A free proxy list looks like abundance: thousands of addresses, updated constantly. The reality underneath is the opposite. Of the 592,038 addresses we have ever recorded as public proxies, only 8,324 are answering right now. That is 1.4% of them. The rest are offline, dead, or were never really proxies at all.
Addresses tracked, all time
Checks we have run against them
Answering right now
Most free proxies barely work
Uptime is the honest measure of a proxy, and by it the free pool is grim. Across every endpoint with a track record, the median answers just 14% of our checks. Half of all free proxies fail more often than they succeed. Only the top slice is dependable: the best five percent clear 83%.
Uptime across the pool
And they do not last
A working free proxy is a temporary thing. Measured across 193,245 proxies that lived and died on our watch, the median lasted just 28 days from the day we first saw it working to the day it went dark. A quarter were gone inside 18 days. This is why a list copied yesterday is mostly useless today, and why we re-verify continuously rather than trusting any source's claim.
How long a free proxy lives
And they are slow
Shared, public and unfunded, free proxies answer slowly. The median response we measure is 1.8s, and the slowest five percent crawl in at over 10.2s. For a quick geo check that is fine; for anything that has to complete at scale it is a wall.
Response time across the pool
Where free proxies live
Open proxies are not spread evenly. They cluster on a handful of large networks, overwhelmingly cloud and hosting providers whose machines are easy to scan and easy to leave misconfigured. These are the networks hosting the most live free proxies right now.
Which countries they exit from
By exit location the picture shifts from where servers are cheap to where open proxies are common. These are the countries the live free pool exits from most.
United States
China
Indonesia
India
Japan
Australia
Canada
France
Hong Kong SAR China
SwedenWhat kind of proxies they are
By protocol the live pool splits into 4,661 HTTP, 3,659 HTTPS, 4,726 SOCKS4 and 4,194 SOCKS5. By anonymity, most present as elite, meaning they hide the original address without announcing that a proxy is in use: 4,861 elite against 113 anonymous and 773 transparent. A high elite count is not a safety rating: it describes what the address hides, never who runs it or what they can see.
How we measured this
Every figure comes from HProxy's own checker network, which tests each address on a real connection rather than trusting a list. We record every address we have ever seen published as a public proxy and keep re-testing it, which is what lets us report not just what is alive but how the whole population behaves over time. The numbers on this page are read live from that system each time the page is built, so they move as the pool does. You can see the underlying pool any time in the free proxy list, and check any single address in the IP lookup tool.