Are you looking for proxies to try before paying? In the article below, I researched and present to you, some of the best 15 proxy service providers that support free trial, with some not even requesting your credit card.
Overview of Top Proxies with Free Trial
- Bright Data — Overall Best Trial Proxies with Stellar Performance
- Smartproxy — Best Alternative to Bright Data
- Webshare — Affordable Datacenter Proxies
- Rayobyte — Free Trial with No Credit Card Required
- Shifter — Unlimited Bandwidth Proxy with Free Trial
Free-tier note: Bright Data's recurring credits apply to web-data APIs and Scraper Studio, not proxy bandwidth.
Have you paid for a proxy only to discover it is not perfect for your task? If you have, you will recognize the importance of trying out a proxy service for free before committing financially. Fortunately, there are a good number of proxy services that recognize this and want to allow users to test their proxies before paying. First in other to gain trust and secondly, to reduce chargebacks and request for refunds.
The good here is that even top providers do offer this. My task in this article is to recommend some of the best free trial proxies in the market for you to try out before purchasing a plan. It is important you pay attention to their feature and less about their trial feature since you will only get access to trial ones in a lifetime. This will enable you to make the right decision for the long term.
Bright Data — Overall Best Trial Proxies with Stellar Performance
The Bright Data service doubles as both a data collection infrastructure and proxy provider. For its proxy service, it offers proxies in multiple categories ranging from mobile, datacenter, residential, and ISP.
When it comes to trial support, it does, allowing you to start using the service for the intended task without paying for it — and no credit card is required. Bright Data's residential proxy network is currently our recommended residential proxy service for a number of reasons.
First, its performance is the highest in the market, with a recorded average speed of 36 Mbps and a ping rate of 396 ms. Its scraping success rate is 96.84% which is the highest in the market and currently has one of the largest pools with over 72 million IP addresses. One thing you will like about the service is that it has IPs in all countries/regions. It does not only support country-level targeting but also state, city, and ASN.
By default, IP is charged after every request. However, you can set it to change IP after a specific time of up to 30 minutes, making it good for session/account management.
Smartproxy — Best Alternative to Bright Data
The Smartproxy service is a good alternative to the Bright Data service especially if you are looking for an equally performing network but at a slightly affordable price. The Smartproxy service offers you 100 MB to be used within 3 days. This is enough to verify if your target site is accessible using their proxies. If you need more time and bandwidth, you can opt for their $7 per GB pay-as-you-go model and use just 1GB to test out their service properly.
The service has a pool with over 55 million IP addresses in its pool gotten from over 195 countries. Their rotating residential proxies have two modes — high rotating and sticky mode. With the high rotating, you get a new IP address for each request which is perfect for web scraping and other types of automation. For session-based tasks like account management, their sticky port that can maintain session for up to 30 minutes is the best.
One thing you will come to like about Smartproxy is its 14-day money-back guarantee which is available regardless of whether you use the free trial offer or not.
Webshare — Affordable Datacenter Proxies
The Webshare service is known for its free datacenter proxies. However, the days of that is gone as they have rebranded into a better service provider with competitive proxies in terms of pricing and quality. The service has proxies in a good number of market categories including static and rotating residential proxies.
The proxy of interest to us here is their datacenter proxies. For this, you have option to choose from over 50 countries from across the globe making it one of the best in terms of location coverage.
The speed limit advertised is over 100 Mbps on their site but from the test carried out, the download recorded was 73.85 Mbps. This is still considered fast compared to many of its competitors. The service limits the number of threads to 300 — 500 and allows you to use IP authentication.
As a new user to the service, you are given 10 free proxies to try out. It is important you know that the free ones are shared proxies. However, the dedicated ones with the aforementioned speed are paid.
Rayobyte — Free Trial with No Credit Card Required
Formerly known as Blazing SEO, Rayobyte is one of the best residential proxy services that offers support for a free trial. Its free trial support is easy to claim as al you have to do is create an account and verify it via email.
After the verification, you will get 50MB which you can use to determine whether their service is good for your use case or not. The service has a pool with over 10 million real IP addresses. The IPs are sourced from over 180 countries across the globe.
The proxies are rotating proxies that change IP after every request. However, the service does have support for sticky IPs which can maintain IP and by extension sessions for some time. Rayobyte offers both packaged and pay-as-you-go plans. Its price for pay-as-you-go is $7.50 per GB.
This is not the cheapest among its equals as better services like Smartproxy offer a slightly cheaper price. However, its pool is less popular which can potentially make it cleaner than the popular ones.
Shifter — Unlimited Bandwidth Proxy with Free Trial
Another proxy provider that offers free trial is the Shifter service. This is one of the oldest residential proxy service which was founded with the name Microleaves before rebranding recently to Shifter. To get access to their free trial, you need to contact support and let them know what you need their service for. This will enable you to get a more tailored trial offer than the 100MB offered to everyone by the Smartproxy service.
As with Bright Data and Smartproxy, it offer multiple proxy types. However, it is quite different with its unlimited residential proxies. With this, you do not get charged based on bandwidth and as such, you can enjoy unlimited bandwidth usage. In terms of performance, while testing it, I recorded an average download speed of 28.85 which is an above average speed.
This is especially useful for tasks that consume a lot of bandwidth and going for bandwidth-pricing-based proxies will cost you a lot. The IPs are not detectable to most web targets. However, you can’t use their service for emailing services and the service also block access to Amazon by default. If you need to access Amazon, you need to contact support to get access granted.
Oxylabs — Largest Residential Proxy Pool
The Oxylabs service has over 100 million IP addresses in its pool, putting it ahead of Bright Data with 72 million IPs and Netnut with 85 million. While it has a larger pool compared to Oxylabs, I will rank the Bright Data residential proxy network as a better performer, especially in the aspect of speed, unique IPs, and efficient IP rotation.
This is because while Oxylabs has a speed of 34.34 Mbps, I recorded a speed of 37.08 Mbps for Bright Data. Aside from Bright Data, only a few services can match Oxylabs' performance and location coverage.
It location targeted is also competitive as it is one of the few that provide granular targeting options based on continent, country, state, city, ZIP code, coordinate, and ASN. One thing you will come to like about the service is its insurance system which covers any loss its user incurred which is their fault. To get a free trial, you should contact them via email or click on the ‘Book a Demo’ button and request for it.
TheSocialProxy — Best Mobile Proxies with Free Trial
TheSocialProxy is another service I recommend especially if you need mobile proxies for managing multiple social accounts on social media or even social media automation. TheSocialProxy does not cap the limit of its free trial as others do in terms of bandwidth.
The limit for its trial is 24 hours. For you to enjoy up to 24 hours trial, you need to go through their KYC process after which you are allowed access to full trial. Otherwise, you only get 2 hours trial after which access is blocked until you pay.
The service uses physical modems and SIM cards in their data centers to route your requests, giving them control over the connection and speed. This enable the service to offer you high-speed mobile proxies for your social account management. By default, IPs are not rotated frequently for you but are maintained for session management.
However, if you need to rotate IPs, some of the ISPs allow you to and it provides you the ability to do that from its dashboard as well as an IP rotation URL.
Netnut — Best Free Trial for Enterprise and Big Proxy Users
The Netnut service is an enterprise-level residential proxy service. Its rotating residential proxies have over 85 million IP addresses in its pool, making it one of the largest in the market. It also has extensive location support and comes with granular targeting options — country, state, and city-level targeting.
It proxies are by default, high rotating, switching proxies for every request. Interestingly, the percentage of unique IPs assigned is as high as over 89%. While testing out their proxies, the download speed recorded was 34.85 Mbps with an upload speed of 47.82 Mbps.
It also does have support for sticky IPs for session management. Its free trial support is meant only for enterprise and big proxy users. To get it, you need to create an account, speak to their agent about your requirements, and they will offer you a free trial while doing KYC. The trial offered is custom but will be enough for you to try out their service and make a purchase decision.
Conclusion
From the above, you can see that there are only a few providers that support free trials. Some providers have a small fee for trial in other to prevent trial scammers. The vast majority of the other providers only offer a refund policy to help you get your money back if their proxies don’t work for you.
I still prefer the services that offer free trials as they are truly risk-free and some of them are even better than some of the services that do not offer free trials. With the list above, you can try multiple providers before making a decision on the best one to choose.
