Free proxies for Craigslist are the wrong tool for posting, scraping and your account, and the Craigslist terms say why. The terms of use forbid collecting content "via robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, or any automated or manual equivalent (e.g., by hand)". They also forbid getting around moderation, and they put a price on each attempt. Looking at another city needs no proxy at all.
This page covers what Craigslist showed our server, what its terms say, how cities work, and what a free proxy puts at risk.
Do free proxies work for Craigslist?
For posting, scraping or your account, the rules decide, and they are strict. We tested no free proxy on Craigslist itself. We asked Craigslist for four pages from our server instead, on 28 September 2026. In our last pass, at 21:42 UTC, the front page sent our server to the page of the city it had placed it in. A request for New York by its address got the New York page, and the terms of use came back in full. The robots file keeps robots out of only a few paths, such as reply and flag.
In our own pool at 20:43 UTC the same day, 1,377 of the 4,862 working free proxies on ordinary addresses were labelled datacenter. That is more than one in four. Counting every entry, 83.1 percent were. Our free proxy data study looks at the whole pool over time.
Some free proxies also pass your own address on. At the same time, 975 of the 4,015 working HTTP proxies on ordinary addresses were transparent, 24.3 percent, about one in four. Counting every entry, 5.1 percent were.
What Craigslist says
We quote the Craigslist terms of use, last updated on 16 August 2019, as they read on 28 September 2026.
Software, robots and scraping
- Browsers and the app only. "Unless licensed by us in a separate written or electronic agreement, you agree not to use or provide software (except our App and general purpose web browsers and email clients) or services that interact or interoperate with CL".
- No robots. "You agree not to copy/collect CL content via robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers, crawlers, or any automated or manual equivalent (e.g., by hand)".
- No getting around protection. Nor may you "circumvent any functionality that controls access to or otherwise protects CL or the API".
Moderation and blocks
- Craigslist decides. "You agree we may moderate CL access/use in our sole discretion, e.g., by blocking, filtering, re-categorizing, re-ranking, deleting, delaying, holding, omitting, verifying, or terminating your access/license/account".
- No bypassing. You agree "not to bypass said moderation". A post that is held or omitted is moderation too, and the terms forbid getting around it.
Accounts and identity
- Honest accounts. "Misleading, unsolicited, and/or unlawful postings/communications/accounts are prohibited, as is buying or selling accounts".
What breaking the terms costs
The terms set liquidated damages, a price agreed in advance, for each kind of breach. Among them:
- "(L) requesting, viewing, or accessing more than 1,000 pages of CL in any 24-hour period - $0.25 per page during the 24 hour period after the first 1,000 pages".
- "(M) bypassing or attempting to bypass our moderation efforts - $4 per violation".
- "(H) creating a misleading or unlawful CL account or buying/selling a CL account - $4 per violation".
- "(C) misrepresenting your identity or affiliation to anyone in connection with your use of CL - $1,000 per violation".
This page gives no steps for getting past a block or moderation.
Proxies and VPNs
The terms of use never mention proxies or VPNs. They rule on what you do, not on the address you do it from.
Other cities need no proxy
One common reason to want a proxy needs none at all. When our server opened craigslist.org, it was sent to the page of its own city. Asked for New York by address, it got the New York page. City pages have their own addresses, so to browse another city, open that city's page.
Your Craigslist account is worth protecting
A Craigslist account holds your postings and your email address. A proxy is a server run by a stranger, in the middle of your traffic, and it adds no encryption of its own. Craigslist serves its pages over HTTPS, so on a clean connection your password is encrypted in transit. A hostile proxy can still present a fake certificate and hope you click past the warning.
We tested that on 28 September 2026, between 18:28 and 18:35 UTC. Through the working SOCKS5 proxies and HTTPS tunnels of our free list on ordinary addresses, we opened an encrypted connection to our own site and compared the certificate. 326 of the 801 that finished the handshake handed back a certificate that was not ours. A 2018 study of more than 107,000 listed open proxies found TLS man-in-the-middle attacks too.
- Our real certificate59%
- A certificate that was not ours41%
Never sign in through a free proxy, and never click past a certificate warning. Our guide to whether free proxies are safe covers the rest.
Where a free proxy fits, and where it does not
| What you want to do | Free proxy? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Browse another city | Not needed | A city page opens by its own address. |
| Scrape listings | No | The terms forbid robots, spiders, scripts, scrapers and crawlers. |
| Get a held or omitted post through | No | The terms forbid bypassing moderation, at $4 an attempt. |
| Run several or bought accounts | No | Misleading accounts and trading accounts are prohibited. |
| Log in | No | A hostile proxy can try to read your login. |
| Learn how a proxy works | Yes | A throwaway request, away from your accounts, costs nothing. |
Where a free proxy costs you
Anything you want to last is the wrong job for a free proxy. On ordinary addresses, more than one in four sits on a hosting network, and about one in four HTTP proxies passes your own address on. Those that worked and then stopped lasted a median 10 days, counting only addresses with fewer than 20 of them (measured 2026-09-28). That count also leaves out Amazon's networks and one June evening when our checker failed. For web tasks that have to keep running, such as checking your own site from another country, a residential proxy is the better tool. Its address belongs to a home connection, and it stays up while you work. Ours start at $0.44/GB, pay as you go, and purchased traffic has no scheduled expiry date. Paid proxy types, residential and ISP proxies among them, are compared in proxies for Craigslist and proxies for Facebook Marketplace. No proxy of any kind makes robots or bypassing moderation allowed on Craigslist.
Test any proxy before you use it
A free proxy that worked ten minutes ago may already be gone. Two things decide whether it is usable: whether it is alive, and where it actually exits. Paste any candidate into our free proxy checker, with no signup. It makes a real connection through the proxy and reports the exit address, country, latency and anonymity grade. From the command line, the same check is one request to our free checker API.
# Tests one proxy from our server: alive or dead, protocols, anonymity, latency, country
curl "https://hproxy.com/api/proxy-check?proxy=203.0.113.7:1080"
The anonymity grade matters here, since a transparent proxy passes your own address on. The full method is in how to check if a proxy is working. Our guide to when free proxies are fine draws the line between a throwaway job and a real one.
The plain answer
Free proxies for Craigslist are the wrong tool. The Craigslist terms allow a browser, the app and email, forbid robots and scrapers, forbid bypassing moderation and put a price on each breach. Another city needs no proxy: open its page. Never sign in through a free proxy. For web tasks that can fail, start with our free proxy list, and check anything you find elsewhere with the proxy checker.
How we measured
We asked craigslist.org for four pages from our server in the United States on 28 September 2026, between 21:37 and 21:42 UTC. They were the robots file, the front page, the New York page and the terms of use. That was a few requests per page, as a person would open them, and we kept the text of the last pass. We ran no test of free proxies against Craigslist. The pool figures come from one read-only query of our free proxy pool at 20:43 UTC. It counted every entry that passed its last check. Each figure leaves out addresses that held 20 or more of the entries it counts, and the figure over every entry stands next to it. The certificate test ran from the same server between 18:28 and 18:35 UTC, on the same kind of addresses, and opened only a handshake with our own site. We store no proxy addresses from these tests, and every time is in UTC.
Sources
- craigslist, terms of use, last updated 16 August 2019, read on 28 September 2026.
- craigslist, robots file, read on 28 September 2026.
- Akshaya Mani, Tavish Vaidya, David Dworken and Micah Sherr, An Extensive Evaluation of the Internet's Open Proxies, arXiv 1806.10258, 27 June 2018.
- HProxy documentation: the proxy checker API, read 28 September 2026.
