Which US residential proxies are worth paying for? Test them in 1 GB
A US residential proxy is worth paying for when it passes your own target on three numbers you set in advance: the share of normal pages, the exit location and the response time. With ProxyField you measure all three with the Easy Trial, 1 GB for $2.95 on the same pool as a 1 TB order. Our 99.6% success rate and about 400 ms average response, according to our service data, are not an outside benchmark, so this test is how you check them.
| Number to collect | How you measure it | Pass mark you set first |
|---|---|---|
| Share of normal pages | 100 requests to your target; count 200 replies with the content you expect | for example 95 of 100 |
| Exit location | an IP lookup through a city line, checked in an IP geolocation database | the US state or city you set |
| Response time | cURL's %{time_total} on the same requests | for example under 1 s (our figure: under 1 s typical for residential, according to our service data) |
The test, step by step
- Write down your pass mark before you start, for example "95 of 100 normal pages, exit in New York, under 1 s". The result then decides, not a sales page, ours included.
- Buy the Easy Trial (1 GB for $2.95, mobile $3.45). Access opens once the payment is confirmed; the gateway is
gate.proxyfield.io:7000. - Count normal pages. Run 100 requests to a page you really need:You see one line per status, such as
for i in $(seq 1 100); do curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" --max-time 30 \ -x gate.proxyfield.io:7000 -U "<login>-country-us:<password>" \ "https://your-target.example/page" done | sort | uniq -c96 200and4 403;000is cURL's code for no response (a timeout or a failed connection). Open a few200pages and check they hold your content, not a block page. - Check the location.
curl -x gate.proxyfield.io:7000 -U "<login>-country-us-city-new_york:<password>" https://api.ipify.orgprints one IPv4 address; look it up in an IP geolocation database. You should see a US IP in or near the city you set. - Check IP quality. Look 20 to 50 exit IPs up in an IP reputation service such as IPQualityScore and note the share with a high fraud score; your target's own answer in step 3 still counts more.
- Time the responses. Replace
%{http_code}with%{time_total}in step 3 and compare the times with your pass mark. - Hold a session. Add
-session-<id>-ttl-<seconds>(30 to 129,600 seconds, 20 minutes by default) and confirm the IP stays the same for as long as your task needs, as in<login>-country-us-region-new_york-city-new_york-session-he9f2qga-ttl-600. An IP idle for 120 s gets a new IP.
100 requests to pages of 500 KB are about 50 MB, so the test uses about 5% of the Easy Trial.
What reliability costs: price per 1,000 usable pages
Your measured share of normal pages turns the per-GB price into the price of a page you can use. At 500 KB per page, 1 GB is about 2,000 pages:
| Purchase | Price per GB | Per 1,000 pages fetched | If 95 of 100 are normal | If 80 of 100 are normal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy Trial, 1 GB | $2.95 | $1.48 | $1.55 | $1.84 |
| 100 GB | $2.49 | $1.25 | $1.31 | $1.56 |
| 1,000 GB | $1.95 | $0.98 | $1.03 | $1.22 |
The formula: price per GB ÷ pages per GB ÷ share of normal pages × 1,000. Put in your own page size and your own share from step 3.
What else makes a US provider worth paying for
| Check | ProxyField |
|---|---|
| Can you test small? | Yes: the Easy Trial is 1 GB for $2.95, no minimum purchase, same pool as 1 TB |
| Does unused traffic expire? | No: traffic never expires; all purchases are final |
| Subscription or auto-renewal? | None: you pay per GB when you need it |
| US targeting | Country, region (state), city; all 50 states and 2,800+ cities |
| Sessions | New IP per request, or sticky from 30 s to 36 h |
| Failover | If a node slows down, traffic automatically moves to the next one. |
| The pool is clean for Google, checked and segmented. | |
| Help | 24/7 live chat, including help with setup and integration |
| Price | $2.95/GB down to $1.95/GB, cheaper than the big brands' $4/GB at every volume, for residential |
Not offered: ZIP or ASN targeting, dedicated mobile devices or ports (mobile is sold per GB), refunds (in return, the traffic never expires) and a free plan. The entry is the Easy Trial, 1 GB for $2.95.