ProxyEmpire Review
Cheap and quick when it answers, but a third of our requests never came back.
The short version
- ProxyEmpire completed between 55.9% and 65.7% of requests on the standard test, the lowest of any network still trading normally.
- Most failures were redirects to the HTTPS form, 25,000 to 83,000 per run, with timeouts making up the rest.
- When it did answer it was quick, medians of 445 ms to 597 ms.
- It returned 145,177 live IPs across five countries, but France came back with just 2,364 addresses across 24 operators.
- Pricing is $0.75 per GB at the entry rate, among the cheapest published in the market.
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 | ProxyEmpire | Shifter | Networks |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 87,218 | 136,667 | 1,270 |
| United Kingdom | 33,090 | 53,506 | 166 |
| France | 2,364 | 33,581 | 24 |
| Canada | 14,277 | 33,485 | 205 |
| Germany | 8,228 | 22,005 | 166 |
A third of requests never came back
Every provider in this series receives the identical test: plain HTTP, one fresh connection per request, 1,000 concurrent, ten second timeout. ProxyEmpire completed between 55.9% and 65.7% of it depending on the country.
The bulk of the shortfall was redirects to the HTTPS form, between 25,000 and 83,000 per run, with timeouts making up the rest. That is a property of the gateway rather than a bad night, since the pattern repeated across all five countries.
We report the shortfall as observed and do not attribute it to a concurrency ceiling or any other single cause, because these runs were not designed to isolate one. What we can say is that a client sending plain HTTP will lose roughly a third of its requests, and every failure is paid for twice, once in bandwidth and once in the retry.
Cheap, quick, and very uneven
On the requests that did complete, ProxyEmpire was quick: medians of 445 ms to 597 ms, comfortably in the faster half of the field. Its 1,831 distinct operators across five countries is a respectable spread too.
Coverage is wildly uneven. The United States returned 87,218 live addresses, the United Kingdom 33,090, but France came back with 2,364 across 24 networks. On a French job at any volume this is not a usable network.
Because the counts come from partial runs, the real pool is larger than the figures here, which we state on the benchmark page as well. Even allowing for that, the French result is an order of magnitude behind the rest of the field.
Pricing
| Plan | Traffic | Per GB | Monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | Any | $0.75 | from $75 |
| Volume | 100 GB+ | on request | on request |
Pros and cons
- $0.75 per GB at the entry rate, among the cheapest published anywhere
- Quick when it answers, medians of 445 ms to 597 ms
- ISP and ASN targeting across 170+ countries
- Reasonable network spread, 1,831 operators across five countries
- Completed only 55.9% to 65.7% of the standard plain HTTP test
- France returned 2,364 live addresses across 24 operators
- Volume pricing is not published
- Redirect behaviour means plain HTTP clients need reworking
Who ProxyEmpire is for
- Cost per gigabyte dominates your decision and retries are cheap for you.
- Your client already speaks HTTPS proxying, avoiding the redirect problem.
- You work in the United States or United Kingdom rather than France.
- You need requests to complete: a third to 44% of ours did not.
- You have French traffic, where the pool measured 2,364 addresses.
- You point a plain HTTP client at the gateway.
How we scored it
| Criterion | Weight | Score | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live pool measured | 25% | 4.4 | 145,177 IPs live across five countries, against the tested field. |
| Network spread measured | 20% | 6.8 | 1,831 distinct networks across five countries. |
| Price per GB measured | 25% | 10 | $0.75 per GB at the published entry rate, which matches the cheapest in the market. Volume pricing is quoted on request rather than published. |
| Response time measured | 10% | 9.7 | 483 ms median across the countries tested. |
| Country coverage | 10% | 8.7 | 170+ countries advertised, scaled against full global coverage. |
| Features | 5% | 7 | ISP and ASN targeting, sticky sessions and wide country coverage. Marked down because plain HTTP proxying is unreliable against this gateway. |
| Transparency | 5% | 6 | The entry rate is published and genuinely low, but volume pricing is on request and the redirect behaviour is not documented anywhere a buyer would find it. |