Free vs paid proxies: what a free proxy really costs

A provider’s free proxy is a small sample, not a plan: Webshare gives 10 shared datacenter proxies with 1 GB of traffic a month, and Oxylabs gives $5 of credit. The first paid step is cheap: $2.99 a month for 100 Webshare datacenter proxies, or $5 for 5 GB of DataImpulse residential traffic that never expires. A public free proxy list costs nothing to download, but you pay for it in addresses that stop working, addresses already on blocklists, and a stranger’s server between you and every site you open. Webshare’s free proxy page and Oxylabs’ price page, checked Oct 11, 2026

Answer · The live comparison uses prices checked up to Oct 24, 2026; every figure in the text keeps the date it was checked. Decodo shows its prices + VAT, so every Decodo figure on this page is before VAT.

Two different things are called a free proxy

A free tier comes from a proxy company. You make an account, accept its terms, and get a few addresses or a little traffic so you can try the service before you pay. The company is named, its terms are public, and the free part has a hard limit.

A free proxy list is a published list of open proxies: servers that accept connections from anyone on the internet. Nobody you can name runs them for you. Some are run on purpose, some are misconfigured, and some sit on computers whose owners do not know their machine is a proxy, because malware set it up (Wikipedia: open proxy).

The rest of this page treats them separately, because the cost of each is different.

What the free tiers give you

SOAX’s Sandbox is free to join, not free to use. It belongs in this table because “free plan” on a pricing page often means exactly that: no monthly fee, every gigabyte paid.

How far 1 GB goes

Proxies bill every byte that passes through them, so a month’s traffic is pages × size per page. A page’s HTML alone is about 33 KB at the median; the whole page as a browser loads it, with images and scripts, is about 2,652 KB (HTTP Archive Web Almanac 2024: markup, page weight, desktop medians).

That is enough to build and test a script. It is not enough to run a browser-based job for a month, and the ten addresses are datacenter IPs, so a site that refuses datacenter traffic refuses them too. How much bandwidth web scraping uses has the arithmetic for your own job.

What the first paid step costs

The cheapest checkout at a small amount, from prices read on the providers’ own pages:

These change with the amount: the comparison re-ranks every plan for the traffic or IPs you type, and proxy trials lists the providers that let you try a paid plan first.

What a public free proxy list really costs

A list has no price, so its cost is everything else:

• Addresses that do not last. An open proxy works until its owner notices, its host changes, or it is shut down. Lists are re-published because yesterday’s entries stop answering.
• Addresses already blocked. Because open proxies are often used for abuse, mail and chat operators run blocklists of known open proxies and refuse connections from them (Wikipedia: open proxy). The site you want may do the same.
• A server you know nothing about. Whoever runs it sees which sites you visit and can read or change anything sent without HTTPS. Are free proxies safe? explains what that means in practice.

For a one-off look at a page from another country, a reputable provider’s free tier is the safer free choice. For anything that runs every day, the paid step above is a few dollars.

The short answer

Free tiers from named providers are worth using to test: 10 proxies and 1 GB a month at Webshare, $5 of credit at Oxylabs. Public free lists cost you time and trust instead of money. When a job needs more than the free limit, the cheapest paid plans start at $2 to $5, and the price comparison shows which one fits your amount.