Searching for a Smartproxy alternative in 2026 has a complication the usual listicle skips: Smartproxy no longer exists under that name. The company rebranded to Decodo in early 2025, the product moved with it, and the old brand now lives only in the years of reviews, tutorials and bookmarks that still point at it. So the question splits in two. If you want to know where the service went, that answer is one sentence long. If the rebrand is your prompt to re-shop, which is the smarter use of the moment, the answer takes a page.
Where Smartproxy went
Decodo is the direct continuation: same company, same network, new name. Accounts, products and the reseller relationships all carried over. As of August 2026 their residential product page advertises entry pricing from $2 per GB and a pool it states at 115M+ IPs, with the plan structure of a classic metered subscription.
We say that plainly because pretending the obvious answer does not exist would be a strange way to open a comparison. We wrote a full side-by-side in HProxy vs Decodo, and the Decodo alternatives page carries the current verified pricing next to ours. If what you liked was the product itself, follow the rename and you are done reading.
What the rebrand changed, and what only changed name
A rebrand rewrites more than a logo, and the practical effects are the part a searcher runs into first.
The material written about Smartproxy before 2025 describes menus, plan names and prices that no longer match what a new signup sees. Screenshots reference a dashboard that has been redesigned since. Review scores accumulated under the old brand sit on profiles the new name had to rebuild. None of that says anything bad about the service; it says the paper trail you would normally use to evaluate it has a cut in the middle. A 2024 article praising a specific plan at a specific price is describing something that may no longer be purchasable.
The sensible response is to treat the rebrand as a version boundary. Behaviour described in old reviews, such as how rotation works or what support responds like, tends to survive a rename. Numbers do not. Verify every price, cap and trial term on the current site, not in the archive.
The re-shopping checklist a rebrand earns you
Since you are re-evaluating anyway, evaluate properly. Five checks cover most of the money.
The billing model before the rate. A metered subscription quotes a per-gigabyte price but bills on a calendar, and the allowance you do not use by renewal day is gone. A pay-as-you-go balance has no calendar. Our pay-as-you-go breakdown runs the arithmetic on what expiry really costs, and it is routinely more than the difference between two providers' advertised rates.
The rate at your volume, not the banner rate. Entry prices are set for the banner. What matters is the tier your actual monthly gigabytes land in, and how far the effective rate drifts when a slow month leaves allowance unused. How to read a proxy pricing page covers the standard tricks.
The unit itself. Residential is priced per gigabyte, ISP and datacenter per IP, mobile per port or per IP almost everywhere. Comparing a per-GB product against a per-IP product with one number is how people buy the wrong thing. How much do proxies cost maps the normal ranges per family.
What happens to unused money. Expiry policies differ more between providers than headline prices do. Ask the question before paying: if I stop for two months, what do I still own?
The exit before the entrance. Cancellation friction, refund terms and whether a trial requires a card tell you how a provider expects to keep customers. A service confident in its product makes leaving easy.
Where we fit, stated plainly
HProxy is not a rebadged version of the same offer. It is the other billing model. Residential traffic from $0.44/GB, paid as you go: you top up a balance, spend it at the published rate, and the remainder never expires because there is no renewal date for it to expire on. Targeting goes down to the city, and the free proxy list exists so you can test the general concept before spending anything. The residential page carries the live rate and the volume ladder; pricing has every family on one page.
The honest counter-case: a metered subscription can beat a balance when your volume is large, steady and predictable enough to land a deep tier and consume it fully, every month. Decodo's platform is also genuinely polished, and a team that lives inside proxy tooling all day may value that polish above the billing difference. Our comparison piece spells out where each side wins rather than declaring a sweep.
The rest of the shortlist
Most Smartproxy searches end up weighing the same few names. Bright Data and Oxylabs sit at the enterprise end, priced and structured for procurement rather than for a card at checkout. IPRoyal runs a pay-as-you-go model with non-expiring traffic, which makes it the provider closest to ours in shape. Each has a verified entry on our alternatives hub, with pricing pulled from their public pages rather than typed from memory, and each earns a different kind of buyer.
The rebrand took the name you searched for off the market. The product behind it is one click away under a new label, and the better outcome of the search is that you re-read the terms you have been paying under. Either way, you leave knowing what a gigabyte actually costs you, which is more than most proxy buyers can say.