Best Proxy Providers: How to Read Independent Tests and Run Your Own

Today's top names are in ProxyPerf's residential table (a 90-day average to October 2026 over 168,426 requests; reliability 59.8% to 99.1%, latency 721 to 2,976 ms on 2026-10-28), cross-checked with Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026 and AIMultiple's proxy benchmark. Each publishes its method, its request count and its window: ProxyPerf ranks residential and datacenter providers daily, and Proxyway reports success rates and response times for global and US residential pools. Open the table itself for the names, because the order changes with the window; confirm the top three to five with your own one-day test. Named providers with dated prices are on our residential proxy price comparison.

Independent benchmarks you can open today (method lines as each site states them; re-check them the day you read the table):

How to read the table, in four steps:

1. Read the index, then reliability: ProxyPerf's index already weights reliability 50%, download speed 25% and latency 25%; for scraping, reliability is the column to check first, and speed (Mb/s) matters mostly for large downloads.
2. Use the 90-day figure, not the 30-day one, unless you are checking a recent change.
3. Check the sample: thousands of requests and the unique IP count; a low unique IP count in the sample means the provider reuses addresses.
4. Shortlist the top three to five of your proxy type, then run the one-day test on your own target.

How to read a benchmark row:

ProxyField's figures are its own service data, not an independent test; check them with the one-day test below.

What a reliability gap is worth (1,000 requests to pages of 0.5 MB at $2.95/GB, a failed page assumed to cost as much traffic as a good one):

Each failed 0.5 MB page costs about $0.0015 of traffic, and the retry costs the same again; the bigger cost of a low rate is the pages you never get.

Signs that a "best proxies" list is built for commissions, not tests: a score out of 10 with no method; no request counts and no dates; pool sizes copied from each provider's own site; the top rank next to a coupon link. A list that earns a commission per sign-up is not wrong for that reason, but without the columns above it is an opinion, not a test. Benchmark targets are popular sites, which may not be yours, so treat any ranking as a shortlist.

You can judge a provider on your own job in an afternoon, for the price of its smallest package, with the same numbers an independent test uses:

A worked example: 1,000 pages of 0.5 MB use 0.5 GB, which costs $1.48 at $2.95/GB; at ProxyField's 99.6% success rate (according to our service data) that is 996 good pages, so about $1.48 per 1,000 successful pages. Run the same test, on the same targets at the same hour, on two or three providers and compare this last number.

On a per-GB plan, usually yes. Bytes in both directions count: request headers, any POST body, response headers and the response body, plus redirects and retries. A failed request still costs the bytes it moved.

So a block page served as full HTML, every retry and every image, script and font a browser loads count like any other traffic, while a short error response moves only a few kilobytes and a connection that times out before any data comes back moves almost none (logic: no bytes, nothing to count). As a general rule:

What that means in dollars, at $2.95/GB: 100 retries of a 2 MB block page use 200 MB, about $0.59, while 1,000 real pages of 0.5 MB use 0.5 GB, about $1.48. In Easy Trial terms, 1 GB is about 2,000 clean 0.5 MB pages, or 500 blocked 2 MB pages. Retries are where an unwatched job loses money, so cap them at two or three per URL:

On ProxyField: both directions (upload and download), including a site's error responses; a connection the gateway refuses (407, 402, 502) costs nothing What is settled: the dashboard shows real-time usage and your remaining gigabytes, and the traffic never expires, so a GB a failed job did not use stays on your balance. On ProxyField's scraper APIs, error responses, blocked and timed-out requests and internal retries are not billed. To see what you are charged on any provider:

1. Note the remaining GB in the dashboard (ProxyField's shows real-time usage and your remaining gigabytes).
2. Run a known batch, say 1,000 requests, and log the bytes of every response, blocks included.
3. Compare the dashboard's usage with your log; repeat each week, so a runaway job shows early.

To log the bytes of one request, cURL prints them itself:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{size_request} %{size_upload} %{size_header} %{size_download}\n" \
  -x gate.proxyfield.io:7000 -U "<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>" https://api.ipify.org

The four numbers are the bytes of the request headers, the request body, the response headers and the response body. Sum them over your batch. cURL counts the HTTP content, not the TLS encryption around it, so a meter that counts bytes on the wire shows slightly more.

To use fewer GB:

• Block images, fonts and media in browser tools, as the Puppeteer and Playwright guides show.
• Fetch plain HTML where the data is in the page source, and keep browsers for pages that need them.
• Cap retries at two or three per URL, with a pause between them, and run a 1,000-request batch before a big job.

If you would rather pay per result than per GB, a scraper API billed on successful results is the alternative: ProxyField's Web Scraping API costs $0.50 per 1,000 successful results over plain HTTP; to start, contact sales.

A $1/GB residential seller is good for occasional, low-volume work on sites that don't block hard: at 90% success on your target it costs $0.56 per 1,000 successful 0.5 MB pages, against $0.98 on ProxyField at the 1,000+ GB rate and $1.48 at the 1 GB Easy Trial price (99.6% success, according to our service data). On price per successful page alone, a $1/GB seller stays below ProxyField's $0.98 as long as its success on your target stays above about 51%. Named providers with dated prices are on our residential proxy price comparison; it lists providers that cost more than ProxyField at every volume it shows, so for $1/GB sellers use the shortlist below. The number to compare is the cost per 1,000 successful pages on your target, not the price per GB:

The formula: price per GB × 0.5 ÷ success rate. Measure the success rate yourself; a low per-GB price stays low only while the pages come back.

Some sellers charge less per GB than ProxyField; what ProxyField offers instead is a 1 GB entry with no minimum purchase and no subscription, traffic that never expires, and the same pool at 1 GB as at 1 TB.

How to shortlist similar cheap residential proxy providers

1. List the per-GB sellers that have no subscription and traffic that doesn't expire.
2. Compare the price at your real volume, not the "from" price at 1,000 GB.
3. Check city coverage and surcharges for your markets.
4. Buy the smallest purchase from two or three and run the one-day test on the same target at the same hour.
5. Keep the one with the lowest cost per 1,000 successful pages, not the lowest price per GB.

Cost per 1,000 successful pages on ProxyField (0.5 MB a page, the 99.6% success rate according to our service data; the formula is price per GB × 0.5 ÷ success rate):

ProxyField residential prices per GB, by the volume of one purchase:

That is cheaper than the big brands' $4/GB at every volume, for residential, with no subscription. Mobile is residential plus $0.50 in every band. The same pool serves 1 GB and 1 TB: there is no separate trial pool. More on the residential product: residential proxies.

Start from the job, not from a brand: the job decides the proxy type, and the type decides which providers are worth comparing.

More on the types: residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP and private (dedicated) proxies. The basics of how a proxy works are in What is a proxy server.

The first four decide whether a provider can do your job at all; the rest decide whether you will regret it.

1. The IP type matches your target. Residential IPs belong to home internet providers, mobile IPs to mobile carriers, datacenter IPs to hosting networks, and ISP IPs are static addresses registered to internet providers. Sites that block hard trust home and mobile networks more than hosting networks.
2. Locations at the level you need. Country targeting is standard; rank tracking, local prices and regional ads need region (state) and city targeting, and enough IPs in each city.
3. Sessions and rotation. Scraping wants a new IP on every request; logins and checkouts want one IP for the whole session. Check how long a sticky session holds one IP; for accounts that live for weeks, you need static IPs.
4. Protocols and setup. HTTP and HTTPS work in nearly every tool; SOCKS5 matters for tools that speak only SOCKS. Check both on the same plan, username and password as well as an IP allowlist, and guides for your tools. See HTTP proxies and SOCKS5 proxies.
5. The price unit and what it hides. Per GB, per IP for a term, or per successful result: compare the price at your real volume, and check expiry, subscription, surcharges and the minimum purchase (what a low price can hide).
6. How traffic is counted. Bytes in both directions, blocks and retries included on most per-GB plans (failed and blocked requests).
7. Clean IPs, not just many IPs. A clean IP has not been abused recently by someone else; count successes on your own target rather than trusting pool size.
8. Acceptable use and restricted sites. Read the policy before you buy: if your target is restricted, no plan will work.
9. Payment, verification and refunds. Check the payment methods, when identity verification is required, and the refund terms, before you pay.
10. Support that answers. Proxy problems are usually setup problems; ask a setup question before you buy and time the answer.

Up to a point. A pool needs enough IPs in your target country and city that you are not reusing the same few addresses all day; beyond that, a bigger headline number does not make a request succeed. Three things matter more than the total:

• IPs where you need them. 1 million IPs worldwide may mean a few thousand in your city. Ask for the figure in your markets.
• How the IPs are used. A pool that anyone can use for anything collects flagged IPs faster.
• Your own success rate. The only number that counts is the share of successful requests on your target.

Some providers' IPs arrive already flagged: they carry high fraud or risk scores in reputation databases because earlier users abused them. To compare providers on this:

1. Buy the smallest amount each provider allows.
2. Collect 100 to 200 exit IPs from each in your target country.
3. Look each one up in an IP reputation service and note the share with a high risk score.
4. Run the same requests to your target and count blocks, 403 and 429 responses and CAPTCHA pages.

Step 4 matters more than step 3: a site's own view of an IP decides whether you get the page. Our proxy checker confirms that proxies connect and shows their exit IP and country.

Providers restrict these categories to protect the network and the people behind the IPs: logins to banks and payment pages are where fraud happens, and abuse of a government site can get whole IP ranges blocked or reported. Restricting the categories keeps the pool usable for everyone else. ProxyField restricts some site categories to protect the network, including financial and government services.

If you need a fixed IP for your own bank or payment account, that is a different product: a VPN or your own static connection, not a shared proxy network. See Proxy vs VPN.

ProxyField's prices for each, as one reference point: residential $2.95/GB for 1 GB down to $1.95/GB from 1,000 GB; mobile $3.45/GB down to $2.45/GB; rotating datacenter $0.29/GB down to $0.22/GB; dedicated datacenter IPv4 $1.39 per IP for 30 days; dedicated ISP from $2.29 per IP for 30 days. All prices are on the pricing page.

Free proxies are good enough for a one-off test of a tool, and for little else. A 30-month study of free proxy lists ("Free Proxies Unmasked", Mehanna et al., MADWeb 2024, arXiv 2403.02445) collected over 640,600 proxies from 11 providers: only 34.5% were ever active, and 16,923 manipulated the content they served. Public lists are open to anyone: most entries are dead within hours, sites block them quickly, and you cannot tell who runs the server or what it does with traffic it can read. For any work with logins, client data or volume, pay for a provider whose terms you have read.

For business use, reliability is three things: the proxies work on your targets day after day, the provider answers when they don't, and the provider will still be there next year. You can test the first two; for the third, look at how long the provider has operated, whether its terms and acceptable use policy are published and enforced, and whether its prices and terms are stable. Keep your proxy settings in one config file, so you can switch providers in an hour, and re-run the one-day test when your success rate drops.

Using a proxy is generally lawful in the US and the EU; what you do through it is what the law looks at. Collecting public data, monitoring prices and rankings, checking ads and testing sites are common lawful uses. Pick a provider whose acceptable use policy forbids spam, fraud and attacks, because a network that allows them is one whose IPs get blocked. More: Is Web Scraping Legal?. This is not legal advice.

ProxyField sells rotating residential and mobile proxies per GB, rotating datacenter proxies per GB, and dedicated datacenter IPv4 and ISP IPs per IP for 30 days, plus scraper APIs billed on successful results. Its answers to the checklist:

• IPs and locations: 412M+ residential and 10.2M+ mobile IPs in 195+ countries and 21,000+ cities, with country, region and city targeting (locations).
• Quality: a 99.6% success rate, according to our service data. The pool is clean for Google, checked and segmented.
• Sessions: a new IP on every request, or sticky sessions from 30 s to 36 h (rotating proxies); static IPs on the per-IP products.
• Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 on one gateway; username:password or an IP whitelist; unlimited concurrent threads.
• Price: residential from $1.95/GB, cheaper than the big brands' $4/GB at every volume. No subscription, and the traffic never expires. All purchases are final.
• Testing: the Easy Trial: 1 GB for $2.95, with no minimum purchase, on the same pool as a 1 TB order.
• Payment: USDT, BTC, ETH or 10 other coins (paying with crypto); no identity verification for ordinary purchases.
• Support: 24/7 live chat, including help with setup and integration.

What it does not sell: IPv6 proxies, shared proxy lists and dedicated mobile devices. For job-by-job advice, see proxies for web scraping, SEO proxies and Instagram proxies; for Google results without running proxies, the Google SERP API.