A free proxy list is a collection of public IP addresses that anyone can route their traffic through at no cost, and this page keeps one that is checked live rather than copied from a stale text file. Each entry is a real server somewhere on the internet that will forward your requests, hiding your own IP from the site you are visiting and making your traffic appear to come from the proxy instead. Because they cost nothing and need no signup, free proxies are the easiest way to experiment with how proxies work, test whether your app behaves differently behind one, or run a quick geo-check from another network before you commit to anything paid.
The honest trade-off is reliability. Free proxies are shared by thousands of people at once, run on infrastructure that nobody is paid to maintain, and the popular IPs are frequently already rate-limited or blocked by large sites. A proxy that passed a check one minute ago can be dead by the time you connect, response times swing wildly, and anonymity grades are best-effort rather than guaranteed. Treat every free proxy as disposable: verify it right before you use it, never put passwords, payment details or other sensitive data through one, and never rely on a single IP for anything that has to keep running.
This list is aggregated from publicly available sources and continuously re-verified by the HProxy engine. Every IP is checked live for whether it is up, how fast it responds, and what anonymity level it offers, then geolocated down to the city and ISP where possible. That means the entries you copy are current rather than a stale dump, but it does not change the underlying nature of free proxies. The verification simply spares you most of the dead entries you would otherwise paste from an old list, so you spend less time testing IPs that were never going to connect in the first place.
You can filter the pool by country, by protocol (HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, SOCKS5), or by anonymity grade (elite, anonymous, transparent), and download any slice as a plain text file ready to drop into your scraper, browser or proxy manager. If you need proxies that actually stay up, rotate cleanly, and do not arrive pre-blocked, that is exactly what HProxy paid residential, ISP, mobile, and datacenter proxies are for. There is no subscription and you pay by the gigabyte, so a free list for experiments and paid proxies for real work is a perfectly reasonable split.
HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5: which one do you need?
HTTP proxies handle plain web traffic and are the simplest option for basic browsing and scraping of non-encrypted endpoints. HTTPS proxies add CONNECT tunneling, which lets encrypted TLS traffic pass through, so they work with the modern web where almost every site is served over HTTPS. For general web use, an HTTP/HTTPS proxy is usually what you want.
SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 operate at a lower level and are protocol-agnostic, so they carry any kind of TCP traffic, not just web requests. SOCKS5 is the more capable of the two: it supports authentication, UDP, and remote DNS resolution, which makes it the better pick for tools beyond a browser. Pick HTTP/HTTPS for web tasks, and reach for SOCKS5 when you need flexibility or non-HTTP traffic.
How to use a free proxy list
Pick an entry from the table and note its IP address, port and protocol. In a browser you can paste these into the network or proxy settings, or use a proxy-switcher extension. In a scraper or HTTP client you set the proxy as a connection option, for example an http:// or socks5:// URL pointing at the IP and port. Always test the proxy against a simple endpoint first, such as a page that echoes your IP, to confirm it is alive and actually changing your apparent location before you point real work at it.
Because free proxies die constantly, build for failure. Pull several candidates rather than one, rotate between them, and drop any that time out or return errors. The download button gives you the whole filtered slice as plain text so you can load a batch into your tool and let it cycle through. If you find yourself babysitting dead IPs more than doing actual work, that is the signal it is time for paid proxies that stay up.
Free proxy vs paid proxy
A free proxy costs nothing and is perfect for learning, testing and throwaway tasks, but you get what you pay for: shared bandwidth, no uptime guarantee, frequent blocks, and no support if something breaks. The IPs are public, so the big sites have often already flagged them, and you have no control over who else is abusing the same address. For a one-off check this is fine; for anything repeatable it quickly becomes more hassle than it is worth.
A paid proxy gives you the opposite profile: dedicated or cleanly rotated IPs, real uptime, predictable speed, and addresses that have not been burned by thousands of strangers. HProxy paid residential, ISP, mobile and datacenter proxies are billed by the gigabyte with no subscription, so you only pay for what you use. The sensible approach is to keep the free list for experiments and reach for paid proxies the moment a task actually has to succeed.