comparisons

The three ways to make money from proxy demand ask three different things of you and pay three different ways. A decision guide keyed to what you have today: an audience, a product, or a codebase.

Do proxies or VPNs actually get cheaper flights? We tested the location-switching myth against the evidence: what the data shows, when point-of-sale pricing is real, and what proxies are actually for.

Smartproxy no longer exists under that name: it rebranded to Decodo in 2025. Where the product went, what the rebrand quietly changed, and how to re-shop residential proxies properly.

HProxy vs Froxy on residential price, plans and the HEATWAVE sale: the one thing Froxy publishes that almost nobody in this market does, and what changes on 1 September 2026.

IPFoxy's residential runs from $5.99/GB down to $1.99/GB, but the cheap rate needs $1,999 up front and every package carries a validity window. What that clock costs a workload that pauses.

HProxy vs MarsProxies on residential price, the advertised $3.49/GB we could not find a tier behind, and the per-IP, per-day model MarsProxies sells everything else on.

MobileHop rents one thing, a dedicated 5G modem, at $8.00 for a day or $5.00 for an hour. Why the smaller price is the worse rate, and which jobs a rented modem beats bandwidth by the gigabyte.

ProxyRack publishes one of the lowest residential rates in this market, and reaching it means buying a 100 GB plan every month. What 5, 20, 100 and 300 GB actually cost on each side, worked out.

Four scraping APIs, converted to one number: dollars per 1,000 requests. The range runs from $0.0749 to $3.75, and on one vendor both ends of a 25x spread sit inside the same $30 plan.

We re-verified all 20 residential proxy vendors we track against their own pricing pages on 10 August 2026, one week after the first capture. Four of our records were wrong, and one of them was wrong in the direction that suited us.

We re-read the residential pricing page of 20 proxy vendors on 10 August 2026. Eight were running a discount. One of the eight published an end date.

IPBurger sells residential in monthly buckets rather than metered bandwidth, and its cheapest published rate is still far above ours. When a small predictable bill is worth it, and when it is not.

HProxy vs Shifter on price, model and sourcing history. Shifter sells monthly plans with no pay as you go, and its advertised ISP rate exists on no published tier.

HProxy vs Thordata on residential price and model: a cheaper flat rate at every normal volume, and the one thing Thordata does better than almost anyone.

We checked what 16 residential proxy providers advertise against what they charge a new customer with no commitment. The median gap is 2.5x. The widest is 20x.

Scraping APIs bill in credits, and one request can cost 1 credit or 75. We read the credit tables at ScrapingBee, ZenRows and ScraperAPI and did the arithmetic.

The English 'best Chinese proxy' roundups name only Western brands and zero real Chinese operators. Here is who actually runs China's proxy industry.

DePIN proxy tokens like Grass and Nodepay are residential proxy networks with a crypto wrapper. The real funding, the token crashes, and what you actually sell.

How to tell if your proxy provider just resells a bigger pool: shared gateways, identical pool sizes, WHOIS and ASN overlap, and rebrand chains.

Google's 2026 takedown named 13 proxy brands under IPIDEA: 922Proxy, PIA S5, IP2World and more, built on hijacked home devices. What it means for buyers.

IPIDEA runs IP2World, PIA S5 Proxy and a dozen storefronts on one pool through Hong Kong shells. Here is the shared infrastructure and how it was built.

NordVPN and Surfshark merged on February 2, 2022 under one Dutch holding company, Cyberspace B.V. Here is the sourced proof, and what it means for buyers.

Researchers tied two dozen 'independent' mobile proxy brands to one Belarusian software stack, ProxySmart. Here is the map and what it means when you buy.

Thordata claims a 2018 founding, but its Hong Kong company dates to 2023 and its own US trademark claims first use in 2025. Here is the sourced timeline.