Introducing Sub-Accounts and the Shifter Reseller Program

Today we’re shipping two things that belong together. Sub-accounts let you track traffic per customer, project or team on a single Residential Proxies plan, straight from the proxy username. And the Shifter Reseller Program gives proxy businesses wholesale access to our network, with sub-accounts as the way to see what each of their customers uses.

If you’re in a hurry: add -subaccount-NAME right after your username, send a request, and that sub-account shows up in your panel a few minutes later with its own traffic. If you sell proxies, the reseller program is the place to start.

Why we built this

The question we hear most from agencies, SaaS teams and proxy resellers is some version of “who used what”. One plan often serves many customers: an agency running collection for a dozen brands, a scraping product that bundles proxies into its own subscription, a reseller with hundreds of end users. Until now the only answer was one plan per customer, which is heavy to manage and still tells you nothing about the customers sharing a plan.

Sub-accounts answer it without new logins, new plans or setup calls. The label travels with the traffic, so attribution happens where the requests are made.

How a sub-account works

A sub-account is a label in your proxy username. It goes right after your username, and every targeting and session option follows it as usual:

customer-USERNAME-subaccount-client_a-country-us-sid-abc123-ttl-600:PASSWORD@p.shifter.io:443

There is nothing to create in advance. A sub-account exists from its first request, and it stays listed until 365 days after its last one. A few rules:

• Names are 1 to 16 letters, digits or underscores. No hyphens, because the hyphen separates the options in the username.
• Names are case-sensitive: Client_A and client_a are two different sub-accounts.
• Sub-accounts belong to a plan. The same name on two plans is two separate sub-accounts.

Sub-accounts work on every Residential Proxies plan.

Where you see them

Open a Residential plan in the panel and you’ll find a new Sub-accounts section:

• Create a sub-account. Type a name and the panel shows the full username and the complete proxy line, ready to copy and hand to whoever needs it.
• A table of every sub-account on the plan, with its traffic today, over the last 7 days and over the last 30 days. Large lists are searchable and paged.
• View chart on any row switches the plan’s traffic chart to that sub-account.

The traffic chart on the dashboard and on each plan page also has a new picker, so you can flip between the main account and any sub-account and read its history by day, week, month or a custom range. The Proxy Generator gained a Sub-account field too, for building endpoints with targeting and sessions already in place.

Sub-accounts in the API

Two new endpoints expose the same data, using the api_token you already use for the Usage & Quota API:

• GET /api/v1/memberships/{membership}/subaccounts lists every sub-account seen on a plan.
• GET /api/v1/memberships/{membership}/subaccounts/{name}/usage?start=&end= returns one sub-account’s traffic for any window, in bytes and GB, with request counts.

Feed them into your own billing, customer dashboards or alerts. The full reference, with examples and error codes, is in the sub-accounts docs.

What sub-accounts are not

It’s worth being precise here, because “sub-account” means different things in different tools.

• They share the plan. Every sub-account uses your plan’s password and draws on your plan’s bandwidth. There is no separate login or allowance per sub-account.
• They are for tracking. We don’t enforce limits per sub-account. If you resell access, your own platform decides what each customer may use, and our numbers tell it what they did use.
• They don’t replace workspaces. When a client needs its own billing, wallet and team, a separate workspace is still the right tool. We cover how the two fit together in our guide to usage tracking for multiple clients.

The Shifter Reseller Program

Sub-accounts are the piece resellers have been asking for, so we’re opening a reseller program alongside them.

The model is simple. You buy residential bandwidth wholesale, with pricing built around your expected monthly volume and how long you commit to it. You run the storefront: signup, pricing, limits and billing live on your platform. Each of your customers gets a sub-account, and our usage API gives your platform the traffic figures to enforce limits and invoice. We run the network: one of the largest live residential pools, with country, region, city and ASN targeting and a wide spread of ISPs.

You can build and test your integration on any Residential plan today and move to reseller terms as your volume grows. To apply, open the reseller program page and send us your expected monthly traffic, your commitment term and what your customers use proxies for. We reply with your terms.

Some patterns this unlocks

• Agencies label each client’s jobs with that client’s name and report usage per client from one plan, without splitting budgets across many plans.
• Scraping and data platforms give every end customer a sub-account and bill on real consumption instead of estimates.
• Internal teams label traffic by project or service, so a runaway job is easy to find when usage spikes.

Where to find it

Sub-accounts are live on every Residential Proxies plan now. Open a plan in the panel and look for the Sub-accounts section, or start from the docs if you’re wiring it into code. If you sell proxies, the reseller program page has everything you need to apply.

As with Team Workspaces, we kept the surface small on purpose so we can keep improving it. If there’s a report or an endpoint your platform needs, tell us.