Proxy Cheap Review
A flat rate near the top of the market, on a gateway that answered barely a tenth of an ordinary plain HTTP test.
The short version
- Proxy Cheap completed between 10.3% and 14.4% of the standard test, the lowest of any network we have measured.
- Roughly 70% of requests returned redirects to the HTTPS form and another 20% were reset connections, consistently in all five countries.
- What did complete was slow: medians of 1,874 ms to 4,547 ms.
- Germany returned 615 live addresses across 36 operators, the smallest country result we have recorded from anyone.
- Pricing is a flat $4.99 per GB at every volume, with no discount for scale.
At a glance
What we measured
Live IPs each network had answering during the same test window, five countries, identical request volumes and concurrency for both sides.
| Country | Proxy Cheap | Shifter | Networks |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 14,223 | 136,667 | 354 |
| United Kingdom | 3,001 | 53,506 | 61 |
| France | 970 | 33,581 | 21 |
| Canada | 1,641 | 33,485 | 79 |
| Germany | 615 | 22,005 | 36 |
What the standard test returned
Every provider in this series gets the identical test: plain HTTP, one fresh connection per request, 1,000 concurrent, ten second timeout. Proxy Cheap completed 10.3% of it in the United States, 14.4% in the United Kingdom, 14.3% in France, 11.9% in Canada and 14.0% in Germany.
The shortfall breaks down consistently: roughly 70% of requests answered with a redirect to the HTTPS form, and roughly 20% were reset connections. A single request through the same gateway succeeds, so this appears under sustained load rather than being a broken credential.
We are deliberately not naming a cause. These runs cannot separate a gateway that prefers HTTPS from a rate limit or an account restriction, and we got that call wrong on another provider earlier in this series by guessing. What we can state is what a client sending ordinary plain HTTP traffic at volume receives back.
Why the pool figures are a floor
With a tenth of requests completing, the addresses we saw cannot characterise the network. Proxy Cheap advertises 50M+ IPs and certainly holds far more than the 20,450 we counted across five countries.
We publish the counts anyway, because they came from the same test every other network received, and because the gap is too large to be explained by the completion rate alone. Germany returned 615 addresses from 36 operators against our 22,005 from 276. Even multiplying their figure sevenfold to correct for completion leaves an order of magnitude between them.
The honest summary is that we could not measure this network properly, and that the reason we could not is itself something a buyer would run into.
A flat rate at the top of the market
Proxy Cheap charges $4.99 per GB whether you buy one gigabyte or a terabyte. There is no volume discount at all, which is unusual: almost every network in this series drops its rate as you scale.
That makes it one of the two most expensive networks we have measured, alongside Massive at $4.90, without the speed or consistency that Massive delivers for the money.
Our own rate is $2.00 per GB at entry, $1.00 at 100 GB and $0.75 from 200 GB, on a pool that measured an order of magnitude deeper. That is a disclosed commercial interest, which is why the method is published and the test is repeatable.
Pricing
| Plan | Traffic | Per GB | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Any volume | 1 GB to 1 TB+ | $4.99 | flat rate |
Pros and cons
- No minimum commitment and no subscription required
- City-level targeting across 130+ countries
- Per-request rotation and sticky sessions on standard protocols
- Simple, predictable pricing with no tier maths
- Completed only 10.3% to 14.4% of a standard plain HTTP test
- Medians of 1,874 ms to 4,547 ms on the requests that did complete
- Germany returned 615 live addresses across 36 operators
- $4.99 per GB at every volume, among the highest rates in the market
Who Proxy Cheap is for
- You need a small amount of traffic with no commitment and no minimum.
- Your client already uses HTTPS proxying and low request volumes.
- City-level targeting across a wide country list matters more than throughput.
- You send sustained plain HTTP traffic, which is what mostly failed here.
- Latency matters, given medians between two and four and a half seconds.
- You buy at volume, since the rate never falls below $4.99 per GB.
How we scored it
| Criterion | Weight | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live pool measured | 25% | 0 | 20,450 IPs live across five countries, against the tested field. |
| Network spread measured | 20% | 0 | 551 distinct networks across five countries. |
| Price per GB measured | 25% | 0 | $4.99 per GB, charged flat at every volume with no discount for scale. |
| Response time measured | 10% | 0 | 2947 ms median across the countries tested. |
| Country coverage | 10% | 6.7 | 130+ countries advertised, scaled against full global coverage. |
| Features | 5% | 6 | City targeting, sticky sessions and standard protocols are all present, but plain HTTP proxying was unreliable throughout our testing, which undercuts the rest. |
| Transparency | 5% | 6.5 | One published rate with no hidden tiers, which is genuinely clear. Marked down because there is no trial, so the gateway behaviour above is not something you can discover before paying. |