Proxy-Cheap vs ProxyScrape 2026: Budget Proxy Showdown
Proxy-Cheap and ProxyScrape both pitch themselves as affordable alternatives to the big proxy names, but they get there differently. Proxy-Cheap is a full-service residential and datacenter proxy provider with competitive per-gigabyte pricing and a sizable pool. ProxyScrape built its brand on free shared proxy lists, then layered paid residential and datacenter tiers on top. Both sit comfortably below $5/GB on residential traffic, which is why they keep showing up in the same buying conversations.
In 2026, the budget proxy segment is more crowded than it was two years ago. Prices have compressed, pool sizes have grown, and buyers have more leverage. That makes the differences between vendors that share a price bracket more meaningful, not less, because a 30% price gap at low volume is still real money when you are running thousands of requests per day. The headline winner here is Proxy-Cheap on residential workloads. ProxyScrape has a lane, but it is narrower than their marketing suggests.
We ran both services through the same scraping workflow over six weeks: a mix of e-commerce product pages, SERP checks, and ad verification pings across US, UK, DE, and SG exit nodes. The numbers below come from that testing plus current public pricing as of May 2026.
tldr: which one should you buy
Buy Proxy-Cheap if you need residential proxies at scale and want the lowest per-GB rate without sacrificing a meaningful pool. ProxyScrape makes sense only if you are doing light datacenter work and want to test on their free tier before spending anything. For most operators running real workloads, Proxy-Cheap wins on price, pool depth, and rotation control. ProxyScrape’s residential layer is a secondary product, and it shows.
pricing
Proxy-Cheap prices residential traffic by the gigabyte with volume discounts that kick in quickly. ProxyScrape sells datacenter proxies on seat-count subscriptions and residential by the GB, but their residential rates run higher.
| Plan | Proxy-Cheap | ProxyScrape |
|---|---|---|
| Entry tier | $2.49/GB residential (1 GB) | $2.99/mo, 500 shared DC proxies |
| Mid tier | $1.79/GB residential (10 GB) | $9.99/mo, 2,000 shared DC proxies |
| Residential (mid) | $1.79/GB at 10 GB | $4.00/GB residential |
| Datacenter | $1.99/100 dedicated IPs/mo | $0.99/100 shared IPs/mo |
| Pay-as-you-go | Yes, no expiry on residential GB | No PAYG; subscription only on DC |
| Free tier | None | ~1,000 shared HTTP/SOCKS proxies |
The gap on residential is significant. At 10 GB Proxy-Cheap comes in at $17.90 versus ProxyScrape’s $40.00 for the same traffic. Proxy-Cheap’s datacenter pricing is higher per seat, but their IPs tend to be dedicated rather than shared, which changes the success-rate math on anything moderately protected. ProxyScrape’s free tier is real and functional for testing, but shared IPs on heavily-scraped targets will burn fast.
what proxy-cheap does better
Residential pricing at volume. $1.79/GB at 10 GB is hard to beat in this segment without dropping to lower-tier providers where pool quality degrades noticeably.
Pool depth. Proxy-Cheap publishes a residential pool of over 40 million IPs across 130+ countries, which gives rotation enough headroom on high-request workflows where repeated IP reuse kills success rates.
Rotation control. You can set sticky session durations from 1 to 30 minutes per session, or flip to pure rotating per request, from the dashboard without touching config files.
No expiry on purchased GB. Traffic you buy does not expire, so you can stock up on a deal and burn it down over weeks without waste.
Mobile proxy availability. Proxy-Cheap offers 4G/LTE mobile proxies starting around $6.50/GB, which ProxyScrape does not offer at all. Useful for app-side verification workflows.
what proxyscrape does better
Free shared proxies for throwaway work. The free list updates regularly and gives you HTTP and SOCKS5 proxies at no cost, which is genuinely useful for initial testing or low-stakes scripts where burning IPs does not matter.
Datacenter seat pricing on a budget. At $0.99/100 shared datacenter IPs per month, ProxyScrape is cheaper on DC seat count than Proxy-Cheap. If your workload tolerates shared IPs and you need raw volume of datacenter addresses, that math works.
API proxy list delivery. ProxyScrape’s API delivers fresh proxy lists in plain text or JSON on a timer, which fits legacy scrapers that read from a file rather than routing through an endpoint.
Browser extension integration. ProxyScrape ships a Chrome extension for quick switching, useful for manual QA or ad verification checks where you need to spot-check a geo without spinning up a full automation stack.
Transparent uptime page. ProxyScrape maintains a public status page with historical uptime data. Proxy-Cheap does not publish equivalent transparency, which matters when you are debugging mystery failures.
features compared
| Feature | Proxy-Cheap | ProxyScrape |
|---|---|---|
| Residential pool size | 40M+ IPs | ~9M IPs |
| Datacenter proxies | Yes, dedicated and shared | Yes, shared |
| Mobile (4G/LTE) proxies | Yes | No |
| Geo coverage | 130+ countries | 100+ countries |
| Sticky sessions | 1,30 min configurable | Up to 10 min |
| Rotation control | Per-request or sticky | Per-request or sticky |
| SOCKS5 support | Yes | Yes |
| Free tier | No | Yes (~1,000 shared DC) |
| API access | Yes (endpoint-based) | Yes (list-based API) |
| Dashboard quality | Clean, functional | Basic but adequate |
| Chrome extension | No | Yes |
| Traffic expiry | No expiry | Subscription-tied |
performance
Over six weeks of testing across US, UK, DE, and SG targets, Proxy-Cheap residential proxies averaged a 91% success rate on Cloudflare-protected e-commerce pages and a 94% rate on open SERP targets. Median response time on US residential was 1.8 seconds per request. ProxyScrape residential hit 83% on the same Cloudflare targets and 90% on open targets, with a median response time of 2.3 seconds. The difference is not catastrophic for low-stakes scraping, but at 10,000 requests per day that 8-point gap in success rate translates to roughly 800 extra failed requests you have to retry or discard. Datacenter performance was closer: ProxyScrape shared DC proxies performed well on unprotected targets but dropped sharply on anything with rate limiting in place, consistent with high sharing ratios on those IPs. Proxy-Cheap’s dedicated datacenter IPs held steadier across the same targets. Neither service had meaningful downtime during the test window, though Proxy-Cheap had one 40-minute authentication endpoint outage in week three.
support and onboarding
Proxy-Cheap uses a ticket system with live chat during business hours (roughly UTC+2 timezone coverage). Average first response in testing was 3 hours on weekdays and closer to 14 hours over weekends. Onboarding documentation is solid: they have integration guides for Python requests, Puppeteer, Selenium, and Scrapy, plus a working Postman collection. ProxyScrape’s support is lighter. There is a ticket system and a Discord community that is reasonably active, but no live chat on the paid tier. Their docs cover the basics but assume more prior proxy knowledge than Proxy-Cheap’s do. If you are setting up a new team member who has not worked with rotating proxies before, Proxy-Cheap’s onboarding materials will get them productive faster. For experienced operators, both are adequate, because the integration pattern is simple enough that docs matter less.
verdict by use case
E-commerce price scraping at volume. Proxy-Cheap. The larger residential pool and lower per-GB cost make it the better choice when you are pulling tens of thousands of product pages per day.
Ad verification spot checks. ProxyScrape. The Chrome extension and free tier make it easy to manually check a geo without setting up an automation pipeline.
SERP tracking on a tight budget. Proxy-Cheap. At $1.79/GB residential you can run meaningful SERP monitoring without burning through budget fast. ProxyScrape’s $4/GB residential gets expensive quickly on this use case.
Throwaway datacenter work (testing, low-value targets). ProxyScrape. The free tier and cheap shared DC seats are purpose-built for this. No reason to pay Proxy-Cheap rates if you are hammering unprotected endpoints with throwaway IPs.
Mobile app verification. Proxy-Cheap. ProxyScrape does not offer mobile proxies. If you need 4G exit nodes for app-side geo checking, Proxy-Cheap is the only option between these two.
alternatives to both
If neither fits, there are three worth knowing about.
Bright Data is the category leader on residential pool size and targeting precision. It costs significantly more, but their full review covers why it is justified for enterprise scraping workloads.
Smartproxy sits between these two budget options and the enterprise tier. Their residential pricing is competitive with Proxy-Cheap at volume and their support is stronger. See the Smartproxy review for a detailed breakdown.
Oxylabs is the pick if you need guaranteed SLAs and compliance documentation for regulated industries. Not budget, but the Oxylabs review explains what you get for the premium.
For a broader look at where these fit, the proxies category page has current rankings across the full market.
You can read the full Proxy-Cheap review and the full ProxyScrape review for deeper dives into each vendor individually.
For proxy industry benchmarks and methodology, the Proxyway market research reports publish annual performance data that informed parts of this comparison. Cloudflare’s bot management documentation is useful context for understanding why residential pool depth matters on protected targets.
disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. pricing independently verified as of 2026, vendors cannot purchase placement.