Smartproxy Is Decodo Now. Every Proxy Vendor Will Follow.
Smartproxy rebranded as Decodo in April 2025 with AI parsers and scraping APIs bolted onto its bandwidth business. Same pattern visible at Oxylabs (Web Unblocker), Bright Data (Browser.ai), NetNut. Margin pressure on raw GB pricing forces the pivot.
In April 2025, Smartproxy rebranded as Decodo. The infrastructure did not change — the residential and mobile proxy networks are the same. What changed was the positioning. Decodo launched with a “Universal Scraper” AI parser and a bundled scraping API alongside the proxy product, recasting the company from a bandwidth seller to a scraping platform.
The pivot is not unique. The same pattern is visible at every proxy vendor with significant scale.
Oxylabs launched its Web Unblocker product line as a value-add on top of residential proxies. Bright Data’s $100mn Browser.ai / Deep Lookup suite is the same move at a much larger scale. NetNut, Soax, and the smaller residential proxy players have all added scraping APIs or AI parsers in the last twelve months.
The reason is straightforward: raw GB pricing on residential proxies is under sustained margin pressure, and the only durable defense is to climb upstack into products with better unit economics.
What the rebrand actually does
The Decodo product surface in 2026 covers three distinct things: residential and mobile proxies (the inherited business), a scraping API that handles JS rendering and anti-bot bypass on top of the proxy network, and the Universal Scraper AI parser that returns structured data from arbitrary URLs.
The pricing reflects the upstack move. Raw residential bandwidth is priced per GB, with rates broadly comparable to Oxylabs and the rest of the residential market. The scraping API is priced per successful request, similar to ZenRows or ScrapingBee. The Universal Scraper is priced per record, similar to Firecrawl’s structured-extraction tier.
A customer who previously bought GB of residential proxy from Smartproxy can now buy the same GB from Decodo, but they can also buy the higher-margin scraping API and AI parser without leaving the vendor. The unit economics on the bundled customer are dramatically better than on the GB-only customer, and the cross-sell is easier than acquiring a new logo.
Why the bandwidth business is squeezed
Two structural pressures drive every proxy vendor toward this move.
The first is supply-side. Residential bandwidth has a clear cost floor — paying compensation to network participants — and a finite ceiling on what publishers will pay before they switch to alternatives. Datacenter proxies undercut residential on price for any target that does not specifically detect them. Mobile proxies are higher-margin but harder to scale. The middle of the residential market is where most of the volume is, and where the margin is thinnest.
The second is demand-side. The buyers of pure GB proxies are increasingly sophisticated scraping operations that already have engineering capacity, can negotiate volume discounts, and can switch vendors with low friction. The buyers of scraping APIs and AI parsers are less sophisticated, more numerous, and stickier — exactly the customer profile that supports better unit economics.
Both pressures point in the same direction: stop selling commodity bandwidth, start selling the outcome. Decodo’s rebrand is the cleanest articulation of that thesis at a mid-tier vendor.
What the pricing math actually looks like
Public pricing across the major proxy and scraping vendors as of Q1 2026:
- Bright Data Web Unlocker: ~$3.00 per 1,000 successful requests
- Bright Data residential: $5.88–$10.50/GB standard, PAYG from $0.60/GB, enterprise from $0.42/GB
- Oxylabs Web Unblocker: $9.40/GB; residential $10/GB premium
- ScrapingBee Freelance: $49/month
- ZenRows: $69/month for 10,000 protected results (~$6.90 per 1,000)
- ScraperAPI: $299/month for 600,000 e-commerce requests (~$0.50 per 1,000)
- Apify PPE actors: typically $0.0015–$0.01 per result (per Q1 2026 Store data)
The spread between vendors on equivalent products is wide — 3x to 10x in places. That spread reflects two things: real differences in success rate against anti-bot stacks, and accumulated brand pricing power. It does not reflect commodity pricing dynamics, because the products are not commodities. The proxy itself is closer to a commodity, but the bundled stack — proxy plus unblocker plus AI parser — is differentiated enough that vendors can sustain the spread.
The downward pressure on raw GB pricing has not yet flowed through to the bundled-stack pricing. It will. As the AI parser and scraping API segments mature, comparable products from competing vendors will erode the differentiation, and the headline prices will come down. Decodo’s launch is the start of that pricing race, not the end of it.
The bundled-stack threat to actor margins
For Apify Store publishers, the proxy-vendor pivot has both threats and opportunities.
The threat: vendors that ship strong AI parsers compete directly with high-quality Apify Actors at the per-record level. A buyer who needs structured extraction from arbitrary e-commerce URLs can use Decodo Universal Scraper or Bright Data Browser.ai instead of finding the right Apify Actor. The Actor wins on target-specificity (better extraction quality on a known target) but loses on generality.
The opportunity: every Actor publisher is now a buyer of proxy infrastructure. As the proxy market commoditizes and the bundled-stack pricing comes under pressure, the marginal cost of running an Actor goes down. Publishers who pass the savings through to PPE pricing will gain share against publishers who do not. Publishers who use the savings to invest in better extraction quality (cleaner schemas, higher success rates, faster runs) will gain share against publishers who do not.
The longer-term question is whether the Apify Store position holds against the bundled-stack vendors. Apify’s core thesis is that target-specific Actors with deep schema understanding beat generic AI parsers on extraction quality. That thesis is true now. Whether it stays true as multimodal frontier models close the extraction-quality gap will be answered in the next twelve months of Universal Scraper and Browser.ai shipping cycles.
For now, Decodo is the cleanest case study of how a mid-tier proxy vendor moves upstack to defend margins. The pattern is replicable, and most of the market will replicate it within the year.
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