Shifter is a straightforward comparison on price and a more interesting one on everything else. It sells residential and static ISP proxies as monthly subscriptions, it is actively trading, and it is the rebranded Microleaves, which gives it a sourcing history worth understanding before you send traffic through it.
Is HProxy a good Shifter alternative?
On both axes, for most buyers. HProxy residential is a flat $0.50/GB bought as credit you top up, against Shifter's $1/GB on a $50 monthly plan. That is twice the rate, and the bigger practical difference is that ours is a purchase and theirs is a subscription.
Where Shifter earns consideration is breadth of static ISP inventory and a long operating history, with the caveat that the history is the complicated part.
The short version
- Price: HProxy is a flat $0.50/GB pay as you go. Shifter's residential entry is $1/GB on a $50/month plan, roughly twice ours.
- No pay as you go at all. Every Shifter tier is a monthly plan with an included allowance. A quiet month still costs the subscription.
- An advertised rate you cannot buy. Shifter markets static ISP from $1/IP. That figure appears on no published tier; the cheapest real one is $1.68/IP.
- Sourcing history: Shifter.io is the rebranded Microleaves, whose IPs were historically sourced through pay-per-install bundling.
Shifter pricing vs HProxy: the part that decides it
Shifter's residential ladder is a set of monthly buckets. You are buying an allowance, not gigabytes.
Shifter residential plans against our flat rate
| Plan | Monthly | Included | Effective $/GB | HProxy $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $50 | 50 GB | $1/GB | $0.50/GB |
| Basic | $100 | 100 GB | $1.00/GB | $0.50/GB |
| Business | $149 | 200 GB | $0.75/GB | $0.50/GB |
| Growth | $299 | 400 GB | $0.75/GB | $0.50/GB |
| Pay as you go | none offered | n/a | not available | $0.50/GB |
shifter.io pricing and hproxy.com/pricing, read 3 August 2026.
The bottom row is the one that changes the arithmetic. There is no way to buy a single gigabyte from Shifter. If your usage is irregular, you are paying $50 in the months you barely touch it, and the allowance does not carry forward.
The ISP rate that exists on no tier
Most of the starting-price trap in this market is a real rate behind a large commitment. Our price study of sixteen providers found fourteen doing exactly that, and in every case the advertised number was reachable by somebody.
Shifter's static ISP headline is a different thing. It advertises from $1/IP, and we could not find any published plan, volume or commitment on its own site that reaches it. The cheapest listed ISP tier is $42 a month for 25 IPs, or $1.68/IP, and the ladder gets no cheaper per IP as it climbs.
That may be an enterprise quote, or a headline nobody updated. We are not going to assert which, because we could not verify it. What we can say is that a buyer reading the marketing page cannot buy the marketing price, which is worth knowing before you plan a budget around it.
Where Shifter genuinely wins
Static ISP inventory at plan scale. If you need 100 or 200 fixed ISP addresses under one subscription, Shifter's tiers are built for exactly that shape, and buying 200 IPs as a single $252 plan is administratively simpler than assembling them elsewhere.
Longevity. It has been operating, under one name or another, for a long time in a market where brands vanish constantly. Our proxy graveyard series exists because most of its contemporaries did not survive. Shifter did.
It has not hidden the rebrand. The Microleaves connection is a matter of record rather than something we uncovered, and a company that renames in the open is easier to assess than one running a dozen storefronts off a single pool, which is the pattern we traced in does your proxy provider resell someone else's network.
Where HProxy wins as a Shifter alternative
The rate, at roughly twice. $0.50/GB flat against $1/GB on the Starter plan. Even Shifter's best published residential rate, $0.75/GB on the $149/month Business plan, sits above our starting price.
You can buy one gigabyte. No plan, no allowance, no monthly minimum. On a 50 GB month you would pay $25 with us against $50 at Shifter, and if next month is quiet you pay nothing rather than $50 again.
A balance that does not expire. Shifter's monthly allowance resets. Our credit stays yours, and blocked or errored requests cost nothing, so an unproductive month is not a billed one.
Sourcing you can ask about. This is the honest core of the comparison. Where a residential IP came from decides whether the person behind it agreed to carry your traffic, and it is the one question worth asking every provider including us. The Microleaves pay-per-install history is exactly the model that question exists to catch.
Who should pick which
Pick Shifter if you want a large block of static ISP addresses on one monthly subscription, your volume is steady enough to fill an allowance every month, and the sourcing history is not part of your compliance picture.
Pick HProxy if you want the lower rate, if your usage is irregular enough that a monthly allowance would go unused, or if you would rather buy gigabytes than subscribe to them.
If sourcing is what you are actually weighing, read Shifter was Microleaves first and then decide. It is a better use of ten minutes than any price table, and we would say the same if the history belonged to us.