Paid vs Free Proxies: Pros and Cons

Proxies can bypass local provider blockings. They can also perform a number of specific functions, for example, traffic cleaning or compression, and load balancing. To do this, however, you need to rent a full-fledged web server and configure the appropriate software on it (your own proxy server). Only experienced professionals can do this. The specificity of such proxies is very narrow.

Froxy Community on Telegram

Join our community on Telegram to learn about the latest news and promotions

Join

Due to the fact that proxies transmit open requests, they should not be used to bypass blocking. To do this, it makes sense to consider the possibility of using niche VPNs (they are also sometimes called “VPN-proxies”). This is the only way to organize reliable encryption in open network areas.

As a result, it turns out that proxies work best for business tasks only, such as competitor parsing, gathering positions in search results, price analysis, checking ad displays, etc.

How is it better to choose the right proxy as there are both free and paid options in the market? Why waste an extra budget when you can save money? There is never extra money in business - what you manage to save is what you eventually earn.

It’s high time to take a closer look at the differences between free and premium proxies. Let's start with free ones now.

Free Proxies

Free proxies are widespread and they are not uncommon. They are of different types. For example, such proxies can be included in the software, expanding its functionality, or they can be responsible for providing access (implementing traffic balancing) to specific services/websites, etc.

However, you cannot solve your personal problems with such free proxies, especially if they tackle commercial activities.

If we consider this option, then there won’t be too many free proxies anymore. These will mostly be general server proxies. It will be extremely difficult to learn how to use free proxies and to find free residential or even mobile proxies if required. The latter ones, by the way, are the most reliable and convenient for parsing or for other tasks related to bulk requests.

Another free shared proxy option is a demo version or a special marketing offer from a paid service. In this case, however, the proxies will be provided with various restrictions: either the address list will be limited or the proxies will be issued for a short time.

Free Proxies Advantages

• The most important advantage of free proxies is the absence of payment. You can save big without investing anything in rent. This is reasonable and this doesn’t require any arguments.
• Free proxies can easily be replaced by other solutions. The longer the list of free proxies is, the easier it is to browse the available options. You can change proxies even for each request, while their free nature will certainly help. The major problem is to find quite a long list to comply with all your requirements.
• Just like with paid proxies, you can find address options from the desired locations. There are even special services that have already done all the work for you: they filtered out free proxies by geographic location and by server type (SOCKS/HTTP/HTTPS, anonymous or not, etc.).
• Free proxies can act as a starting offer for paid services. This allows evaluating the quality of services as well as proxy functionality and reliability without making a payment.

Free Proxies Disadvantages

• Fast free proxies are something unreal if not even mythical. Due to the fact that many freebie lovers instantly use them, the channel bandwidth rapidly drops, as it is divided among all users. It eventually becomes impossible to use such a proxy. You have to either look for a new free address or wait until the flow of people who want to forward free requests decreases (this can take hours or even days/weeks).
• It can take much time to find free proxies that actually work. The “savings” question becomes not so interesting then because time is money in business. If you don’t look for a proxy independently, you will have to pay for the services of a specialist.
• Connection stability is generally extremely low. Even if a proxy worked 2 minutes ago, it can be currently overloaded or even offline. It is impossible to predict the lifetime of a particular proxy in advance.
• As far as many free proxies are server-based, their IP addresses are likely to be easily tracked by antifraud systems and blocked as suspicious. As a result, more time may be required to solve the captcha or to wait for the blocking removal.
• The confidentiality level is very low in free proxies and it cannot be verified. Even anonymous free proxies may not be eventually anonymous. It's all about what is meant by anonymity. This word in combination with a proxy is used to show that the real address of your device is not transmitted through this proxy in the request body. This, however, does not mean that the proxy provider does not log your requests and does not resell your personal data to third parties. Learn more about anonymous proxies.
• No one will give you any guarantees - neither in terms of performance nor in terms of bandwidth or safety. Free proxies are always provided "as is". You can use them only at your own risk.

Conclusion

Free proxies may only work for a certain range of tasks when no important (confidential) information is transmitted through them, and when you have access to a sufficient number of free IPs with convenient sorting by their types and load.

The latter issue frequently triggers problems. There are many people who want to get free proxies. Thus, the channels are quickly overloaded, and the proxies fail. It proves to be more expensive to spend time looking for new lists of addresses than buying paid proxies.

Paid Premium Proxies

When financial relations between the participants are formed, the responsibility of the parties immediately arises: official guarantees, an agreement on the quality of services/SLA, etc.

The choice of paid proxies is much more expensive than free ones. Here we can already talk about an adequate assortment and about different types of proxies that are created specifically for certain business tasks.

For example, you can rent addresses in the required locations and ultimately use traffic for your own purposes (without sharing it with other participants).

Residential and mobile proxies can be considered the most convenient for business tasks. You can use them, for instance, to organize the work of sneaker bots or to launch multi-accounts on Instagram.

Paid Proxies Advantages

• In most cases, you do not share a channel with third-party users (unless these are paid shared proxies), so you get a stable Internet channel without any restrictions. The speed of some proxies can reach 100 Mbps or even 1 Gbps (depending on the capabilities of the end equipment and route specifications).
• Official guarantees of availability and quality. If something does not work or works not the way it should, a client can contact technical support. Specialists will either undertake special measures independently, replace the problematic proxy or return the money for a poor-quality service.
• Paid proxy providers do not sell their clients' data to third parties. This ensures a higher level of security and confidentiality. However, you need to remember that proxies are organized in such a way that it is impossible to completely close or erase your confidential data from the stream.
• When renting residential and mobile proxies, you can count on the best functionality: opportunity for detailed filtering of addresses by geographic features (up to the choice of city and communication provider), automated or manual IP rotation, uploading in a convenient format, API, etc.

Paid Proxies Disadvantages

• Payment Availability. The higher the quality of the service is and the more in demand it is, the higher the price is. Rotary mobile or residential proxies are generally calculated by the volume of transmitted traffic, which can significantly affect any budget (there are no limits and high speeds here).
• No matter how super anonymous the proxies are, they cannot hide traffic. This is possible only if there are encrypted tunnels (this functionality is available in VPN only, but VPN services do not work well for bulk tasks).
• Some tech nuances notably depend on the proxy type. Therefore, their paid or free nature does not change the situation. So, you will not be able to speed up the mobile proxy channel or get a stable connection on residential IPs. They have a short life cycle and, thus, they actively rotate.
• If an operator does not have a proxy in a given location, he/she will not expand the geography just for you. The network, of course, is developing, and this is normal, but this is by no means a quick process. You cannot affect it.

Conclusion

The work of a paid proxy server also depends on various technical nuances. Anyway, a client receives official guarantees and adequate quality.

What else is required for business tasks? Technical support, a convenient personal account, API, intelligible technical documentation, and an exhaustive selection/assortment. This is possible with a premium proxy only.

How To Get Paid Proxies for Your Tasks?

Froxy offers an opportunity to rent mobile and residential proxies. They work better for parsing, SEO, and SMM tasks as compared to other proxy types.

Traffic packages carry out the calculation. Other options are provided in a turnkey format: API, upload of proxy lists, targeting to the city or communication provider level, over 8 million IPs in 200+ locations, rotation, HTTP and SOCKS 5 support, at least 200 parallel ports, 99, 99% uptime rate.