The Free Proxy List Graveyard: GatherProxy, Samair, and the Sites That Died

There was a ritual to it. You needed a proxy, so you opened a free proxy list bookmark, GatherProxy or Samair or one of the names everyone traded in forums, and you copied a fresh IP into your scraper or your browser. Plenty were dead on arrival, but enough worked that the habit stuck for years.

Open those same bookmarks today and most of them are gone. Some redirect to a parked domain. Some load a page nobody has touched since the last decade. A few were quietly bought, rebranded, and pointed at a paid product. The free proxy list scene had its golden age, and a lot of the landmarks are now headstones. This is a walk through that graveyard: which sites died, which are technically still breathing, and why free proxy list sites keep dying in the first place.

What happened to the old free proxy list sites?

Most of the classic free proxy list sites either went dark or pivoted to paid. GatherProxy's tool stopped being updated, Samair rebranded into the premium PremProxy, and HideMyAss dropped its free proxy for a paid VPN. The ones still standing, like Spys.one, survived by automating constant re-verification.

The pattern is consistent once you look for it. Running a free list is a maintenance job that never ends, and most owners either lost the appetite or found a way to charge money instead.

The graveyard, name by name

GatherProxy

For a long stretch, GatherProxy (gatherproxy.com) was the default answer when someone asked where to get free proxies. It was more organized than most, sortable by country and port, and it shipped a companion scraper tool so you could pull the list straight into a script. The email wall was always a mild annoyance, but people tolerated it because the list was worth it.

That tool has not seen an update in years, and the original site drifted into the zone where it half loads, asks for an email, and hands back a list that is mostly stale. The clearest tell is what grew in its place: lookalike domains and clones that borrow the GatherProxy name to catch the leftover search traffic. When a brand gets impersonated instead of maintained, it has gone dark.

Samair (now PremProxy)

Samair (samair.ru) is one of the oldest names in the scene, with roots going back to around 2001. For years its free list was a staple. It did not so much die as move out. The project consolidated under PremProxy (premproxy.com) and leaned toward a paid service. PremProxy is still online, but the free, no-strings samair.ru list people remember is retired. It is a common ending here: the free list was the on-ramp, and the paid product became the destination.

HideMyAss

HideMyAss ran one of the best-known free web proxies of its era, with a curated free proxy list alongside it. As the company went all-in on a paid VPN, those pieces were wound down: the browser extension was pulled from the Chrome Web Store in 2022, and the curated free list is gone. The hosted web proxy itself still lingers, but the brand is no longer a free proxy-list source, and what that web proxy quietly logs is its own story, which we took apart in our HideMyAss free proxy piece.

ProxyFire, FreeProxyLists, and the long tail

Plenty of smaller names went quiet with no announcement at all. ProxyFire was a proxy checker and community that faded years ago. FreeProxyLists (freeproxylists.net) still gets name-dropped in old roundups, but it stopped being something anyone relies on. Xroxy, Cool-Proxy, and a dozen forum-traded lists followed the same arc: active, then intermittent, then a domain that may or may not resolve. If you have not heard a site mentioned in a while, that silence is usually the answer.

The walking wounded

Spys.one

Spys.one (formerly spys.ru) is the survivor everyone loves to hate. Yes, it is still online and still updates, with tens of thousands of proxies across well over a hundred countries, but it is barely worth the friction. The catch is the experience. The interface is famously cluttered, the ports are hidden behind JavaScript so you cannot copy them cleanly, and the proxies are shared and unstable, with uptime that averages around 70 percent. It survived by never really changing, which is both its charm and its problem.

Why free proxy list sites keep dying

Strip away the individual stories and the same handful of causes show up every time.

1. Free proxies are shared and short-lived. An IP that works this minute can be dead in an hour, blocklisted by lunch, and back online tomorrow. A list is only useful if it tracks that churn, and most do not.
2. Verification never stops. Publishing a list is easy. Re-checking hundreds of thousands of IPs around the clock, forever, is a real engineering job with a real server bill and no glamour attached.
3. The ad-supported model decays. Traffic without revenue means the owner loses interest, the checker breaks, and nobody fixes it. The list keeps serving, it just stops being true.
4. Abuse burns the well. Free proxies attract scrapers and spam, ranges get blocklisted, and the site becomes a liability its owner would rather not carry.
5. Paid is the exit. Sites with commercial ambition treat the free list as a funnel. When it stops converting, the free list gets quietly dropped in favor of a VPN or a paid-proxy plan.

Our own numbers back this up. In our free proxy data study we tracked how fast free proxies decay, and the short version is that a list which is not re-checked constantly is wrong within minutes, not days.

The ones that survived (and what they did right)

The sites still standing in 2026 share one trait, and it is not their design. The survivors are the ones that automated verification and never stopped, testing their proxies on a tight loop rather than publishing a static dump. A newer wave of GitHub-hosted lists refreshes every few minutes and posts the results in public, which keeps them honest. That is the whole trick. A list is a living thing or it is a fossil, with no middle ground.

Free proxies still have real uses, and they are not always the wrong call. We wrote about when free proxies are fine for the cases where cost matters more than reliability. The mistake is expecting a list nobody maintains to behave like one somebody does.

A free proxy list that still works

This is where the graveyard tour has a point. We run a free proxy list that is re-checked every few minutes, not every few months. Dead entries fall off, fresh ones come on, and what you copy is what was alive moments ago instead of whatever a scraper grabbed in 2019.

If you already have proxies from somewhere else, including scraps from one of the sites above, drop them into our proxy checker and see which ones still breathe before you trust them. And if you used to pipe the old GatherProxy tool into a script, our free proxy API is the modern replacement: the same live list, served straight to your code.

The old landmarks are not coming back. The good news is that the thing they were good at, a fresh list you can actually use, is not hard to find once you accept that constant verification is the only feature that matters. Bookmark a list that still gets checked, and you can stop refreshing headstones.