Decodo is the proxy company that called itself Smartproxy until 22 April 2025. Its contract names the operator as Data troops, UAB, a Vilnius company with 192 staff and 29.0 million euros of revenue in 2025. Tesonet, the Vilnius venture builder behind Oxylabs and Nord Security, lists Decodo in its own portfolio with the investment year 2024. The rest of this page is the record, oldest first, with the source of every date. Prices and the alternatives are on our Decodo review.
Decodo at a glance
| what the records show | |
|---|---|
| trading as | decodo.com; smartproxy.com forwards there |
| former name | Smartproxy, until 22 April 2025 |
| operator | Data troops, UAB, company code 305893779, Švitrigailos g. 34, Vilnius |
| operator registered | 8 September 2021, Lithuanian register |
| backer | Tesonet: "Investment year: 2024" on its portfolio page |
| chief executive | Vaidotas Juknys since March 2026; Vytautas Savickas before him, now CEO of the Oxylabs group |
| staff | 192 insured on 2 October 2026 |
| revenue | 29.0 million euros in 2025, net profit 0.51 million |
| trademarks | DECODO in the US (8171035, 8320804) and the EU (019104894), owned by Data troops |
| online since | December 2018: first certificate and GitHub account |
| Trustpilot | 4.3 from 1,825 reviews, archived 12 February 2026 |
We read every record on 10 October 2026 from our server in St. Louis: the Lithuanian register, the US and EU trademark offices, the RIPE network database, US court dockets, the Internet Archive, and Decodo's and Tesonet's own pages.
The story, oldest first
A solid marker is a record we read in a register, an archive or a public database. A hollow one is the company's own word, or its investor's.
Before Smartproxy: a name for sale
The name is older than the company. Verisign's registry dates smartproxy.com to 9 November 2003. In August 2008 the address showed an advertising page titled "proxy", with links about phones, ringtones and long-distance plans.
By February 2011 the page carried "© 2011 Marchex Sales, Inc." and the line "This domain may be for sale." In October 2016 it said: "The domain smartproxy.com is for sale. To purchase, call Afternic.com."
From September 2017 to November 2018 the archive shows an empty page. It does not show when the name changed hands, or for what price.
December 2018: a shop for Instagram and sneaker proxies
The proxy business appears in the first days of December 2018. The certificate logs record the first certificate for smartproxy.com on 4 December 2018. On 6 December 2018 a GitHub organisation was created. It is called Decodo today and gives Lithuania as its location.
The first archived shop page dates from 19 February 2019. Its title read "The Best Residential Proxy Network with 10M+ IPs". The products were named after what buyers used them for: Instagram proxies, sneaker proxies, and proxies for Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook and Reddit.
The prices were monthly plans. The smallest gave 5 GB for $75 a month, which is $15 a gigabyte. The largest public plan gave 100 GB for $600, or $6 a gigabyte. A refund was possible within three days.
Six years later the company described those first buyers itself. Its rename post said some began with "straightforward tasks like managing multiple social media accounts". Its About page dates the business to 2018: "Since 2018, Decodo (formerly known as Smartproxy) has been the go-to proxy and scraping solutions provider."
A contract without a company
For five years the contract did not say who was selling. The License Agreement archived on 19 July 2019 says the service "is owned and maintained by Smartproxy and its affiliated companies". The text names no registered company and no address.
The privacy policy said the same in its own way: "In all cases mentioned in this Policy Smartproxy is your personal data controller." All 20 archived versions from July 2019 to June 2021 say this, and none names a company. The affiliate terms of December 2023 and May 2024 chose the laws of England and Wales, and still named no company.
The version of the License Agreement "last updated on March 28th, 2023" kept that wording until mid-2024. The next version, "last updated on July 10th, 2024", is the first to name one: UAB "Data troops", legal entity code 305893779, Antakalnio str. 17, Vilnius. The archive holds 68 captures of that contract with differing content between July 2019 and February 2025.
A customer in those five years could not tell from the contract which company stood behind the service. Data troops itself is younger than the brand.
Data troops: the company that signs today
The Lithuanian register shows Data troops, UAB registered on 8 September 2021. It started with 2,500 euros of share capital in 100 shares, at Treniotos g. 2-12 in Vilnius. The register gives its first director only as initials. Today it shows one shareholder, a company it does not name.
Its first insured employees appear in May 2022: five on 4 May, nine on 8 May. Its first revenue is in the accounts for 2022. The company moved to Antakalnio g. 17 in January 2023 and changed its director in February 2023.
The filed accounts show revenue of 7.1 million euros in 2022, 19.0 million in 2023, 21.2 million in 2024 and 29.0 million in 2025. Net profit was 0.48 million euros in 2022, a loss of 0.47 million in 2023, then 0.33 million in 2024 and 0.51 million in 2025.
Which company sold Smartproxy from December 2018 until Data troops had staff in 2022 is not in any record we found. We list it under the questions this page cannot answer.
Growth, by its own numbers
The shop page claimed "10M+ IPs" from February 2019 to March 2020. From July 2020 the title said "40M+ IPs", and that figure stayed until mid-2023. By January 2024 the claim was "55M+ real IPs" for residential traffic and "65M+" in total.
The year 2023 brought the most new products. In its own review of that year, the company wrote: "We started the year by introducing mobile proxies." ISP proxies and a scraping product called Site Unblocker followed, and SOCKS5 arrived for residential, mobile and dedicated datacenter proxies. The same post reported "over 10K new users in 2023" and 67,273 support queries.
Prices went the other way. The smallest purchase cost $15 a gigabyte from 2019 to 2021. In January 2023 a pay-as-you-go gigabyte cost $12.50. By March 2024 it cost $7, and on 26 September 2026 it cost $4.
On 7 September 2022 the brand joined a new industry group. The Internet Infrastructure Coalition announced the Ethical Web Data Collection Initiative that day, and its release named five founding members: "Coresignal, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, Sprious, and Zyte." Decodo still calls itself "a co-founder of the EWDCI".
2024: an investor, a legal name and a new brand
Tesonet's own portfolio page lists decodo.com with "Investment year: 2024". The page gives no month and no stake size.
The paper trail of that year moves fast. On 10 July 2024 the contract named Data troops for the first time. Sixteen days later, on 26 July 2024, an application for the word mark DECODO reached the US Patent and Trademark Office. It was filed on an intent-to-use basis: for a name not yet in use.
On 13 November 2024 Data troops filed DECODO with the EU's trademark office. By December 2024 decodo.com showed a placeholder page with one word in its title: "DECODO".
On 30 January 2025 the RIPE network database received an organisation called "Data troops, UAB", with tech@smartproxy.com as its contact. On 27 March 2025 the register moved the company to Švitrigailos g. 34 in Vilnius.
The rename of 22 April 2025
Decodo's rename post went up on 22 April 2025, signed by its chief executive, Vytautas Savickas. "The transition to Decodo represents the next phase of our journey, evolving in response to the dynamic needs of our customers," he said in the press release that day. Accounts, plans and payment history moved over, and the old proxy endpoints kept working.
The post spoke of an "85K+ user base" and offered a 30% code for the month. The US trademark file records 22 April 2025 as the first use of DECODO in commerce.
Within six months the homepage claim changed more than in the four years before it. In January 2025 smartproxy.com claimed "55M+ real IPs". By July 2025 decodo.com claimed "115M+ real IPs" and 125M+ in total. No page we read explains the jump.
The old name did not stay empty. Decodo warns that "brand impersonators are operating under the Smartproxy.org name, which offers low-quality products under our former name". The registry records a transfer of smartproxy.org on 25 June 2024. On 10 October 2026 it forwarded to another site selling "SmartProxy" proxies. Decodo names smartproxy.cn as a second impostor.
Decodo today
Tesonet wrote about Decodo on 20 November 2025: "From a humble team of seven to a thriving organization of over 130 employees." The Lithuanian social insurance data shows 192 insured staff at Data troops on 2 October 2026, at an average gross salary of 4,346 euros in August 2026.
On 25 March 2026 Decodo announced a new chief executive. Vaidotas Juknys, "previously our Chief Commercial Officer", took over, and Vytautas Savickas "is moving to new ventures". The same site says Savickas "led Decodo as CEO for the better part of a decade". His new venture was next door. Oxylabs posted on the same day, 25 March 2026, that "Vytautas Savickas is becoming the CEO of Oxylabs group", while its founder, Julius Černiauskas, would become Chairman of the Board.
The trademark work finished that year. The US registered DECODO as 8171035 on 10 March 2026, and the stylised mark as 8320804 on 30 June 2026. Both list Data troops, UAB as the owner. The US file also records an ownership assignment on 9 and 10 July 2025.
Both US applications were filed by the same attorney at the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright. A docket number is the filer's own reference for a case. The one on the second application reads "OXYL.T0005US.AP1": it begins with the first four letters of Oxylabs. The file does not say why.
The customer count grew on the company's pages from "85K+" to "135K+". On 10 October 2026 the About page carried both figures: "85K+ users around the globe" in its text, and "135K+ users" lower down.
Who Decodo is connected to
| connection | what the record shows | what it does not show |
|---|---|---|
| Tesonet | its portfolio lists decodo.com, "Investment year: 2024", in Vilnius | the size of the stake |
| Oxylabs | Tesonet lists it as founded by Tesonet in 2015. Oxylabs, UAB sits at Švitrigailos g. 32, next door to Data troops at number 34. Under the same company code it was UAB "TESONET" until 2018 and Teso LT, UAB until November 2022. It co-founded the EWDCI with Smartproxy in 2022. Decodo's chief executive until March 2026, Vytautas Savickas, became CEO of the Oxylabs group that month, by Oxylabs' post of 25 March 2026 | a shared owner of the two operating companies |
| Webshare | in the same Tesonet portfolio, "Investment year: 2022", San Francisco | any link to Data troops |
| ScrapingBee | in the same Tesonet portfolio, "Investment year: 2025", Vilnius | any link to Data troops |
| Data troops, UAB | named in the contract since July 2024; owner of the DECODO trademarks; a RIPE organisation with tech@smartproxy.com | who owns it: one company, unnamed in the free register |
| the trademark filings | both US applications for DECODO were filed by one attorney at Norton Rose Fulbright; the second carries the docket number OXYL.T0005US.AP1 | why the filer's reference begins with OXYL |
| Paddle | Decodo's pricing pages: "All orders are processed by our online reseller Paddle.com which is a Merchant of Record for these orders" | anything beyond payment handling |
| Coresignal, Sprious, Zyte | fellow founders of the EWDCI in September 2022 | any ownership link |
| the hosting network | gate.decodo.com and gate.smartproxy.com use the same four addresses on network AS212238 (Datacamp Limited). Oxylabs' residential gateway uses addresses on the same network | anything: Datacamp rents to many companies |
| smartproxy.org | Decodo calls it an impersonator; the registry records a transfer in June 2024 | any link to Decodo |
Four brands a buyer might weigh against each other, Oxylabs, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Decodo, appear in one investor's portfolio. Our Webshare company page follows the brand Oxylabs bought in 2022, and our page on who owns your proxy provider maps the whole group.
Smartproxy in court filings
Decodo has not been a party to any US case we found. Its old name appears in three sets of filings.
GeoSurf, 2020. In Luminati Networks v. BI Science, a patent case in the Eastern District of Texas (2:18-cv-00483), Luminati asked BI Science how its GeoSurf service worked. BI Science's filing of 22 January 2020 lists "servers used by GeoSurf: Packetstream, Serverloft, SmartProxy, and Serversget."
The IRL app, 2024. A SoftBank fund, SVF II Aggregator (DE) LLC, sued a co-founder of the social app IRL and four others in the Northern District of California (4:23-cv-03834-YGR). Its amended complaint of 3 June 2024 alleges that bots inflated IRL's user numbers. It says many of IRL's top addresses "were associated with particular proxy service providers, known as OxyLabs and SmartProxy", and that "IRL maintained relationships with OxyLabs and SmartProxy and had been paying them for services".
The same complaint calls card charges for "Paddle" "an alternative name to SmartProxy". The defendants answered on 6 August 2024 that this "is verifiably untrue" because "Paddle is a payment processor". Decodo's own pricing pages show the link: they name Paddle as the reseller that processes its orders. Paddle's own FAQ, quoted by the defendants, says it serves "thousands of software companies around the world".
On 27 February 2025 the judge granted the defendants' motion to dismiss in part and denied it in part. The case was sent to private mediation in April 2025, and a stay was entered on 22 September 2025. The claims are against the IRL defendants; neither Smartproxy nor Oxylabs is a party.
Bright Data's patents, 2023. In Bright Data's appeals to the Federal Circuit against Code200, UAB and others, the docketed papers record Bright Data's argument that "competitors like Oxylabs, Smartproxy, and Microleaves have praised the advantages" of the technology its patents cover.
What Decodo sells today, in short
Decodo sells residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies, and scraping APIs billed per request. On 26 September 2026 one gigabyte of residential traffic cost $4 pay as you go. A 3 GB plan cost $11.25 a month, and the lowest rate was $2 a gigabyte at 1 TB a month. All prices exclude VAT.
A first purchase can be refunded within 14 days if less than 20% of the traffic, or 1 GB, has been used. Some kinds of target open only after an identity check. The full price tables, the fine print and the alternatives are on our Decodo review.
On where its addresses come from, Decodo says it works with "trusted providers, including wholesalers who acquire exit nodes from app users". It adds: "we enable users to earn money by participating in a peer-to-peer network". Users "receive earnings based on the amount of data traffic they contribute to the network, calculated in GBs." No page we read names the app.
What customers report over time
| archived | score | reviews |
|---|---|---|
| August 2021 | 4.3 | 219 |
| November 2022 | 4.7 | 781 |
| May 2024 | 4.7 | 1,211 |
| January 2025 | 4.5 | 1,481 |
| June 2025, as Decodo | 4.5 | 1,646 |
| February 2026 | 4.3 | 1,825 |
The Trustpilot score rose to 4.7 by late 2022 and held there into 2024. Since the rename it has slipped back to the 4.3 of 2021, while the number of reviews kept growing.
Is Decodo legit?
The records describe an established business. Data troops is a registered Lithuanian company that files accounts and pays social insurance for 192 people. It owns its brand in the US and the EU, and it has sold proxies under one name or the other since December 2018. The review count has grown every year we checked.
Two things are not on the record. One is which company sold Smartproxy before 2022. The other is who owns Data troops today.
If you are looking elsewhere
- If you want a provider outside the Tesonet portfolio, leave Oxylabs, Webshare and ScrapingBee off the list too. HProxy is not part of any proxy or VPN group. The Decodo review prices five other networks side by side.
- If you buy small amounts, Decodo's pay-as-you-go wallet credits can expire after twelve months without use. HProxy sells $0.50/GB for one gigabyte of Lite with no plan, and the balance never expires.
- If you want to test before you pay, our free proxy checker tests HTTP and SOCKS proxies from any provider, with no sign-up.
What we could not find out
- Who sold Smartproxy from December 2018 to 2022. No contract version of those years names a company, and Data troops had no staff before May 2022.
- Who owns Data troops. The free register shows one corporate shareholder without a name. Tesonet's page shows an investment year, not a stake.
- Who filed the first DECODO application. The US file records an ownership assignment on 9 and 10 July 2025; the assignor is not on the status page.
- What the OXYL in the second filing stands for. Only the filer can say what its docket number OXYL.T0005US.AP1 refers to.
- Why the residential claim doubled. From 55M+ in January 2025 to 115M+ in July 2025, with no explanation on the pages we read.
- Which app pays the peer-to-peer users that Decodo's sourcing page mentions.
We bought nothing and tested no Decodo proxy: our rule is to read and never to buy. Prices, staff numbers and claims change fast. This page is due for a new check by 10 January 2027.
Sources
- Lithuanian register via rekvizitai.vz.lt: Data troops, UAB (305893779) and Oxylabs, UAB (302166536), company data, change history, filed accounts and insured staff. Read 10 October 2026.
- Tesonet: portfolio page, and "Decodo's Next Chapter: Evolution, not revolution", 20 November 2025. Read 10 October 2026.
- Decodo: License Agreement, sourcing page, security and compliance page, About page, "Smartproxy is now Decodo" (22 April 2025), "Decodo's New CEO: Vaidotas Juknys Takes the Lead" (25 March 2026), "Decodo's Year in Review 2023" (10 January 2024). Read 10 October 2026.
- Internet Archive: smartproxy.com from 2008 to 2025 (homepage, License Agreement, privacy policy, affiliate terms, residential pricing), decodo.com from 2024 to 2026, and the Trustpilot pages of both. Read 10 October 2026.
- Oxylabs, "Oxylabs Group Evolves Its Leadership Structure to Accelerate the Next Decade", 25 March 2026. Read 10 October 2026.
- US Patent and Trademark Office: DECODO, serial 98668585 (registration 8171035) and serial 99175577 (registration 8320804), status pages with the attorney records and the prosecution history. Read 10 October 2026.
- European Union Intellectual Property Office: trademark 019104894. Read 10 October 2026.
- RIPE database: organisation ORG-DTU2-RIPE. Read 10 October 2026.
- Verisign and Public Interest Registry records for smartproxy.com and smartproxy.org; certificate logs (crt.sh); GitHub organisation record. Read 10 October 2026.
- Internet Infrastructure Coalition, "The i2Coalition Launches Initiative to Promote Public Data Aggregation Industry Best Practices", 7 September 2022. Read 10 October 2026.
- US courts, through CourtListener: Luminati Networks v. BI Science (E.D. Tex. 2:18-cv-00483); SVF II Aggregator (DE) LLC v. Shafi (N.D. Cal. 4:23-cv-03834-YGR), amended complaint of 3 June 2024, motion to dismiss of 6 August 2024 and the docket; Bright Data v. Code200, UAB (Fed. Cir. 23-2144 and related). Read 10 October 2026.
- Our own checks from the box: DNS and network owner of gate.decodo.com, gate.smartproxy.com and pr.oxylabs.io; the status of smartproxy.org. 10 October 2026.
