The Biggest Free Proxy List

A proxy is a server that sits between you and the internet and relays your requests. The site you reach sees the proxy address and location instead of yours. A free proxy is one that is open to the public at no cost. It is published on public lists and reachable by anyone who has the address.

Nobody is paid to keep these servers running, and everybody is using them at once. That is the whole explanation for the numbers above. They are useful for a test or a geo check, and the wrong tool the moment reliability matters.

Pick a row and note its IP address, port and protocol. Enter them in your browser proxy settings, or as the proxy option in your scraper. The usual form is http://IP:PORT or socks5://IP:PORT. Then request a page that echoes your address, to confirm the proxy really changes what the site sees.

Free proxies die constantly, so build for failure rather than trusting one address. Pull several, rotate between them, and drop any that time out or return an error. Use the download button for the filtered set as plain text. The free API returns the same list as txt, JSON or CSV, with the same filters.

Almost every free list advertises a count and an interval, and neither can be checked by a reader. On 5 September 2026 we tested one whose README claimed 2,326 working proxies, validated every five minutes. We fetched its published file in the same hour and tried every entry in it.

The test was not a port check: through each proxy we fetched a real page. An entry counted as working only when the reply carried an exit address that was not ours. That rule matters, because an earlier pass counted 287 addresses as leaking proxies. They turned out to be CDN edges that answered our own Host header and proxied nothing.

1,770 entries accepted a TCP connection, which is all a port check measures. Only 306 of them carried traffic. So four entries in five pass the cheap test and fail the real one. HTTP was 71 percent of what that list published and 3.3 percent of what worked.

That result belongs to one list, on one day, from one datacenter, and we do not widen it. What it gives you is the question to ask any list, this one included. Ask what a check actually consists of, and ask when this entry was last checked. The Checked column above answers the second question for every row.

A live entry is a working entry only in the loosest sense. These are the numbers behind our own pool, measured on 5 September 2026.

The success rate is the line to read twice. A typical live free proxy fails more often than it works, and that is normal for the category. It is also why rotating through several beats picking one carefully.

HTTP and HTTPS proxies carry web traffic, and a plain HTTP proxy handles ordinary web requests. An HTTPS proxy adds tunnelling for encrypted traffic, which almost every modern site now uses. For browsing and scraping, that is usually the one you want.

SOCKS proxies work lower down and carry any TCP traffic. Web requests are one case among many, so they suit tools outside the browser. Between the two versions, SOCKS5 is the newer one. RFC 1928 (IETF, March 1996) adds authentication, UDP support and remote name resolution. That last part keeps your DNS lookups inside the tunnel, so SOCKS5 is the better pick when offered.

A free proxy changes the address a site sees, and it does not make the connection private. SOCKS5 defines no encryption of its own. RFC 1928 makes security depend on the method the two sides negotiate. Anyone can run a free proxy, and whoever runs it can read traffic that is not encrypted.

A proxy can also relay your request and still tell the site who you are. RFC 7239 (IETF, June 2014) defines the Forwarded header, which carries "the originating IP address of a request". The same document calls client addresses "privacy sensitive". That is what a transparent proxy does, and it is standard behaviour rather than a fault. Our pool classifies 600 of the live set as transparent. Never send a password, a payment detail or anything private through one.

Free proxies suit a test or a geo check, and this list makes that easy. When a job has to keep running, the numbers above explain why they stop. The address is shared, already flagged, and gone in about six days.

HProxy paid proxies use residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter addresses that are not already flagged. They add city-level targeting and sticky sessions, which no free entry can offer. They are billed by the gigabyte, with no subscription. The rate is $0.44/GB from 2,000 GB+, or $0.50/GB for a single GB. Most people land on the same split, using this list for experiments and paying when it matters.