Byteful

Unblock the web. Ethical proxy infrastructure for AI agents and web scrapers.

[Byteful @byteful]

Full eligibility and the application forms: https://t.co/GN6lVX3LxU

[Byteful @byteful]

The Byteful Startup Program is live🚀

Free residential data for three months, then up to 50% off for two years. Three tiers for bootstrapped, VC or accelerator backed, and Y Combinator companies.

Plus a Slack channel with a senior Byteful developer.

[Byteful @byteful]

Ten questions worth asking any proxy provider before you buy 📋

How are they billing you, and what counts?
Does unused data expire?
How long does a sticky session really last?
What is the P95, not the average?
When a request fails, are you told why?

Five more in the carousel.

[Byteful @byteful]

A scraping job that works at 100 requests does not automatically work at 100,000 📋

1️⃣ Data consumption at volume
2️⃣ Your timeout
3️⃣ Your concurrency ceiling
4️⃣ Retry strategy, with backoff
5️⃣ Whether you can tell why something failed

[Byteful @byteful]

Full details: https://t.co/352Zb0s8vw

[Byteful @byteful]

Introducing TCP/IP Fingerprint Emulation, now live in beta on datacenter and ISP proxies!

Your browser says Windows. Does the TCP handshake agree? 💻

Windows, macOS, Linux, Android or iOS, set per request in your proxy username or once when you export your list.

[Zyte @zytedata]

Your TCP handshake can give away which OS you run, whatever your User-Agent says. Joe Dye of @byteful takes #ExtractSummit2026 down to the packets. #WebScraping #Proxies

[Byteful @byteful]

Day two of @zytedata's Extract Summit is underway, and Byteful is here in Austin, Texas!

Today at 12:00pm, our founding engineer Joe Dye takes the stage at Brazos Hall for a talk on TCP/IP fingerprint emulation🫆

Come and say hello before or after👋

[Byteful @byteful]

Byteful accounts now support organizations 👥

A shared workspace for your team with its own proxies, billing and API keys. Each member gets a role, so no more sharing one password.

API keys can be scoped to specific actions with an expiry date, which is what you want when an agent holds the key.

[Byteful @byteful]

We've extended this window by one hour, to midday BST today⏰ This change is to ensure as minimal disruption as possible to our API.

Proxy network services remain unaffected during the window.

[Byteful @byteful]

Scheduled maintenance from 9 to 11am BST today 🛠

During this window, API services will be intermittently accessible and the dashboard may be temporarily unavailable. Existing proxies will continue to work as normal.

Live status: https://t.co/siBVN7zPF3

[Byteful @byteful]

Unlimited concurrent sessions means there is no concurrency tier to buy 🔓

No plan-level cap to hit, no upgrade to reach for. You pay for data or for IPs, not for how many requests run at once.

Fair usage safeguards still exist for traffic that threatens stability. Rarely triggered.

[Byteful @byteful]

Smartpath decides in under 10ms whether a request actually needs a residential IP.

If it does, it uses residential. If it does not, the request can go through datacenter instead without consuming residential data.

Most request latency comes after that routing decision.

[Byteful @byteful]

SOCKS5 has been standardised since 1996 and defines three commands 🔌

CONNECT for TCP. BIND when the client needs to accept a connection back. UDP ASSOCIATE for UDP datagrams.

It can also pass a hostname to the proxy for proxy-side DNS resolution instead of resolving locally.

[Byteful @byteful]

OS Targeting is live on residential and mobile proxies 💻

Route your traffic through a Windows, Linux or Android device. Add os_windows, os_linux or os_android to your username, or pick it in the dashboard.

Live IP counts per OS, same as the location filters.

[Byteful @byteful]

Every response carries its own debugging trail 🔎

A Byteful status code for what happened, and a request ID you can search in the live activity viewer to pull up the request details.

For HTTPS we can't surface the target's own status code. TLS keeps it encrypted, so you get the failure we observed.

[Byteful @byteful]

More precise targeting isn't always better 🎯

Country-level targeting gives you a broader pool. Add city, state, ZIP or ASN filters and you further limit the eligible IPs.

Our docs recommend country unless you specifically need city, and leaving ASN off unless you need a particular network or carrier.

[Byteful @byteful]

HTTP and SOCKS5 proxy traffic differently 🔌

HTTP proxying is built around web traffic. SOCKS5 is application-agnostic, relaying TCP and, where supported, UDP too.

That opens up DNS, streaming, gaming and other real-time workflows.

[Byteful @byteful]

Byteful is now EWDCI Certified🛡

The Trust Seal goes to web data companies that pass a formal review against the initiative's Core Principles: transparency, data handling, privacy safeguards, accountability.

There is a difference between saying this ourselves and having it independently confirmed.

[Byteful @byteful]

Your timeout is probably set off the wrong number ⏱

Average response time tells you very little about the slow end of your traffic.

Use your P95 as a starting point instead: 95% of responses complete within it.

Ours is 810ms against a 410ms average. Proxyway 2026.