United gave the cleanest result in our whole travel test, and the cleanest kind of bad: of 120 free proxies, not one connected. We run a free proxy list and a verification engine, so this is measured rather than asserted, and zero of 120 is as unambiguous as a number gets. This is the short, stark version; the paid setup is in proxies for United.
We pointed 120 free proxies at United
On 24 August 2026, as part of a wider travel-site test, we took 120 HTTP proxies from our own free proxy list, each verified alive minutes earlier, and asked every one for a united.com page.
Not one of the 120 completed the request. Zero reached the site, and unlike the sites that answered with a visible challenge, United's failures were all connection failures, the request never completing at all.
120 free proxies asked for a united.com page
- 0
- Reached the site
- 0
- Visible bot challenge
- 120
- Failed to connect
of 120
every one
Source: HProxy, 120 HTTP proxies from our own free list, measured 2026-08-24
Why zero, stated honestly
We will not over-explain a result we can only partly attribute. A proxied request can fail because the proxy is dead, or because the site refuses the connection at the network edge before anything is served, and from the outside those two look the same. What our test shows is that all 120 free proxies failed to complete a united.com request. Most free proxies die between the liveness check and the use, which is the ordinary cost of free and enough on its own to explain a lot of failures; United may also refuse proxied connections more readily than a lighter site. The honest statement is the measured one: no free proxy in our sample got a United page, and we do not claim to know the exact split of causes.
Either way, the practical answer is the same. Free proxies did nothing against United, which makes it the starkest case in the test for why the free tier does not do travel data.
United against Delta, for contrast
The contrast with United's closest sibling is instructive. In the same test, Delta let fourteen of 120 free proxies reach a page, though that page was a JavaScript shell without fares. United let zero even connect. Both airlines render their fares client-side, so neither returns prices to a plain fetch, but United's front door was fully closed to the free pool while Delta's was merely permissive to a page with nothing useful on it. Neither is a free-scraping win; United is just the more complete failure.
The free pool behind the result
The connection failures are the pool. Our free proxy data study, from 129M checks across 590K tracked proxies, finds the working free pool overwhelmingly on cloud networks, a few thousand alive at any moment and turning over constantly. Against United, that pool produced not one completed request.
What free proxies are genuinely good for here
Against United specifically, the honest answer is almost nothing, given the zero-of-120 result. Free proxies remain fine for what they are always fine for elsewhere, a throwaway check of whether a site loads or a parser test against a saved page, but United did not even give them that in our test. Check any candidate with our free proxy checker before relying on it, and read are free proxies safe before routing anything real through one.
Free versus paid for United
| What you are trying to do | Free proxy | Paid residential + browser |
|---|---|---|
| Connect to united.com at all | No, 0 of 120 in our test | Yes |
| Read the actual fares | No, and cannot connect anyway | Yes, browser renders them |
| Track dynamic price movement | No | Yes, stable pool, frequent reads |
| Cost | $0 plus your time | From $0.44/GB, pay as you go |
When the job outgrows free
On United, free is not a starting point at all; it produced nothing. Reading United fares needs a residential address the site accepts, behind a real browser to render the client-side fares, and a pool wide enough to read the dynamic prices often. Ours are $0.44/GB, pay as you go, no KYC and no expiring balance, so a test run costs cents. The setup is in proxies for United, and the wider picture is in free proxies versus travel sites.
Sources
- HProxy travel-site test, measured 24 August 2026: 120 HTTP proxies from our own free proxy list, one united.com page each, 0 reaching the site, 0 visibly challenged, 120 failing to complete the request. Method in free proxies versus travel sites.
- HProxy, free proxy data study, for pool size, composition and lifetimes.
- HProxy, proxies for United, for the paid setup and the client-side fares.