GimmeProxy is gone. From May 2015 it did one thing: every call to its API returned one random public proxy that it had checked, in JSON, with no registration. The Internet Archive holds those answers month after month until January 2022, one last answer on January 30, 2025, and nothing after. The site was rebuilt as a template in August 2025, replaced by a placeholder in 2026, and on September 6, 2026, the domain answers "404 page not found". About 40 people a month still search for the name (Keyword Planner, September 2026), and the wrappers on npm, GitHub and CRAN still point at the dead endpoint. This is the record, and what to use now.
Every date below comes from the Internet Archive's captures of the site, of its API endpoint and of its developer's blog. The rest comes from the .com registry and from requests we made ourselves on September 6, 2026. Where the record is silent, this page says so.
What GimmeProxy was
The domain was registered on April 21, 2015, (registry record, read September 6, 2026). On May 4, 2015, its developer, a freelance web developer, announced it on a personal blog. The post describes the itch. Free lists were "not so FREE": sites let you see a few proxies and then "try to sell you full updated list for $3-20 per month". Proxies "advertised as 'checked' 3 minutes ago" did not work. So: "I decided to build my own free rotating proxy api." The first version took any string as a user id and returned one proxy as ip, country, type and a ready-made curl option.
The first archived homepage, dated July 31, 2015, carries the line the site kept for ten years: "New proxy with every request, no registration, no hassle."
By April 2016 the developer reported "700-800 working proxies at any given moment" and "60 requests per second to more than 1300 machines every day, peaking to 150 requests per second". The same post announced a filter API: country, port, and how recently the proxy was checked. The capture of June 1, 2016, shows 746 active proxies, 1,180,145 requests in the previous 24 hours, and a free limit of 20 requests a minute. In December 2016 the developer published three posts on how it was built: Node.js, Redis and Elasticsearch. A scraper run by cron every 30 minutes collected proxies "from websites like hidemyass or gatherproxy".
That last detail is worth holding on to. GimmeProxy did not find proxies. It read other people's public lists, checked them, and served the survivors one at a time. The value was the check.
What the site printed, year by year
| Capture | Proxies counter | Requests counter | Free plan | Paid keys |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June 1, 2016 | 746 active | 1,180,145 in 24 hours | 20 requests a minute | an API key on request |
| June 1, 2018 | 7,242 active | 3,292,682 in 24 hours | 240 requests a day | €39, €119 and €399 a month |
| June 1, 2020 | 17,242 active | 3,392,682 today | 240 requests a day | €79.99, €99.99 and €179.99 a month, marked New Year Sale |
| June 1, 2022 | 17,242 active | 3,392,682 today | 240 requests a day | the same, still marked New Year Sale |
| June 1, 2023 | 17,242 active | 3,392,682 today | 240 requests a day | the same, still marked New Year Sale |
| June 1, 2024 | 7,380 working | 2,674,322 today | not shown | the same, still marked New Year Sale |
Source for every row: the counters, plan table and free plan line printed on the Internet Archive capture of that date, read on September 6, 2026. The 2018 page also sold a 48-hour evaluation key for €9.95.
Two things in that table date the decline better than any outage. The counters read 17,242 proxies and 3,392,682 requests on June 1, 2020, on June 1, 2022, and on June 1, 2023, to the digit. A live counter does not do that. And the New Year Sale that was on the page by June 2020 was still on the page in June 2024. Prices moved in one direction over the years. In February 2017 a user of the API wrote in a public bug tracker that it "costs $15 a month". By June 2018 the cheapest key was €39. By June 2020 it was €79.99, as a sale price.
When it stopped, from the API's own captures
The Internet Archive holds 102 monthly captures of the homepage, from July 31, 2015, to April 13, 2026, and separately 46 monthly captures of the API endpoint. The chart shows the homepage captures per year.
The API captures are the better clock. From September 2, 2015, to January 8, 2022, the archive holds 44 monthly responses with a proxy in them. The capture of March 1, 2023, is an error. Then come two responses on January 30, 2025. The one we read carries a SOCKS5 proxy checked 194 seconds earlier, by the response's own field. Nothing follows.
The homepage tells the rest. The old site, prices and all, was still archived on April 24, 2025. On August 10, 2025, the capture is a new page titled "Free Proxy API Service for Developers", promising "99.9% Uptime" and a "global CDN", with the same /api/getProxy path. On February 18, 2026, it is a generic page titled "API Service" that tells the reader to "contact your system administrator" for documentation. The April 13, 2026, capture is a 427-byte version of the same text.
On September 6, 2026, the name still resolves. The nameservers are at Cloudflare and the address belongs to a hosting company's network. The server presents a placeholder certificate that its own software generated on July 5, 2026. Every request we made, over http and https, to the homepage and to /api/getProxy, got the same three words: "404 page not found". The registration was updated on March 22, 2026, and runs to April 21, 2027. Someone is paying for a name that serves nothing.
The developer's blog went the same way. The posts that describe GimmeProxy survive in the archive, and the domain that hosted them now serves an unrelated placeholder.
What the record does not say
No capture explains why the API stopped, and the developer's blog has no closing post. Whether the August 2025 relaunch ever returned a proxy is unknown. The archive holds no API response after January 30, 2025, and absence from the archive is not proof of absence. The counters and prices come from one capture per year. The $15 a month figure is one user's statement in 2017, not a price table. Who paid for keys, and how many did, is not in any record we hold.
What to use instead
GimmeProxy's developer described the job in 2015: "get list of proxies somewhere, check them and choose one at a time by random." The replacement for a one-proxy-per-call API is a list you trust enough to do exactly that in your own code. On September 6, 2026, we fetched every free list that was still alive and took up to 200 entries from each. Each entry had to relay a real request and come back with an exit address that was not ours.
| List | Entries tested | Relayed a request |
|---|---|---|
| free-proxy-list.net | 200 | 86 |
| monosans proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 62 |
| iplocate free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 51 |
| proxifly free-proxy-list (GitHub) | 200 | 36 |
| geonode free list | 200 | 15 |
| hide.mn list | 64 | 0 |
No list relayed more than half of what it published. That is the base rate of free proxies, not a fault of any one site. Whatever list you pick, check an entry before you use it.
Our own free proxy list is served by a free API that returns every live proxy in one call, as text, JSON or CSV, with no key. It filters by protocol, country, anonymity and lifetime uptime. So the random pick happens in your code, from a set that was just verified, instead of one proxy at a time from a remote counter. The same week as this test we found our own verifier accepting decoy servers that answer every request and forward nothing, and we replaced it. Since September 6, 2026, a proxy is marked alive only when our test request came back through it, on that protocol, carrying a code we sent. The proxy checker applies the same test to any list you paste in.
Free lists have a ceiling that no amount of checking removes. Every address on them is public, shared with everyone who found the same list, and already known to the sites people most want to reach. When a job needs an exit that stays up, keeps a session and has not been handed around, that is a paid proxy, billed by the gigabyte. GimmeProxy sold faster access to shared public proxies for €39 to €399 a month. A paid proxy today charges by the gigabyte for an exit that is yours for the session.
Sources
- The developer's blog posts of May 4, 2015, April 15, 2016, and December 23, 2016, (256cats.com), read from the Internet Archive on September 6, 2026.
- Internet Archive captures of gimmeproxy.com dated July 31, 2015, June 1, 2016, June 1, 2018, June 1, 2020, June 1, 2022, June 1, 2023, June 1, 2024, February 16, 2025, April 24, 2025, August 10, 2025, February 18, 2026, and April 13, 2026, read on September 6, 2026.
- Internet Archive captures of gimmeproxy.com/api/getProxy, 46 monthly rows from September 2, 2015, to January 30, 2025, read on September 6, 2026.
- Internet Archive CDX index for gimmeproxy.com, one row per captured month, read on September 6, 2026.
- A public issue of February 7, 2017, by a user of the API (GitHub, codeforsanjose/findahome, issue 2).
- The .com registry record for gimmeproxy.com (whois), read on September 6, 2026.
- Google Ads Keyword Planner, monthly searches for "gimmeproxy", September 2026.
- HProxy measurements on September 6, 2026: DNS, TLS and HTTP requests to gimmeproxy.com from our server, and the same-hour relay test of alive free lists.
