Here at Proxyway, we have a complicated relationship with free proxies.
With free proxies you never know who actually is in the middle between you and the web.
You might think that the proxy server is safe and will only make your connection secure.
But a lot of the times this couldn't be further from the truth.
Using them is risky, yet as with all free things, the demand for them never dies off. That’s why I’m here to bring you
a list of top proxy providers that offer free IP lists and providers that offer
a safer option - free proxy plans. Make sure to stick till the end for those!
The free lists are collected by scanning the web for computers with open connections
and work best with web scraping tools, automation software,
and other apps. Of course, you can also use them solely for anonymity purposes. However don’t
expect too much, free list IPs are often slow, unstable, and don’t stay online for very long.
Free proxy plans are safer, but limited, so work best for one-off tasks.
Let’s start with the free IP list providers. First up - ProxyScrape. The
provider enables you to choose from three lists based on their protocol. Those are
HTTP(S), SOCKS4, and SOCKS5. They range from 200 to 2,000 IPs, which isn’t a lot;
that’s because ProxyScrape updates the IPs every five minutes to filter out the dead ones.
You can filter the lists by speed, location, anonymity level, and encryption status.
Unlike some other websites, ProxyScrape offers generous exporting options. You can
download the filtered list to a .txt file or use the provided API free of charge.
The downside is that you can’t see the actual list before exporting it.
And while frequent refresh times should ensure live IPs,
you have no way to know if they’ll stay online, as there are no uptime metrics.
The second provider worth exploring is Free-proxy.cz. It’s a long-standing and one of the
most feature-complete proxy lists. It offers over 5,000 IPs from more than 100 countries. Of course,
some of them have only a few addresses, but major locations like the US include hundreds.
The website lets you filter proxies by protocol, location and anonymity. You
then receive 35 IPs per page with additional information about their response time, speed,
uptime, and when they were last checked. You can sort each parameter. The uptime metric is
especially useful, as the IPs are checked infrequently – every six hours or longer.
Spys.one is another old-timer that’s still up and running. It offers one of the most
extensive proxy lists we’ve seen, with over 28,000 proxies in ~160 countries.
The proxies are updated at different times, so some will be checked a few minutes ago,
while others will have stayed there for over a year.
Spys.one lets you filter the IPs by various parameters like protocol, anonymity, and location.
It also includes less usual filters such as city, ASN, Squid, and Mikrotik proxies. You have several
ways to narrow down the IPs you need, the simplest one being tabs at the top of the page. There’s
additional information by each address, such as its latency, uptime, and the date it was checked.
Despite its size and wealth of options, Spys.one isn’t the easiest proxy list
to work with. While you can choose to show between 30 and 500 IPs, there’s no pagination,
so you’re never sure how many addresses there are in total. Also, you can’t really sort the columns,
and you have no way to export the proxies in bulk. So, there’s a lot of handpicking involved.
Hidemy.name is a VPN provider that also offers a list of free proxies.
It constantly has around 10,000 proxies in over 60 countries. To our surprise,
among the main countries were Armenia, Belize, and Curacao. You can filter the list by location,
protocol, and anonymity; the list also shows the IP’s speed and when it was updated. It’s nice that
you can have several toggles at once, for example, to include both anonymous and elite addresses.
The list refreshes pretty frequently. The newest proxies were updated a minute ago
when we last checked, and the oldest ones were around four hours prior.
The biggest issue is actually getting the list out of the website:
you can export them in multiple ways, but only after paying $5. That’s one way to monetize.
Now let’s move on to the providers offering free proxy plans.
And the first recommendation is Razorproxy. Though it’s a private proxy provider, Razorproxy does
offer a completely free plan. The plan lets you access 40,000 shared datacenter IPs in the US.
The provider’s proxies will be faster and much more stable than any public address. In addition,
they automatically rotate, so you won’t need to manage a proxy list by hand.
We only wish it’d be a monthly and not a one-time deal.
With Razorproxy’s free plan, you get 2 GBs of data without other limitations,
which is pretty generous. This will require filling in a form.
If you enjoyed the service you can upgrade to a paid plan once the traffic runs out.
Webshare offers 10 static datacenter proxies from four different locations. These IPs are private,
which ensures predictable uptime and performance.
The provider gives you the option to rotate this list, though I’m not sure how much good that would
do with so few IPs. The catch? You get 1 GB of traffic (per month) with max 50 parallel threads.
Don’t hesitate to click those links in the description to explore
all of the mentioned providers yourself. For more
superb recommendations, visit our best proxy playlist, and I’ll see you in the next one!