We run a free proxy list, so we know its strengths and its limits better than anyone. Free proxies are great for some tasks and a poor choice for others. Here is an honest comparison to help you decide.
Where free proxies come from
Free proxies are public servers that accept connections from anyone. Some are deliberately open, many are misconfigured routers and servers, and a few are honeypots. Nobody guarantees how long they stay online. Our job is to find them, test them every minute and show you only the ones that work right now.
Reliability
- Free: a typical public proxy lives from a few minutes to a few days. Even working ones drop connections under load.
- Paid: providers promise 99%+ uptime and replace dead IPs automatically.
If your task can retry a request with another proxy, low reliability is just an inconvenience. If it cannot, it is a deal-breaker.
Speed
- Free: hundreds to thousands of milliseconds, shared with many unknown users. Sorting by latency in our list helps a lot.
- Paid: stable speed and bandwidth, often unlimited traffic.
Security
A public proxy can see the hosts you visit and any unencrypted traffic. With HTTPS sites your content stays protected, but you are still trusting an unknown operator. A paid provider is a company with a reputation, terms of service and something to lose.
Rule of thumb: never log into important accounts or pay for anything through a free proxy.
Detection and blocks
Public proxy IPs end up in blocklists quickly because thousands of people use them. Large sites — search engines, marketplaces, social networks — often show captchas or block them outright. Paid residential and mobile proxies use addresses of real home and cellular users and are much harder to distinguish from ordinary visitors.
Geography
Free proxies cluster in a handful of countries. You may find dozens in the US or Indonesia and none in a small country you need. Paid providers let you choose the country, often the city and even the mobile carrier.
Cost
Free proxies cost nothing but time: you will spend some of it finding working addresses and handling failures. Paid proxies cost money, from a few dollars a month for datacenter IPs to more for residential and mobile traffic.
When free proxies are enough
- Learning how proxies work and testing your code.
- Checking how a site looks from another country.
- Small scraping jobs on sites without strict protection.
- One-off downloads and quick experiments.
When to pay
- Production scraping with deadlines and volume.
- Working with accounts, ads or e-commerce, where a block costs money.
- Sites with strong anti-bot protection.
- Anything that handles sensitive data.
Getting the most out of free proxies
- Take proxies that were checked seconds ago, not hours ago.
- Prefer elite and SOCKS5 proxies.
- Keep a pool, rotate and retry — see the example in how to use a proxy.
- Refresh the list through our free API every few minutes.
Start with the free proxy list. If you outgrow it, the premium proxies advertised on this site are run by the same team that tests every free proxy here.