customers keep abusers off the infrastructure your traffic shares. Bright Data restricts access to human-verified registered companies; Oxylabs requires a KYC form from every customer at signup with risk-based escalation; Decodo runs automated fraud checks and KYC on every registration; IPRoyal's KYC (via iDenfy) is mandatory only for static ISP proxies, with unverified accounts staying partially restricted. If the legal side of your project is unsettled, start with is web scraping legal? before buying anything.
Our methodology
This is a document-based comparison. Every price, tier, and feature above comes from the four vendors' own product and pricing pages, fetched and re-verified on July 17, 2026, with promotional rates (Oxylabs' WU40 code, Bright Data's deposit match) labeled as promotions and success rates labeled as vendor claims throughout. Where a page did not show a figure — Decodo's and IPRoyal's unblocker trial terms, Oxylabs' top-up rates — we say unverified rather than estimate. ProxyFacts has not yet run first-hand benchmarks; every figure above comes from the cited provider pages. ProxyFacts is monetized through disclosed affiliate partnerships; those partnerships never change which numbers we report.
Which unblocker should you choose?
- Choose Bright Data Web Unlocker for turnkey scale. Success-only per-request billing, built-in browser rendering, unlimited paid-tier concurrency, and a free 5K requests/month to validate against your real targets — if you can clear the company-level KYC.
- Choose IPRoyal for the cheapest per-request entry. $1.00 per 1K down to $0.70 per 1K at 100K requests with a $1.00 minimum and no documented JS-rendering surcharge; the trade-off is the smallest claimed pool and the thinnest track record.
- Choose Oxylabs Web Unblocker for per-GB predictability. If you have measured your traffic and your pages are light, $9.40-$7.50/GB with a real 1-week trial is a defensible buy — sized against list rates, not the WU40 promo.
- Choose Decodo Site Unblocker for proxy-format per-GB. A single proxy-style endpoint from $10/mo (plus VAT) with a 14-day money-back option, ideal when you want unblocking behind existing proxy-configured code at small volumes.
Verdict
4.0/5
Bright Data
Free tier of 5K requests per month, no card — but production scale requires passing company-level KYC
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IPRoyal
Cheapest per-request entry at $1.00 for 1K requests; no free trial shown, so start with the $1 minimum
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Oxylabs
1-week free trial (1 GB or 10K results, no card); per-GB tiers suit measured, lightweight traffic — budget list rates, not the WU40 promo
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Frequently asked questions
Can I evaluate these products without spending real money? Mostly yes. Bright Data's 5,000 requests/month free tier needs no card, and Oxylabs' one-week trial includes 1 GB (up to 10K results) without a card. Decodo shows no Site Unblocker trial but offers a 14-day money-back option, and IPRoyal shows no trial — its $1.00 minimum purchase is the practical test budget.
Which one wins a one-off 50,000-request job? On per-request list prices, IPRoyal: 50K at its $0.80 per 1K tier is $40, versus $67.50 at Bright Data ($1.50 per 1K after the free 5K). A per-GB product only beats those numbers if your pages average under roughly 80-100 KB — measure before assuming they do.
Should I size an Oxylabs plan around the WU40 discount? No. The 40% cut lasts six months, and the durable figures are the list rates of $9.40/$8.60/$7.50 per GB. Model your steady-state cost at list, and treat the promo as a bonus, not a baseline.
Will an unblocker fetch pages behind a login or paywall? That is not what these products are for, and using them that way violates the providers' terms and falls outside ProxyFacts' coverage. Unblockers are built for public pages that block automated or datacenter traffic.
For where unblockers fit in the full data-collection stack — raw proxies, unblockers, and scraping APIs — read our web scraping guide pillar.