Plenty of proxy comparisons are written by affiliates who earn a commission on each signup. A short test of your own is more reliable, and it gives whoever approves the spend something concrete to sign off on. The checks below take about 30 minutes and filter out weak providers early, whoever recommended them.
1. Read the refund policy first
Before testing anything, find out what happens if the proxies don't work. Which faults are covered, how quickly must you report them, and is the remedy a replacement, a refund or both? A provider that won't refund faulty orders is telling you how much it trusts its own product.
2. Start with the smallest order available
A real test is worth more than a sales demo. Pay-as-you-go providers let you buy a starter order in the $1-10 range and test it the same day. If a provider insists on a sales call before you can try anything, ask for a test allocation in writing.
3. Check that the IPs match the description
Run the first ten proxies through our IP lookup tool and check:
- Does the country match your order?
- If you bought residential, does the ASN belong to a home internet provider such as Comcast, BT or Deutsche Telekom, or to AWS, OVH or Hetzner behind a residential label?
- If you bought mobile, does the lookup flag the IP as mobile?
If none of the ten match, the test can stop there.
4. Measure success on your real target
Pick the site your team actually cares about, whether that is a marketplace, a search engine or a competitor's store, and send 100 requests through the proxies. Count:
- 200 OK responses (successful).
- 403 and 429 responses (blocked or rate-limited).
- CAPTCHA pages.
Agree the pass mark before you start. As a working rule, 95-99% success on most targets is healthy, below 80% points to a poor fit, and below 50% means the product is not what was described.
5. Time a support ticket
Send a genuine technical question, such as "how do we use sticky sessions with country targeting?", and time the reply. Good providers answer within an hour during business hours. "We'll get back to you in 1-2 business days" is a warning sign for any team that runs time-sensitive jobs.
6. Walk through the dashboard with a colleague
Ask someone who did not place the order to find their way around. Can they:
- See usage in real time?
- Set country and city targeting?
- Create a sticky session without help?
- Find API access for automation?
- Download a proxy list in a few seconds?
If the basics are missing or hard to find, your team will feel it every week.
7. Run a one-day stability check
Over 24 hours, request the same proxy every 5 minutes and confirm that it responds. Count the proxies that were dead on arrival and those that dropped mid-session. Good services stay at 99%+, and below 95% is mediocre.
8. Red flags to record in your report
- No public pricing: sales calls only, which usually means prices vary from customer to customer.
- A "free trial" that requires a card: expect friction when you cancel.
- Reviews that look manufactured: look for genuine customer discussions instead.
- No written refund policy.
- Marketing labels with no detail on ASNs or IP types.
- Annual billing as the only option.
- Pool size claims without a per-country breakdown.
How we answer this checklist
Our pricing is public and billed per GB, pay-as-you-go, with no subscription or minimum spend, so a test order can be as small as 1 GB. If proxies are dead on arrival, report it within 24 hours of delivery and we replace them, or refund the affected part of the order if we can't. Credentials appear in your dashboard as soon as payment clears, every type supports HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, and support is staffed 24/7. Order a small amount, run the checklist above and judge the results for yourself. The details are on our pricing and refund policy pages.
