Cloud IP blocking in 2026 — Webshare vs Supadata vs alternatives?

[belwalshubham]

Hi everyone,

We’re currently facing YouTube transcript blocking when using youtube-transcript-api from cloud environments (AWS staging/production), while the same code works perfectly on local machines.

From our investigation, this seems to be due to YouTube blocking cloud provider IPs.

We explored a few approaches and wanted to get community input on what’s working reliably in 2026:

What we tried

Direct usage (no proxy)

• Works locally
• Blocked on AWS

Webshare (residential proxies)

• Explored the free tier first
• Free plan only provides datacenter proxies (which are also blocked by YouTube)
• Residential endpoint (p.webshare.io:80) is not accessible on free tier
• Attempting to use it results in:
  • 407 Proxy Authentication Required

Managed APIs (e.g., Supadata)

• Works reliably
• No blocking issues
• But introduces external dependency + cost

Sharing the use case behind our YouTube transcript requirement for better context.

We are building a system where users can:

1. Add YouTube videos directly from a dashboard
2. Automatically fetch and store the video transcripts
3. Use these transcripts as part of a knowledge base for our RAG Chatbot

Questions

1. Are Webshare (or similar residential proxies) still reliable for production use?
2. Is Webshare better than Supadata, or are there any other better or free alternatives available?
3. Has anyone found a stable long-term proxy setup that avoids frequent blocking?
4. Are managed services like Supadata now the de-facto approach?
5. Any other approaches that are working well in 2026?

Would really appreciate insights from others running this in production.

Thanks!

[jdepoix]

Hi @belwalshubham,

Using rotating residential proxies (like those offered by Webshare) still is the most reliable and cheapest way to retrieve transcripts through youtube-transcript-api. If you don't want to faff around with proxies yourself you can use a hosted solution like Supadata, but using youtube-transcript-api + Webshare will always be cheaper, as hosted solutions will also have to pay for proxies in addition to the hosting costs etc.