The shape of AI data collection
Training data collection is different from most scraping. You fetch enormous numbers of pages from a huge variety of sites, you rarely care where the IP is, and cost per GB matters more than anything else. You also face growing scrutiny over how data was collected. Our AI training data proxies guide covers the background.
Rayobyte has products aimed squarely at this, and its ethics stance helps with the scrutiny.
Products for each layer
| Layer | Product | Rough price |
|---|---|---|
| Open, lenient sources | Rotating datacenter | $0.30 per GB PAYG, about 1 cent on monthly plans |
| Broad crawl of sites that block datacenter | Scale Residential | $0.015 to $0.0095 per GB on monthly plans |
| Location-specific or local-language sources | Premium Residential | $3.50 to $0.70 per GB |
| Hard pages that need browsers | Scraping API | $1.80 per 1,000 successful requests self-serve |
| Interactive sources | rayobrowse | Browser hours |
Why Scale Residential fits AI work
Scale Residential is residential traffic without targeting, sold on monthly plans for verified businesses. A $1,500 plan includes 136,000 GB, about 1.1 cents per GB, with 1,500 concurrent requests. For broad crawls where you need residential trust but not location, nothing else in Rayobyte's catalog comes close on price. It requires a compliance review, which for AI teams is a feature: it documents that your collection was vetted.
Sizing by concurrency
On Scale Residential, concurrency is one request per dollar of plan, and it's usually the binding limit. With 1,500 concurrent requests and an average response of 3 seconds, you fetch about 500 pages a second, roughly 43 million pages a day. At 100 KB of HTML per page that's around 4.3 TB a day, which would exhaust 136,000 GB in about a month. Measure your real numbers and size the plan accordingly. See concurrency and threads.
Residential tip: Before scaling, run a short pilot with Rayobyte on your real targets and record success rate, latency and GB per result. Our our complete Rayobyte guide explains which Rayobyte product fits which job.
Keep it efficient
- Fetch HTML only. Skip images, scripts and styles unless your dataset needs them.
- Deduplicate URLs before fetching, and normalize them.
- Use sitemaps and feeds for discovery instead of crawling every link.
- Store compressed raw pages with metadata so you can reprocess without refetching.
- Route by domain: datacenter first, Scale Residential when blocked, Scraping API for the stubborn few.
Governance and ethics
AI data collection is under legal and public scrutiny. Good practice includes:
- Respect opt-outs such as robots rules and AI-specific directives where sites publish them.
- Avoid personal data you don't need, and filter it out when you do collect it.
- Keep provenance records: URL, time, collection method.
- Use an ethically sourced proxy network. Rayobyte says its residential IPs are opted in with a visible opt-out, it blocks sensitive categories, and it is EWDCI certified. See how Rayobyte sources residential IPs.
Our ethical web scraping guide goes further.
Location-specific data
Some datasets need local content: regional news, local-language sites, country-specific catalogs. Use Premium Residential with country targeting for those sources only, and keep the bulk on cheaper products.
Proxy tip: If your residential usage goes up and down, compare Geonode: its per-GB residential bandwidth doesn't expire, so you only pay for what you use. See Geonode for AI training data.
How it compares
Geonode offers unlimited residential plans priced by port speed and a suite of scraping APIs (Scraper, Map, Crawl, Search); Webshare offers cheap datacenter lists and rotating residential. See Rayobyte vs Geonode for AI training data, Rayobyte vs Webshare for AI training data and all three.
If you're still shortlisting, compare these options with the wider market in our best proxies guide, and use our cheap proxies guide to estimate a sensible budget.
Budget tip: If you want a cheap proxy to try this with, Webshare has a free plan with 10 datacenter proxies and 1 GB of bandwidth a month, no card required. Paid lists let you pick proxy count, bandwidth and location. See Webshare for AI training data.
Key takeaways
- Use rotating datacenter for open sources and Scale Residential for broad crawls that need residential trust.
- Scale Residential costs about 1 to 1.5 cents per GB; concurrency is the real limit.
- Fetch only what you need, deduplicate and keep provenance.
- Ethical sourcing and a compliance review help with data governance.
FAQ
Which Rayobyte product is cheapest for AI crawling?
Rotating datacenter on monthly plans for lenient sites, and Scale Residential for sites that need residential IPs.
Do I need geo-targeting for AI data?
Usually not. Use Premium Residential only for location-specific sources.
How do I get approved for Scale Residential?
Apply in the dashboard and complete the compliance review, explaining your company, data sources and use. Test on Premium Residential meanwhile.
Editorial note: Proxy providers change their pools, features and prices often, so treat any figures here as typical ranges at the time of writing and confirm current terms with the provider before you buy.