There are two honest ways to compare proxy providers. Read both pricing pages carefully and match the units, or run the same batch through both and count. This page does the first and tells you how to do the second.
The published numbers
Read from their own public pricing pages on 10 August 2026, and stated as advertised rather than as verified by us:
- ISP: from $1.68 per IP with no commitment, falling to $1 per IP on NOT ACHIEVABLE on any publicly listed tier. Cheapest listed rate is $1.26/IP at the $252/month Growth plan (200 IPs)..
- Residential: from $1 per GB with no commitment, falling to $0.75 per GB on $149/month for 200GB.
- Scraping API: $44 per month on none stated beyond a monthly plan; entry price is the floor.
Every one of those is a published rate rather than a measured outcome. That is not a criticism of Shifter: our own page is built from the same material. It is the reason the rest of this comparison is about what published rates leave out.
Shifter in its own words
On 9 September 2026 the site introduced itself as "Residential Proxies, ISP Proxies and Web Scraping APIs, Shifter". The one-paragraph pitch on their own page: "Access 205M+ residential proxies, ISP proxies, Web Scraping APIs, and SERP APIs. Built for data collection, SEO monitoring, market research, and web scraping at scale."
What else that page states, without interpretation:
The product lines named on that page are residential, ISP or static residential, SOCKS5 and a scraping or SERP API. They advertise 195 countries or locations. The page offers some form of free trial. Their pricing page is titled "Sign in - Shifter".
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.
Age, and why it matters here
The domain was registered on 4 June 2017, through NameCheap, Inc, which makes it about 9 years old. The lookup behind those dates ran on 23 April 2026. As things stand the domain is held to 4 June 2026.
This proves nothing about the product. It is a cheap check against the one failure mode that costs buyers real money in this market, which is paying a provider that will not exist in six months.
What we hold on ownership and naming: Rebranded from Microleaves to Shifter.io; Sold to Super Tech Ventures (Taiwan); Acquired by Super Tech Ventures (Taiwan).
What Shifter publishes
Our own crawl reached 19.168 of their pages, last run 18 June 2026. The mix was 1.200 blog pages, 40 pricing pages, 16.032 location pages, 160 use-case pages and 168 integration pages.
The number is not a compliment or a criticism. It describes how much of their effort goes into being found, which is worth knowing when you are weighing a marketing claim against a measurement.
What buyers type into Google about them
Search volume around the name runs to 320 a month, split as 320 a month for a review of them. Figures read from Google Keyword Planner on 9 September 2026.
The biggest slice is people checking whether to trust it, so the useful thing to hand a reader is evidence rather than an opinion.
At up to $304.56 a click, these are expensive words. Worth remembering when a review ranks first and happens to recommend whoever pays the most.
What you still do not know after reading their 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.
Per gigabyte against per address
Work out what your job actually consumes, in gigabytes or in concurrent addresses, before you look at any price. Without that number, no two quotations in this market can be compared at all.
Concurrency limits decide throughput
Rate limits are often enforced per account rather than per plan, which means buying more traffic does not raise them. Confirm how yours scales before you assume a bigger plan runs faster.
The two of us, on the questions that matter
Set the two side by side on the questions that decide the outcome, rather than on feature counts:
| Question to ask | Shifter | HProxy |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price | Published, see above, dated 10 August 2026 | From $0.44/GB, pay as you go |
| Does unused balance expire? | Their terms page answers this | Never |
| Minimum commitment | Lower rates require one, see above | None |
| Identity checks | Not published clearly, ask before paying | Card orders are screened, and verification is sometimes requested |
| Targeting | On their own terms page | Country, city and ISP |
| Free way to evaluate | Not published clearly, ask before paying | Free proxy list and proxy checker |
Six rows is enough. Longer comparison tables in this market are usually padded with features nobody chooses on, which makes them look thorough and read as noise.
What to do instead of reading more comparisons
The steps below take about ten minutes and settle the question properly.
- Fund both accounts with the least money each will accept, and note what that minimum was, because it is part of the comparison.
- Aim both at the page that matters to you rather than a test endpoint, and keep every other variable fixed.
- Write down two numbers per provider: the share of requests that succeeded, and the traffic it cost.
- Take a handful of the addresses you were given and verify their country and type against a checker you do not control.
- Keep the winner, and repeat the whole thing quarterly, because pools age.
The rest of the shortlist
Buyers comparing this name usually have two or three of these open in other tabs:
- VMLogin alternatives
- Vozforums alternatives
- Vpn4All alternatives
- VPNBook alternatives
- VPNGate alternatives
- Vpnreactor alternatives
What we sell, stated plainly
Our position is narrow. Residential from $0.44 per GB, no subscription, no expiry on the balance, and a public record of what our free network actually does. A provider unwilling to be measured is telling you something, and so is one that asks to be.
