The Biggest Free Proxy List

A proxy is a server that sits between you and the internet and relays your requests. When you route through one, the website you visit sees the proxy's IP address and location instead of yours, which is what lets a proxy change your apparent location or hide your real IP. A free proxy is simply one that is open to the public at no cost, usually a server someone left open deliberately or one that was misconfigured and then discovered.

Because anyone can use them, free proxies are shared by many people at once and are not maintained for reliability, which is why they are slow and short-lived compared with paid proxies. They are genuinely useful for low-stakes tasks, testing and understanding how proxies behave, but the moment reliability or privacy actually matters they are the wrong tool.

Pick an entry and note its IP, port and protocol. In a browser, put the IP and port into your proxy settings; in a scraper or HTTP client, set it as the proxy option, usually as a URL like http://IP:PORT or socks5://IP:PORT. Then send a request to a page that echoes back your IP to confirm the proxy is alive and actually changing your apparent address before you rely on it. Use the filters at the top to narrow by protocol, country or anonymity, and the download button to grab the whole filtered set as a plain text file.

Free proxies die constantly, so build for failure rather than trusting any single IP: pull several, rotate between them, and drop any that time out or return errors. If you would rather automate it, the free API returns the entire live list in one call as txt, JSON or CSV with the same country, protocol and anonymity filters, so you can wire the list straight into your tooling.

HTTP and HTTPS proxies are built for web traffic. A plain HTTP proxy handles ordinary web requests; an HTTPS proxy adds tunnelling for encrypted TLS traffic, which is what almost every modern site uses, so for browsing and scraping the web an HTTPS-capable proxy is usually what you want. SOCKS proxies work at a lower level and carry any kind of TCP traffic, not just web requests, which makes them more flexible for tools beyond the browser.

Between the SOCKS versions, SOCKS5 is the newer and more capable one: it adds authentication, UDP support and remote DNS resolution, the last of which stops your DNS lookups leaking outside the proxy. If you are choosing and both are available, SOCKS5 is almost always the better pick. You can filter this list to any single protocol if your tool needs a specific one.

A free proxy costs nothing and is ideal for learning and throwaway tasks, but the IPs are public and shared, so they are often slow, frequently already blocked, and come with no uptime guarantee and no support. For a single quick check that is fine; for anything you need to repeat, the constant dead entries quickly outweigh the zero price.

Paid proxies give you clean, dedicated or cleanly-rotated IPs with real uptime and predictable speed on addresses that have not been burned by thousands of strangers, plus features free proxies cannot offer like city-level targeting and sticky sessions. HProxy paid residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies are billed by the gigabyte with no subscription, so you only pay for what you use and can keep this free list purely for experiments.