Data study

Four scraping APIs, converted to one number: dollars per 1,000 requests. The range runs from $0.0749 to $3.75, and on one vendor both ends of a 25x spread sit inside the same $30 plan.

We re-verified all 20 residential proxy vendors we track against their own pricing pages on 10 August 2026, one week after the first capture. Four of our records were wrong, and one of them was wrong in the direction that suited us.

We re-read the residential pricing page of 20 proxy vendors on 10 August 2026. Eight were running a discount. One of the eight published an end date.

A headless browser downloads the whole page. Behind a residential proxy that is billed by the gigabyte, and at 6.54 MB per protected page fetch the meter runs faster than most teams budget for.

Our engine has verified 580,000 free proxies 110 million times across 110 source lists. Most never worked, the best source has a 40% hit rate, the worst 0.19%.

We checked what 16 residential proxy providers advertise against what they charge a new customer with no commitment. The median gap is 2.5x. The widest is 20x.

Residential proxies are resold consumer bandwidth. We checked what the apps buying that bandwidth pay per GB, against what providers charge for it.

Scraping APIs bill in credits, and one request can cost 1 credit or 75. We read the credit tables at ScrapingBee, ZenRows and ScraperAPI and did the arithmetic.

Free proxy data study: across 580,000 free proxies and 110 million checks, how many actually work, how fast they die, their protocol mix, and where they live.