Recommended Free Tools
Web-scraping proxies route requests through an address other than your server’s. That can help with geographic testing, connection management, and targets that limit traffic from one address, but a proxy does not guarantee access, authorization, anonymity, successful extraction, or lawful use. The right choice depends on your permitted workload, response quality, session requirements, location, and total cost per usable result—not on a headline price alone.
What a scraping proxy actually changes
A proxy is a network intermediary. Your scraper sends a request to the proxy service, which forwards it to the target and returns the response. The target generally sees the proxy’s source address rather than the address of your application server. Depending on the service, you may also choose a country, city, carrier, session duration, rotation policy, authentication method, or concurrency limit.
That routing change is only one component of a scraping system. The target can still require JavaScript, cookies, authentication, rate limits, consent interaction, or a challenge. Terms of service, privacy rules, copyright, database rights, and other laws apply independently of the network path. Use proxies only for targets and data you are permitted to access, and honor published restrictions and reasonable request rates.
Is demand for proxies increasing?
Apify’s State of Web Scraping Report 2026 surveyed hundreds of professionals. In its proxy section, 65.8% said they used more proxies than the previous year, 20% reported stable use, 3.3% reported lower use, and 10.8% were unsure. The report also found that 58.3% said their proxy expenses increased; 28.3% said costs were stable, 2.5% said they fell, and 10.8% did not know.
Windows Errors? Fix Them Before They Spread
Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallOutdated Drivers Are Slowing You Down
One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware match#1 Best Overall
- 【WIRELESS MOBILE MINI TRAVEL ROUTER】 Convert a public network (wired or wireless) to a private Wi-Fi for secure surfing. Tethering. Powered by any laptop USB, power banks or 5V/2A DC adapters (sold separately). 39g (1.41 Oz) only, portable and pocket friendly. 2.4GHz ONLY
- 【OPEN SOURCE & PROGRAMMABLE】 OpenWrt pre-installed, USB disk extendable.
- 【LARGER STORAGE & EXTENDABILITY】 128MB RAM, 16MB Flash ROM, dual Ethernet ports, UART and GPIOs available for hardware DIY.
- 【OPENVPN CLIENT】 OpenVPN client pre-installed, compatible with 30+ VPN service providers.
- 【PACKAGE CONTENTS】 GL-MT300N-V2 (Mango) mini router (2-year Warranty), USB cable, Ethernet cable, User Manual. Please update to the latest firmware.
These are respondent-reported directions, not a census, market-revenue measurement, or a count of requests or gigabytes. Apify explicitly did not define what “more proxies” meant. Its interpretation is that growing consumption may offset falling unit prices, but that remains an interpretation of the survey. The same survey found 43.1% used two or three providers and 25.9% used one provider; this describes observed setups, not a requirement to multi-source.
How much do proxies cost?
There is no single meaningful proxy price. Providers commonly charge by transferred traffic, by IP address and lease term, or by API call. To compare offers, measure the same workload: pages requested, average response size, retries, concurrency, geographic targeting, session length, and the percentage of responses that become usable records.
Provider price snapshots
The following are displayed starting prices from provider pages checked on September 29, 2026. They are not market averages, and the products have different units, included quantities, and terms.
| Product type | Displayed starting price | What to verify |
|---|---|---|
| HProxy residential | $0.44/GB | IP sourcing and consent, rotation, sticky sessions, country availability, and bandwidth minimums |
| HProxy datacenter | $0.10/IP | Lease period, country, concurrent requests, bandwidth policy, and target success |
| HProxy ISP | $0.65/GB | Whether addresses rotate or remain static, lease terms, and metering |
| HProxy mobile | $1.50/GB | Carrier and country coverage, session duration, and whether mobile egress is necessary |
| HProxy scraper API | From $1.49 per 1,000 calls | Supported targets, retries, rendering, parsing, failure billing, and definition of a successful call |
| IPWAY residential Pro example | $1.80/GB | Included volume and business or enterprise discounts |
| IPWAY rotating datacenter Pro example | 300 GB for $144/month ($0.48/GB) | Plan limits and whether the comparison is equivalent to another provider’s offer |
| Geonode displayed residential | From $0.27/GB | Plan conditions and current availability |
| Geonode displayed ISP | From $1.25/IP | Lease duration, bandwidth, and location |
| Geonode displayed datacenter | From $0.50/IP | Address pool, concurrency, and country |
| Geonode unlimited residential | $1,800/month | Fair-use, speed, targeting, and concurrent-session conditions |
HProxy’s scraper-call price and “blocked or errored calls are not billed” statement are provider claims, not independent benchmarks. Geonode’s displayed “5.4×” cost advantage and 96% success figure are likewise provider claims; the page labels the latter as a 1,000-request e-commerce and ticketing run and dates the competitor comparison to May 2026. Verify volatile rates and terms before committing.
A workload calculation
For a bandwidth plan, estimate:
monthly pages × average transferred GB per page × expected attempts per successful page × price per GB
For example, if your permitted job needs 200,000 pages, each transfers 0.004 GB, and you average 1.4 attempts per successful page, expected traffic is 1,120 GB. Multiply that volume by the quoted rate, then add any minimums, storage, rendering, and parsing costs. The arithmetic is a planning template, not a performance result.
Rank #2
- 【Advanced Home Data & Media Hub】For advanced home users who need phone backup, file storage, and centralized data management. Centralize family photos, 4K videos, movies, computer backups, and personal files in one place while running multiple apps for home entertainment and everyday data management. Suitable for households with growing digital libraries and multiple NAS use cases.
- 【Built for Creators, Media Servers & Advanced Apps】Powered by the Intel N100 Quad-Core CPU, 8GB DDR5 RAM, 2.5GbE networking, and dual M.2 NVMe slots, DXP2800 handles large files and heavier workloads with ease. Run Docker, virtual machines, and media server applications compatible with Plex—ideal for content creators, tech enthusiasts, and advanced home users managing 4K videos, RAW photos, personal media libraries, and multiple NAS apps.
- 【Up to 80TB for Growing Digital Libraries】 Supports up to 80TB of storage using two HDD bays and two M.2 NVMe SSD slots for family photos, movies, RAW photos, 4K videos, work files, and device backups. AI photo management supports recognition of people, objects, scenes, and locations, album organization, and duplicate photo detection. HDDs and SSDs are not included.
- 【AI-powered Home Surveillance】Turn DXP2800 into a centralized home surveillance hub by connecting compatible network cameras and storing recordings locally on your NAS. AI-powered features include Face Recognition, People Detection, and Pet Detection, helping advanced home users review important events more efficiently while managing home surveillance and personal data in one place.
- 【One data Center Across Your Devices】Keep files from desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and other devices together instead of scattered across cloud accounts and external drives. Access, back up, organize, and share data across Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, web browsers, and compatible smart TVs—ideal for creators and advanced home users working across multiple devices.
For an IP plan, add the number of addresses multiplied by the lease cost, then test whether bandwidth, concurrency, and target response rates meet the workload. For an API, divide the bill by successful, usable records—not raw calls. A nominally cheap request can be expensive if it returns an error, incomplete fields, or a page your parser cannot use.
Residential, datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxies
Network labels describe address origin and service design, not a universal quality ranking. Provider definitions, sourcing practices, rotation, and targeting differ, so validate a small, authorized sample before scaling.
Do these 3 things before closing this tab:
1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDatacenter proxies
Datacenter addresses come from hosting networks rather than consumer access providers. They can be economical for high-volume jobs when a target accepts them and usually offer predictable throughput. Check address reputation, country choices, concurrent-request limits, bandwidth charges, and the target’s observed response rate. They are not automatically unsuitable for every site.
Residential proxies
Residential services route through consumer-network addresses. They may fit workflows requiring consumer-network geography or a broad location pool, but per-gigabyte billing makes large HTML documents, images, JavaScript resources, and retries costly. Ask how addresses are sourced and consented, how rotation and sticky sessions work, and whether a city-level target is actually available.
ISP or static-ISP proxies
ISP products can be a middle option when you need a longer-lived address associated with an internet service provider. Confirm whether the product is static or rotating, how long an address is leased, whether traffic is metered separately, and how many simultaneous sessions are allowed.
Mobile proxies
Mobile networks can be relevant when a permitted test specifically requires carrier egress or mobile geography. They are often priced by traffic. Compare country and carrier coverage, session duration, throughput, and the incremental value of a mobile origin before paying the premium.
Quick wins for a faster PC:
Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Do you need residential proxies?
No—not by default. Start with the least complex network type that meets the target’s documented access requirements and your location and session needs. Datacenter may be adequate for an allowed, high-volume job; residential or mobile may be justified by a specific consumer-network or carrier requirement. Run a controlled sample and compare successful, usable output, not just whether a TCP connection was possible.
Rank #3
- One Place for All Your Data - Consolidate scattered files from multiple computers, phones and external drives into one accessible hub with 100% ownership
- Professional File Collaboration - Share projects with clients, sync documents across teams and maintain version control without Dropbox fees
- Automated Backup Protection - Set-and-forget backups for Macs, PCs and mobile devices to multiple destinations including cloud and external drives
- DIY Surveillance System - Transform IP cameras into a professional monitoring solution with motion alerts, recording schedules and remote viewing
- 2-Year Warranty - Reliable hardware backed by Synology's expert customer support team and ongoing software updates
When a scraping API is cheaper than raw proxies
A managed scraping or web-data API can bundle routing with browser rendering, retries, parsing, structured fields, and monitoring. It may cost more per request while costing less per delivered record because your team avoids proxy orchestration, challenge handling, browser infrastructure, and maintenance.
Compare equivalent deliverables:
- Price per successful, complete record or page.
- Whether JavaScript rendering, cookies, retries, and geographic targeting are included.
- Failure and blocked-request billing rules.
- Concurrency, freshness, field coverage, and export format.
- Engineering time, observability, storage, and proxy replacement in a self-managed design.
HProxy currently lists scraper calls from $1.49 per 1,000 and says blocked or errored calls are not billed. Treat that as its published offer, not independent benchmarking. A fair comparison measures the same target and success definition on both approaches.
Where proxies are used
Provider pages describe public-web collection, e-commerce price and availability monitoring, market research, SEO and rank tracking, ad verification, and AI or LLM data collection. These are vendor-described applications, not independent proof that a particular product will work. Social-media and AI-agent examples must still comply with platform rules and must not be used to misrepresent identity or evade controls.
The Tool Desk
Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Operational separation
A 2025 European Commission CROS deliverable describes Statistics Hesse creating a separate scraping environment, routing requests through a proxy server in a DMZ, and separating that system from internal infrastructure. The report says a dedicated scraper IP helped contain potential blocking impact. Its software-selection process moved from Apache Reverse Proxy to Squid because the former was inadequate for massive scraping in that environment. This is one organization’s architecture, not a universal prescription; the broader lesson is to isolate scraping credentials, hosts, and outbound controls from sensitive systems.
Reliability, security, and free-proxy risks
Free public proxies should not be treated as a bargain. In the 2024 Free Proxies Unmasked study by Naif Mehanna, Walter Rudametkin, Pierre Laperdrix, and Antoine Vastel, the authors collected more than 640,600 proxies from 11 providers and tested them daily over a 30-month longitudinal study. Only 34.5% were active at least once during the test period. The study identified 4,452 vulnerabilities, including 1,755 enabling unauthorized remote code execution and 2,036 enabling host privilege escalation, and found 16,923 proxies manipulating content.
Those figures describe the study’s sample and method, not every paid network. They do establish why an unknown intermediary should not receive credentials, private data, or unencrypted application traffic. The authors conclude: “Ultimately, our research reveals that the use of free web proxies poses significant risks to users’ privacy and security.”
Rank #4
- Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited data.
- Super-fast VPN and one tap connect.
- Free worldwide multiple servers.
- Works with all type of data carries. (Wi-Fi, 4G, LTE, 3G).
- No registration, sign up needed.
Minimum operational safeguards
- Use provider authentication and rotate credentials; never embed secrets in public repositories.
- Send only the minimum data required and use HTTPS to the target.
- Log proxy endpoint, status, latency, bytes, retries, and final usability without storing unnecessary personal data.
- Set per-target rate limits, concurrency caps, timeouts, and circuit breakers.
- Quarantine suspicious responses and validate content type, certificate behavior, and expected fields.
- Keep scraping hosts separate from internal production networks where practical.
- Document target permission, retention, deletion, and access-control decisions.
How to compare providers without fooling yourself
- Define the permitted job. List targets, fields, geography, schedule, freshness, session length, and maximum concurrency.
- Measure page weight. Record transferred bytes for representative pages, including redirects and resources your implementation actually downloads.
- Define success. A successful request should produce the required fields, not merely an HTTP 200.
- Run a small sample. Compare the same URLs, time window, location, session policy, and retry budget.
- Calculate delivered cost. Include proxy traffic, API fees, browser compute, storage, engineering time, and failed attempts.
- Check contract and provenance. Review acceptable-use rules, address sourcing, consent claims, data processing, support, and cancellation terms.
- Scale gradually. Watch success rate, latency, error classes, bandwidth, and target feedback before increasing concurrency.
Troubleshooting common failures
Many 403, 429, or challenge responses
Reduce concurrency and request rate, verify that your use is authorized, preserve required cookies and sessions, and check whether the selected address type or geography is appropriate. A new proxy alone is not proof that the target permits the workflow.
Costs exceed the estimate
Inspect response bytes, image and script loading, redirects, retries, and session churn. Recalculate using actual attempts per usable result and confirm billing units, minimums, and overage rules.
Sessions lose state
Use a documented sticky-session option, retain cookies for the intended duration, and avoid rotating between requests that must share authentication or a cart. Confirm the provider’s maximum session lifetime.
Requests are slow or time out
Measure DNS, connection, proxy, target, and rendering time separately. Lower concurrency, choose a nearer permitted region, increase a bounded timeout, and stop retrying non-transient failures.
Returned content is incomplete or altered
Validate content length, encoding, content type, and required fields. Compare a direct permitted request with the proxied response, quarantine unexpected scripts or injected markup, and contact the provider before trusting the data.
IP addresses are unavailable in the needed location
Check whether “country” means exit country, city, carrier, or an approximate database location. Ask about pool size and replacement policy; do not assume a country selector guarantees city-level precision.
Or skip the browser setup
If your task is to obtain clean website screenshots rather than raw HTML records, ScreenshotNeo provides a website screenshot API and MCP server. A single request can return PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF. It accepts cookie and consent banners before capture and removes more than 60 known consent platforms, newsletter popups, and chat widgets; each cleanup step can be disabled. Bot checks and CAPTCHAs, blank pages, timeouts, failed loads, and cache hits are not billed, and response headers identify the page verdict and billing status.
Example cURL request (see the ScreenshotNeo documentation):
Best Value
- Complete Phone & Computer Backup - Automatically protect photos, documents and videos from iPhone android, Mac and Windows to one secure location
- Your Private File Cloud - Access files from anywhere and share large projects with family or clients without relying on expensive cloud subscriptions
- Smart Home Security Hub - Monitor your home 24/7 with AI-powered surveillance that detects people, vehicles and sends instant alerts
- 100% Data Ownership - Keep full control of your personal data with multi-platform access and no monthly subscription fees
- 2-Year Warranty - Reliable hardware backed by Synology's expert customer support team and ongoing software updates
curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webpPython:
import requests
r = requests.get("https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot", params={"access_key": "YOUR_API_KEY", "url": "https://stripe.com"}, timeout=90)
open("shot.webp", "wb").write(r.content)Node.js:
const q = new URLSearchParams({ access_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY', url: 'https://stripe.com' });
const res = await fetch(`https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot?${q}`);ScreenshotNeo also supports full-page capture with lazy images, CSS-selector elements, dark mode, device presets and custom viewports, retina scale, PDF paper and page options, custom CSS and JavaScript, clicks, waits, blocked resource types, headers, cookies, user agents, Authorization, timezone, geolocation, transparent backgrounds, resizing, TTL-based caching, signed links, asynchronous webhooks, bulk capture for 100 URLs per call, usage reporting, and an OpenAPI specification. Its MCP server exposes take_screenshot, get_page_info, and capture_pdf to Claude, Cursor, and other MCP clients.
What’s actually slowing this PC down?
Pick the symptom - the matching free tool is one click away.
There is a free allowance of 1,000 screenshots per month with no card. Paid plans start at $5 for 3,000 shots; yearly billing provides two months free, and every feature is included on every plan. Create a free ScreenshotNeo account.
Bottom line
Choose proxies by measured cost per usable result and by the access, geography, session, and compliance requirements of your specific workload. Rising usage and expenses are visible in Apify’s 2026 survey, but they do not establish a universal market price. Test a permitted sample, include retries and page weight, avoid free public proxies for sensitive traffic, and treat every provider performance number as a claim until your own measurements confirm it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are proxies the same as a scraping API?
No. A proxy primarily changes the network route. A scraping API may additionally provide browser rendering, retries, parsing, structured fields, and monitoring; compare delivered results and total operating cost.
Can a proxy make scraping anonymous or legal?
No. It changes the apparent source address but does not remove legal, contractual, privacy, or identification obligations.
Free tools Windows power users keep installed
One-click scans. No signup required.
Why can a low per-GB price still be expensive?
Large pages, images, retries, redirects, and low usable-response rates increase paid traffic. Calculate cost per successful record using your measured workload.
What should I test before buying a large plan?
Use a small, authorized sample with representative URLs, locations, session lengths, concurrency, and fields, then record success, latency, bytes, retries, and total cost.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
