Most free web proxies have the same weakness: they send every visitor through a few rented servers in a data center, and websites learned to recognize those addresses years ago. Today we are launching an alternative. Shifter Web Proxy is a free web proxy that opens any website through a residential IP address, a real home internet connection, in 54 countries. There is no signup, no ads and nothing to install.
What Shifter Web Proxy is
A web proxy is a website that fetches other websites for you. You enter an address, the proxy requests the page from its own IP and shows you the result, so the site you visit sees the proxy rather than you. It works inside your browser, with no software and no settings to change.
Shifter Web Proxy does that through the same residential network our customers use for web data collection. When you open a page from Germany, the website sees a German household broadband connection, not a server rack, and it shows you the page a local visitor would get.
Everything happens in its own browser tab. The browsing tab has back, forward and reload buttons, an address bar, a country switcher, and a counter of the free time and data you have left today. The page you started from stays where you left it.
How to use it in three steps
- Enter a website. Type or paste any address, such as example.com. You do not need to type the https part; the proxy adds it for you.
- Pick a country. Choose one of the 54 exit countries, or keep the default, the United States.
- Browse in a new tab. Select Browse, complete a quick reCAPTCHA check, and the site opens in its own tab.
From there you browse normally. Follow links, type new addresses into the bar, or switch country from the toolbar mid-session to compare how the same page looks somewhere else. Changing country starts a fresh session with the website, so a site you were signed into may ask you to sign in again.
Why residential exits matter
Websites decide a great deal from your IP address alone: which language and currency to show, which articles and prices are available, and whether to answer at all. They also check what kind of network the address belongs to. A visit from a hosting provider is a strong sign of a bot or a proxy, so many sites answer it with a block page, an access denied error, an endless CAPTCHA or the wrong country.
A residential IP belongs to a consumer internet provider, the same kind of connection people use at home. Pages load the way locals see them, which is the whole point of browsing from another country. That makes the free tool useful for:
- Seeing a site from another market. Check what a news site, store or government portal shows to visitors in that country.
- Comparing prices and offers. Airlines, hotels, software vendors and online stores often vary prices, currencies and promotions by country.
- Checking your own pages. Confirm that geo redirects, cookie banners, localized ads and app store listings appear correctly abroad.
- Keeping your own IP out of a site’s logs. The site records a Shifter residential IP instead of your home or office address.
54 countries, each with its own page
The exit list covers North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, from the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Germany to Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, South Africa and India.
Every country has its own landing page, so you can bookmark the one you use most and start already set to it. Browse from a free USA web proxy to see American prices and catalogues, use the Germany web proxy to check a site from inside the EU, or open the Japan web proxy to load Japanese stores and services as local visitors see them. The full country grid is on the web proxy page.
Privacy: what we keep and what we do not
Free proxies have to earn money somehow, and with most of them that means advertising: banners on the landing page, pop-ups inside the sites you visit, and ad networks setting their own cookies along the way. Shifter Web Proxy shows no ads, because the business behind it is selling proxies, not attention.
Here is exactly what happens to your data:
- No log of the pages you visit. We do not record where you browse.
- No IP address on file. To enforce the free allowance, the service keeps one anonymous counter per browser: a random identifier, stored only as a hash, with the time and data you used today. It does not record your IP and it is not tied to an account, because there is no account.
- HTTPS stays encrypted. For HTTPS websites the encrypted connection is negotiated inside your browser tab, so our gateway relays traffic it cannot read. Like any proxy, the gateway needs the name of the site you connect to, and it does not write it to a log.
- The check is reCAPTCHA. The short check before each session is Google reCAPTCHA, which follows Google’s privacy policy. It keeps bots from using up a network real people share.
A web proxy protects the tab you browse in, not your whole device, and anything you type into a website, such as a name or an email address, still identifies you to that website.
How it compares with other free web proxies
Before launch we tested 17 popular free web proxies with one scripted method, version wpb-1.1, run the same way against every service, Shifter included. We recorded the network of every exit IP we could observe, counted ads on the landing page and inside proxied pages, and measured page loads, session limits and country choice.
Three results stood out:
- Every competitor exit we observed sat on a hosting or datacenter network. Shifter’s exits came from consumer internet providers.
- Most of them show ads. 10 of the 17 services had ads on their landing page, and several inserted ad slots into the pages visitors browsed.
- Shifter had the best speed score. The score weighs median load time against pages that failed to load, so a proxy cannot look fast by refusing heavy pages.
Shifter Web Proxy ranked first in our review series, and the scores are computed from those measurements rather than assigned by hand. Each tool has a full write-up in our web proxy reviews, including the Shifter Web Proxy review itself, and each has a head-to-head comparison in the web proxy alternatives series. If you are coming from one of the best-known tools, start with our CroxyProxy alternative page.
The free allowance, and when to move to a plan
Every visitor gets 30 minutes and 100 MB of browsing a day, reset at midnight UTC. That is enough to check a few sites from abroad, compare prices across markets or read a page that is not available where you are. Some sites, such as streaming services and pages with heavy sign-in flows, may not work through any web proxy.
The web proxy covers one browser tab. When you need more time, more traffic, or proxies inside your own browser, apps and scripts, the network behind it is available on a plan:
- Residential proxy plans open the full residential network, with country, city and ASN targeting and IP rotation, billed per GB of traffic.
- ISP proxy plans give you static ISP IPs pinned to the city and provider you choose, billed per IP address.
Shifter Web Proxy is open now at shifter.io/web-proxy. Pick a country and start browsing.