The market ProxyDB trades in has a wide honesty range. Some vendors publish every tier, some publish a starting rate that nobody reaches, and a few publish nothing at all. Knowing which kind you are looking at is half the decision.
ProxyDB on the record
ProxyDB operates from proxydb.net. Our classification for them is free proxy list.
A price is missing here on purpose. We have not captured a sourced rate for ProxyDB recently enough to publish one, and a stale number in this market is a wrong number.
Look for the tier you would actually land in, not the one at the bottom of the table, and find the expiry and failed-request clauses before the rate impresses you.
What is on their front page
Read 9 September 2026, the homepage titles itself "ProxyDB - Proxy List".
Reading the same page for the things buyers actually ask about:
The product lines named on that page are SOCKS5. We found no separate pricing page linked from the homepage, which usually means the price arrives by quotation.
None of that is verified performance. It is what the vendor chose to publish, recorded with a date so you can see whether it still says the same thing.
Longevity, on the public record
The domain was registered on 7 April 2015, through NameCheap, Inc, which makes it about 11 years old. That record was read from the registry on 23 April 2026. The registry shows it renewed to 7 April 2027.
Read that as a floor rather than a recommendation. Longevity says somebody has kept paying the registrar, and in a market with this much churn that is worth ten seconds of your attention.
The operator, and why it matters
We checked this one by hand on 6 September 2026. It is a list, and we record the operator as independent. Per-IP pages like ours.
No proxy seller behind it that we could find. Independent lists tend to live on ad revenue, so expect the page to be busier than the data warrants.
The Internet Archive has it from 25 October 2006 to 1 January 2026, about 16 years of coverage. The domain was registered 7 April 2015 through NameCheap, Inc.
The number that matters, and that no list page prints, is how many entries still work. Ours is public: 589918 addresses discovered, 4023 alive at the last check, median lifespan 145 hours. Apply that decay to any undated list you are reading.
What the advertised numbers cannot tell you
A pool total is not a promise
The number that matters is how many usable exits you can reach in the one country your job needs, this week. A pool total averages that away, which is why two providers with similar totals produce opposite results on the same site.
Why 195 countries tells you nothing
Almost every provider claims almost every country. What differs is depth, and depth decides whether a single city or a single carrier is usable. No published figure tells you that.
The day something goes wrong
Every provider works when nothing is wrong. The difference shows up on the day a subnet gets flagged or a gateway stops answering. Before committing volume, send one real question through the support channel and time the reply.
What separates them, in a table
This is the shortest table that still decides the purchase:
| Question to ask | ProxyDB | HProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Not verified by us, read their page | From $0.44/GB, pay as you go |
| Does unused balance expire? | Worth confirming in writing before you commit | Never |
| Minimum commitment | Their terms page answers this | None |
| Identity checks | Check the current terms, this one moves | Card orders are screened, and verification is sometimes requested |
| Targeting | Not published clearly, ask before paying | Country, city and ISP |
| Free way to evaluate | On their own terms page | Free proxy list and proxy checker |
Nothing in that table settles the decision on its own. It narrows the field to two or three, and then measurement finishes the job.
The ten minute version of this decision
For a few dollars you can get a verdict specific to your job, which no comparison page can honestly promise you.
- Open an account on each and add the smallest amount they take. Skip the trial if a paid unit is cheap enough to buy outright.
- Point both at your real target, through your real tool, on the same day, with the same mix of requests.
- Log successes, failures and gigabytes used. Cost per successful request is the figure you are after.
- Verify a slice of the exits independently. Country labels in this market are self-reported and are not always right.
- Take the winner and set a reminder to run this again, since a result has a shelf life of about a quarter.
Others in this market
Nearest alternatives by product shape rather than by who pays us, since nobody does:
- Proxy4Free alternatives
- Proxycompass alternatives
- Proxyelite alternatives
- Proxyfish alternatives
- ProxyKingdom alternatives
- Proxylists alternatives
Where HProxy sits in that test
We sell residential proxies from $0.44 per GB with no subscription and a balance that does not expire, plus ISP, mobile and datacenter in the same account. That is the pitch, and the test above is a better judge of it than this paragraph.
