Grubhub checks where you are before it shows you anything. On 24 August 2026 we loaded grubhub.com from a server in Germany and received a page titled "Grubhub food delivery is not available in your country", no storefront, no search box. The same request through a US exit loaded the site. That country gate is the first reason anyone outside the United States needs a proxy for Grubhub, and it comes before the reasons that apply inside the country: menu prices that restaurants set per market, delivery and service fees that differ by city and by membership, and coverage that can only be discovered one address at a time.
We run US residential traffic for jobs like this, and we tested Grubhub's front door with both mixed and US-only free proxies so the numbers below are measured rather than assumed.
The direct answer for Grubhub
US residential proxies pinned to the city you are reading, driven from a real browser, one sticky session per delivery address. A static US ISP proxy per account for the Grubhub for Restaurants portal or any logged-in session. Datacenter exits inside the US can get past the country gate, which makes them tempting, but they are the first addresses to be throttled once you read storefronts at volume.
What Grubhub is as a target
Grubhub is a US food delivery marketplace that has been owned by Wonder since 7 January 2025, when Just Eat Takeaway.com completed the sale (Just Eat Takeaway.com newsroom). It operates a second, New York-focused brand on the same platform and runs Grubhub Campus Dining for universities. Its membership tier, Grubhub+, became an ongoing benefit of Amazon Prime on 30 May 2024, so Prime members get it without paying separately (Grubhub news). That matters for data work because it splits every fee schedule in two: what a member pays and what a non-member pays, per market, per order size.
Like the other marketplaces, Grubhub builds a storefront from the delivery address. Which restaurants appear, whether each is open for delivery, the fees, the estimate and the item prices merchants chose for delivery all depend on where the order would go. Unlike Uber Eats there is one country, and unlike DoorDash the front door, in our test, was a country check rather than a bot challenge.
Jobs a proxy is the right tool for
- Menu and price monitoring across US cities. Restaurants set their own Grubhub prices, and chains want to know which franchisees mark up, by how much, and how that compares with the same location on DoorDash and Uber Eats. Reading the same storefronts from many addresses on a schedule is the whole job.
- Fee and Grubhub+ research. Delivery fees, service fees, small-order fees and the member-versus-non-member split differ by market. Analysts and competitors read them per address; merchants check what their customers are actually charged.
- Coverage and delivery-radius checks. A restaurant's reach on Grubhub is discovered by entering addresses. Chains verify every location, campus operators check the blocks around a university, and site-selection work maps who can be reached from where.
- Listing accuracy. A restaurant that operates in six cities wants to see its own listings the way customers in each city see them: hours, menu, photos, whether it shows as open.
- Watching from outside the country. For anyone not in the United States, this is the whole game: without a US exit, Grubhub shows nothing at all.
Jobs a proxy is not the tool for
Driver accounts. Grubhub drivers pass a background check. The address a request arrives from plays no part in it.
Promo codes and multiple accounts. Accounts link through phone number, payment method and device, and farming offers across accounts runs against Grubhub's terms. A new IP changes the least important of those links.
Deactivations. They attach to the identity and the device. The address is the only thing a proxy touches.
The front door, measured
Two runs on 24 August 2026, both from one server, each proxy sending a single request for grubhub.com with a normal browser user-agent and a short timeout.
First, 50 elite HTTP proxies from our free proxy list with no country filter: 42 never completed a connection; of the 8 that did, the 4 exiting outside the United States received the "not available in your country" page and the 4 exiting inside it loaded the site shell. Second, 20 elite HTTP proxies filtered to the United States: 13 never connected and 7 loaded the site shell. The direct request from our German server got the country page.
So the gate is a country check on the IP address, and a US address of any kind, datacenter included, opens it. Compared with the Cloudflare challenge we measured on DoorDash and Uber Eats the same evening, this is a friendlier front door. It is not the whole defense. What loaded was the application shell; the storefronts, menus and prices render in the browser from Grubhub's own API calls, and the address lives in the session. The per-address rate limits behind that are unmeasured on our side, so treat the first rising 403 or 429 rate in your logs as the number nobody publishes, and back off when you see it. Our guides to fixing 403 errors through a proxy and 429 rate limits cover what those responses mean.
Non-US exit
country page, no storefront
US exit
site shell loads
Address session
storefronts render
Volume
residential holds, datacenter throttled
Which proxy type fits, by job
| Grubhub job | Proxy type | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Menu, price and fee monitoring across cities | Rotating US residential, city-pinned | Passes the country gate and reads as a local shopper at volume |
| Coverage and delivery-radius checks | Rotating US residential, sticky per address | Each address is a session that has to hold still |
| Listing accuracy for a multi-city restaurant | Rotating US residential, city-pinned | See each listing as customers in that city see it |
| Grubhub for Restaurants or any login | US ISP (static residential) | One trusted, fixed location per account |
| A single logged-out look from abroad | US datacenter, or a fresh US free proxy | Opens the country gate; not for repeated reads |
| Anything that keeps getting throttled | Mobile | Carrier IPs are shared by many phones and rarely blocked |
The difference between the residential flavors is laid out in datacenter vs residential proxies. The free USA proxy page explains why US exits are the most common free proxies and why they still die in minutes.
Free versus paid for Grubhub
Free proxies do better here than on the other two marketplaces, because the door is a country check rather than a JavaScript challenge, and a fresh US exit from our free proxy list can open it for one look. Two things stop that from being a plan. Thirteen of the 20 US proxies in our test could not complete a single request, which is the normal lifespan of free, and the four that loaded the shell were shared datacenter addresses that get throttled the moment they read storefronts on a schedule. For one anonymous look at a menu from abroad, take a US proxy from the list, verify it in the proxy checker, and expect to try several. For anything repeated, our US residential proxies start at $0.44/GB, pay as you go, no KYC, with a balance that does not expire.
How to set it up
- Get a US exit before anything else. Nothing renders otherwise. Pin the residential exit to the state, and where possible the metro, of the addresses you plan to read; a Florida exit reading Chicago addresses is a mismatch that gains you nothing.
- Drive a real browser. Playwright or Puppeteer with the proxy set at launch and cookies retained; the storefront is rendered client-side. Copy the launch config from the Puppeteer proxy guide.
- Hold one sticky session per address. Enter the address, read the storefronts you need, then rotate to a fresh exit for the next address. Rotating mid-session loses the address. Sticky vs rotating proxy sessions explains the two modes.
- Read both fee schedules. Grubhub+ changes what a member pays, and the site shows the member price to a member. A logged-out session sees the non-member schedule; if you need the member view, that is an account, which means an ISP exit and one account per exit.
- Pace and watch the block rate. Leave gaps between requests, randomize their length, skip images and fonts, and treat rising 403 or 429 responses as the instruction to slow down. Avoiding IP bans while scraping covers the remaining habits.
How many IPs
Size by addresses and pace, not by restaurants.
Reading one city, both fee schedules:
addresses sampled 80
storefronts per address ~40, paced 1 per 6-10 s
sessions per exit per day 4-6
exits in rotation ~15-20 US residential, city-pinned
member view 1 account on 1 static ISP exit
Residential is billed by traffic; the exit count above is a pacing
plan. With images blocked a storefront read stays well under a
megabyte, so the address list, not the restaurant count, sets the bill.
A sweep of ten cities for a week costs that week's traffic and nothing after it, because pricing is pay as you go.
Where a proxy stops
From outside the country, a US address alone turns Grubhub's blank page into a working site, and that is the proxy's whole contribution. Driver identity, an account's phone and card, and Grubhub's terms (which prohibit scraping and multi-accounting) all stay exactly where they were. With a real browser and human pacing on top, a US residential exit lets a legitimate data job read public storefronts the way customers in that city read them. For the two rivals with harder front doors, see proxies for DoorDash and proxies for Uber Eats; the general method for any scheduled price job is in proxies for price monitoring.
Sources
- Just Eat Takeaway.com newsroom, 7 January 2025, completion of the sale of Grubhub to Wonder: newsroom.justeattakeaway.com
- Grubhub news, 30 May 2024, Grubhub+ as an ongoing Amazon Prime benefit: about.grubhub.com
- HProxy measurement, 24 August 2026: grubhub.com from a German server (country page), 50 mixed elite free proxies (42 no connection, 4 country page, 4 site shell) and 20 US elite free proxies (13 no connection, 7 site shell), all from our free proxy list.