FloppyData Alternatives: Better Proxies (and One Smarter Option)
FloppyData's $1/GB residential pricing looks unbeatable - until you start seeing 502 errors, discover your "residential" IPs carry fraud scores around 80/100, and spend days going back and forth with support over a refund. Trustpilot flags FloppyData's review page with an integrity warning after removing fake and incentivized reviews. Failed requests erase the savings fast.
The complaints follow a pattern. Users report proxies going down "repeatedly throughout the day... 10 to 30 minutes at a time," killing scheduled scraping jobs. Multiple reviewers flag "residential" IPs that are actually datacenter addresses, blacklisted and triggering robot checks on every request. One GoLogin benchmark did rank FloppyData #1, but that test checked only 50 IPs per provider across three regions - hardly a stress test.
Here's the thing: $1/GB is the most expensive proxy pricing on the market if your success rate is 50%.
Our Top Picks (TL;DR)
- SOAX - Best overall. Clean pools, $1.99 trial. From $3.60/GB.
- Decodo - Best for scaling teams. Free 3-day trial, 55M+ IPs, from $3.25/GB.
- Prospeo - Best if you're buying proxies to scrape business emails. 143M+ verified emails at ~$0.01 each, no proxies needed.
Best FloppyData Alternatives for 2026
SOAX
Use this if you want one credit pool across residential, mobile, ISP, and datacenter proxies. No separate subscriptions - buy credits once and allocate wherever you need bandwidth. The pool covers 155M+ residential IPs, 33M+ mobile, and 2.6M+ ISP addresses.
Pricing runs $3.60/GB at 25GB, dropping to $2.00/GB at 800GB. The $1.99 three-day trial gives you 400MB to test IP quality before committing - enough bandwidth to validate targeting and quality across a few geos before you scale. SOAX has also doubled US proxy coverage recently and reports a 7% latency improvement from infrastructure upgrades.
We've found SOAX's unified credit system genuinely useful for teams that bounce between scraping use cases. One week you're hammering residential IPs for e-commerce data, the next you need mobile proxies for app testing. No separate invoices, no wasted allocations.
Skip this if you need sub-$1.50/GB pricing at high volume. Enterprise tiers start around $0.32/GB, but you'll need to talk to sales.
Prospeo - Skip Proxies Entirely
If you're buying proxies to scrape business emails and phone numbers, you're solving the wrong problem. Proxies, scrapers, rotation logic, CAPTCHA solvers - that's infrastructure overhead for data that already exists in verified form.
Prospeo gives you direct access to 143M+ verified emails and 125M+ verified mobile numbers across 300M+ professional profiles. Cost works out to ~$0.01 per email. Email accuracy runs 98% with a 7-day data refresh cycle, which is roughly six times faster than the industry average. There's a free tier with 75 emails/month so you can validate quality before spending anything. No 502 errors, no fraud-scored IPs - search by 30+ filters, export verified contacts, push them to your sequencer. If you want to go deeper on list quality and matching, see data enrichment services.
Real results back this up. Snyk's 50 AEs cut bounce rates from 35-40% to under 5% and generated 200+ new opportunities per month. Stack Optimize built to $1M ARR while maintaining 94%+ deliverability across all clients. If your proxy spend is really just a roundabout way to get contact data, this is the direct path. For more options in this category, compare sales prospecting databases and outbound lead generation tools.
Decodo
Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) targets mid-market teams who want competitive pricing with a free trial to validate before committing. It's CNET's pick for "best for smaller businesses", which tracks - the onboarding is straightforward and pricing doesn't punish you for starting small.
The good: $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go, $3.25/GB at 25GB, drops to $2.00/GB at 1TB. Free 3-day trial. A claimed 99.68% success rate.
The annoying: their pricing page says 55M+ IPs while the residential product page claims 115M+. Pick a number, Decodo. Also, VAT gets added on top of listed prices, so watch your invoices if you're budgeting to the dollar.
LightningProxies
Aggressive pricing is the draw here. Sale rates hit $3.50 for 1GB, $2.20/GB at 100GB, and $1.50/GB at 1TB+. The pool runs 10M+ residential IPs with country, state, city, and ISP targeting. Trustpilot reviews sit at 4.6 stars, which is solid for this space.
The tradeoff is pool size. 10M IPs is a fraction of what SOAX or Bright Data offer, and you'll feel it on niche geos where IP diversity matters. The free trial also requires live chat rather than self-serve signup, which is a minor friction point but worth knowing upfront.
IPRoyal
IPRoyal's standout feature is non-expiring traffic. Buy bandwidth and use it whenever - no monthly reset, no pressure to burn through your allocation. Sticky sessions last up to 7 days, which is genuinely useful for session-dependent scraping.
Subscription pricing starts at $7.00/GB for 1GB and drops to $4.90/GB at 50GB. At higher volumes, IPRoyal also advertises residential pricing "from $1.75/GB."
The catch: Reddit users in r/GrowthHacking report IPRoyal IPs still get flagged on Instagram and TikTok for multi-accounting. Premium subnets don't guarantee social platform access. In our experience, non-expiring traffic sounds better than it works for most teams - bandwidth you never use is bandwidth you overpaid for.
Bright Data
Use this if you're spending $500+/mo on proxy bandwidth and need the most resilient network available. Bright Data's 150M residential IPs and 99%+ success rates in independent benchmarks make it the enterprise default. Geo-targeting goes down to city, ASN, and ZIP level.
Skip this if you're under $500/mo. PAYG residential runs $8.40/GB - often 2-3x SOAX depending on the tier. KYC costs you a day of setup before you send a single request. And Bright Data IPs also get flagged on social platforms, same as IPRoyal. If multi-accounting is your use case, no provider fully solves it.
Oxylabs
Oxylabs runs 175M residential IPs at ~$4/GB and is CNET's pick for larger businesses. Trials run 3-7 days depending on account type. If you're already evaluating Bright Data, Oxylabs belongs in the same bake-off - similar scale, similar friction, similar price tier. We won't belabor the comparison here; the real differentiator between these two usually comes down to which sales team gives you a better deal.
You're not shopping for proxies - you're shopping for contact data. Prospeo gives you 143M+ verified emails and 125M+ mobile numbers without a single proxy request. 98% email accuracy, 7-day data refresh, ~$0.01 per email. Snyk's 50 AEs dropped bounce rates from 40% to under 5% in weeks.
Ditch the proxy stack and get the data directly.
Pricing Comparison
All residential proxy rates. FloppyData included as baseline.
| Provider | 1 GB | 50-100 GB | Free Trial | Non-Expiring |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FloppyData | $1.00/GB (~20GB packages) | $1.00/GB | No | No |
| SOAX | $3.60/GB (25GB plan) | $3.40/GB (50GB) | $1.99 / 3-day | No |
| Decodo | $4.00/GB (PAYG) | $2.75/GB (100GB) | Free 3-day | No |
| LightningProxies | $3.50 (1GB sale) | $2.20/GB (100GB) | Via chat | No |
| IPRoyal | $7.00/GB (1GB) | $4.90/GB (50GB) | No | Yes |
| Bright Data | $8.40/GB (PAYG) | ~$3.84/GB (130GB) | No | No |
| Oxylabs | ~$4.00/GB | ~$4.00/GB | 3-7 day | No |
Which Alternative Fits?
Your best pick depends on what you're actually using proxies for.
| Use Case | Best Pick |
|---|---|
| Web scraping at scale | SOAX or Bright Data |
| Multi-accounting | LightningProxies or IPRoyal |
| Budget / intermittent use | IPRoyal (non-expiring) or Decodo |
| B2B lead gen / email collection | Prospeo |
Let's be honest - among these FloppyData alternatives, SOAX offers the best balance of price, pool quality, and flexibility for most scraping use cases. If your real goal is B2B contact data, skip the proxy stack entirely. If you're building outbound on top of that data, use proven sales prospecting techniques and keep an eye on email bounce rate.
At $1/GB with a 50% success rate, FloppyData costs you $2 per usable gigabyte - before you even parse the scraped HTML. Prospeo delivers clean, verified B2B emails for $0.01 each with 98% accuracy. No rotation logic, no CAPTCHA solvers, no bandwidth math. Just 30+ filters and export.
Stop debugging proxies. Start booking meetings.
FAQ
Is FloppyData legit?
FloppyData is a real proxy service with genuinely competitive $1/GB pricing. However, Trustpilot carries an active review integrity warning, and users report datacenter IPs sold as residential with fraud scores around 80/100. Run a small test before committing volume.
What's the cheapest residential proxy in 2026?
FloppyData at $1/GB is one of the cheapest widely advertised residential rates. LightningProxies drops to $1.50/GB at 1TB+. SOAX and Decodo both reach $2.00/GB at their highest tiers. Cheapest doesn't mean cleanest - factor in success rate before comparing per-GB cost.
Do I need proxies to find business emails?
No. Prospeo provides 143M+ verified emails directly at ~$0.01 each - no scraping infrastructure, no proxy costs, 98% accuracy. A free tier gives you 75 emails/month to test before committing.
How do I test a proxy provider before buying?
Start with SOAX's $1.99 trial (400MB, 3 days) or Decodo's free 3-day trial. Run your actual scraping targets - not just a speed test - and check success rates, IP fraud scores, and geo accuracy. A 90%+ success rate on your specific targets is the minimum threshold worth paying for.