7 PlainProxies Alternatives Worth Switching To
PlainProxies' free web proxy is dead. As of late 2025, the page just fails to load - no announcement, no redirect, nothing. Their paid service isn't doing much better: a 3.5/5 on Trustpilot from 25 reviews, with complaints about speeds that swing between fast and unusable, geo-targeting that routes Netherlands traffic through Ukraine, and refunds that get messy if you paid with crypto.
Pricing is also confusing. Their unlimited residential option is marketed at €158 for 1 day, while the same product line shows monthly pricing starting at €249. So the "daily" route gets expensive fast if you keep renewing.
We tested replacements against real scraping workloads and independent benchmarks. Here's what's actually worth your money.
Our Picks (TL;DR)
- IPRoyal - Best all-around replacement. 32M+ residential IPs, 99.84% success rate in a large 2026 benchmark, traffic that never expires. Starts at $5.25/GB.
- Webshare - Best free replacement. 10 proxies and 1GB/month at zero cost, no credit card.
- Prospeo - Skip proxies entirely if your goal is B2B contact data. 143M+ verified emails, no proxy infrastructure needed. Free tier included.
Pricing Comparison
PlainProxies included for context.
| Provider | Residential $/GB | Datacenter | Free Tier/Trial | Rating / Success Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PlainProxies | €0.55/GB | From €2/mo (entry) / from €27/mo (1TB tier) | Free web proxy removed | 3.5/5 Trustpilot |
| IPRoyal | $5.25-7.00/GB | $1.39/proxy | None | 99.84% |
| Decodo | $2.00-3.75/GB | $0.60/GB | 3-day, 100MB | 99.75% |
| Webshare | $2.25-3.50/GB | $2.99/100 proxies | 10 proxies, 1GB/mo | 99.58% |
| Bright Data | ~$5-10/GB | Sales-led | Free trial | 98.50% |
| Oxylabs | ~$5-10/GB | Sales-led | Free trial | 99.60% |
| Evomi | $0.99/GB | $0.45/GB | Free trial + refund | - |
Best Replacements for PlainProxies
IPRoyal
G2 lists IPRoyal as the top PlainProxies alternative, and benchmark data backs it up. In a Zetta Proxies summer 2025 test - 100 requests per second over 30 minutes - IPRoyal posted a 99.84% technical success rate, the highest score of any provider tested. The residential pool covers 32M+ IPs. A popular r/WebDataDiggers community benchmark in 2026 also put IPRoyal near the top for residential performance and flexibility.
Pricing runs $5.25/GB at 10GB on subscription, scaling down at volume. The standout feature: traffic never expires. Buy 50GB today, use it over six months. That alone makes it a better deal than PlainProxies' confusing daily-vs-monthly structure.
Use this if: You need reliable residential proxies with flexible consumption.
Skip this if: You're optimizing purely on cost per GB - Decodo and Webshare are cheaper.
Decodo
Formerly Smartproxy, Decodo is the volume play. Residential pricing starts at $3.75/GB for 3GB and drops to $2.00/GB at 1TB. The pool is marketed as 55M+ ethically sourced IPs, and Decodo advertises sub-0.5s average response time on its pricing page. In the Zetta Proxies benchmark, Decodo hit a 99.75% technical success rate.
There's a 3-day free trial with 100MB that auto-activates a paid plan unless you cancel - so set a reminder.
Use this if: You're running high-volume scraping and need the best cost-per-GB at scale. If you're doing web scraping lead generation, the math usually favors Decodo at higher volumes.
Skip this if: You want the most unique US IPs in a short benchmark window. Bright Data and Oxylabs showed higher "observed IPs" in the same 30-minute test.
Webshare
CNET gave Webshare an 8.3/10, calling it the "cheapest all-around" option - and the free plan makes it the obvious free replacement for PlainProxies. You get 10 proxies and up to 1GB/month with no credit card required.
Paid residential runs $3.50/GB at 1GB, dropping to $2.25/GB at 100GB. Datacenter is remarkably cheap at 100 proxies for $2.99/month. Proxyway's 2025 research measured a 99.58% infrastructure success rate, which CNET cited in their review.
The tradeoff is speed and IP quality. CNET calls the IPs "pretty average" and notes slow response times. For testing or budget scraping, though, nothing beats free.
Bright Data
Here's the thing about Bright Data: it's the ZoomInfo of proxies. Massive, capable, and more than most people switching from PlainProxies actually need.
The numbers are impressive - 147,000+ unique US IPs observed in 30 minutes during the Zetta Proxies 2025 benchmark, more than any competitor tested. Enterprise-grade infrastructure covering residential, datacenter, ISP, mobile, and Web Unblocker. But residential pricing typically runs $5-10/GB, and the sales process is enterprise-oriented. If you're spending under $500/month, you'll feel like you're buying a semi truck to deliver groceries.
If your real goal is extracting contacts, compare this approach to using free lead generation tools instead of building a proxy stack.
Oxylabs
Oxylabs posted 116,000+ observed US IPs in 30 minutes and a 99.60% technical success rate in the same benchmark. Strong enterprise infrastructure across the board.
Where Oxylabs genuinely separates itself: mobile proxies. AIMultiple's head-to-head showed Oxylabs hitting 90-98% success on mobile versus Bright Data's 66-85%. That's a meaningful gap if mobile proxy performance matters to your workflow.
Same $5-10/GB enterprise pricing tier with sales-led onboarding. For everything outside mobile, it's a coin flip between Oxylabs and Bright Data.
Evomi
Budget newcomer with residential proxies starting at $0.99/GB - the cheapest on this list by a wide margin. Mobile from $4/GB, datacenter from $0.45/GB, plus a free trial and money-back guarantee. Less independent benchmark data exists compared to established players, so we'd test it on non-critical workloads first before going all-in.
If you're mainly trying to pull emails from pages, you may be better off with a dedicated email crawler or a free email scraper than paying for bandwidth.
You're comparing proxy providers at $2-7/GB to scrape professional emails. Prospeo gives you 143M+ verified emails and 125M+ mobile numbers directly - 98% accuracy, no proxy infrastructure, no CAPTCHA solving, no HTML parsing. Starting at $0.01 per email.
Stop scraping. Start selling. 75 free emails to prove it.
Pool Size Claims vs. Reality
Every proxy provider advertises massive IP pools. Here's what actually showed up in independent testing at 100 requests per second for 30 minutes:
| Provider | Observed US IPs (30 min) |
|---|---|
| Bright Data | 147,000+ |
| Oxylabs | 116,000+ |
| Decodo | 90,000+ |
| IPRoyal | 49,000+ |
Every provider's observed IPs are a fraction of what marketing pages imply. Don't pick a provider based on pool size hype. Success rate and response time matter more for actual workloads.
Scraping B2B Emails? Skip the Proxy
Let's be honest - a lot of teams paying for residential proxy bandwidth are really just trying to scrape professional profiles for email addresses. That means managing proxy rotation, handling CAPTCHAs, parsing HTML that breaks every time a site updates its layout, and then spending more time cleaning and verifying the data you pulled. We've watched teams burn through $200/month in proxy costs to collect contact data they could get directly for a fraction of that.
Prospeo eliminates that entire workflow. The database covers 143M+ verified emails and 125M+ verified mobile numbers across 300M+ professional profiles, refreshed on a 7-day cycle. Search with 30+ filters, export verified contacts directly. At roughly $0.01 per email with 98% accuracy, it's almost always cheaper than building a scraping-plus-proxy-plus-verification stack from scratch.
If you still need to validate what you collect, use an email verification workflow to keep bounce rates down.
Every proxy on this list advertises massive IP pools, but observed numbers tell a different story. Prospeo's B2B database skips the guesswork entirely - 300M+ profiles verified on a 7-day refresh cycle, with 30+ filters to find exactly who you need. No bandwidth costs, no rotation logic, no broken scrapers.
Replace your entire proxy-to-email pipeline with one search.
Free Web Proxy Alternatives
If you specifically need a browser-based proxy for quick anonymous browsing - the exact use case PlainProxies' free tool covered - these work without signup:
- Proxyium - Clean interface, no account required
- CroxyProxy - Handles video streaming reasonably well
- Hide.me - Established VPN provider with a free web proxy tool
None of these are suitable for scraping or automation. They're browser-only tools for viewing a blocked page or masking your IP for a quick session.
If you're doing outreach after collecting contacts, pair your list with sales prospecting techniques and a clean B2B cold email sequence.
FAQ
What happened to PlainProxies' free proxy?
The free web proxy stopped loading as of October 30, 2025, with no official announcement or redirect. A GoProxy test on that date confirmed the page was dead. Proxyium and CroxyProxy are the closest browser-based replacements if you just need quick anonymous browsing.
Is PlainProxies still worth using?
For most teams, no. Beyond Trustpilot complaints about speed and geo-targeting, the unlimited residential offering sold at €158/day gets expensive fast. IPRoyal and Decodo deliver better benchmark performance - 99.84% and 99.75% success rates respectively - with clearer pricing.
What's the cheapest residential proxy?
Evomi starts at $0.99/GB, the lowest per-GB rate available. Webshare offers 10 free proxies with 1GB/month at zero cost. For B2B email collection specifically, Prospeo at ~$0.01/email eliminates the need for proxy bandwidth entirely, which often works out cheaper than any proxy plan.
Which PlainProxies alternative has the best free tier?
Webshare gives you 10 proxies and 1GB/month with no credit card and no time limit - the most generous free proxy plan available. For browser-only anonymous browsing, Proxyium works instantly without any signup at all.