On 2 July 2026 the FBI seized NetNut’s domains. Its parent company, a publicly traded Israeli firm, allegedly powered a botnet of roughly two million compromised devices running proxy software their owners never agreed to install. NetNut was not a fringe operator. It was one of the thirteen providers formally benchmarked by the industry’s main testing outlet three months earlier. I run Ecommerce Paradise, and that single event should change how you choose a proxy provider, because it proves the thing that matters most is not speed or price.
The Budget Pick That Names Its Sourcing
IPRoyal runs Pawns.app, a named opt-in program you can download and read the payout terms of, and its residential traffic does not expire.
How I Ranked These
Most proxy roundups rank on price per gigabyte and pool size. Both are close to meaningless. Pool size is self-reported and never audited, and the advertised price per gigabyte is almost always a volume tier no small buyer will ever reach.
So I ranked on three things instead.
Sourcing disclosure. Does the provider name the program its residential IPs come from, so you can go and look at it? This is now the primary criterion, for reasons the NetNut seizure makes obvious.
The price you actually pay. Not the headline. The cost at the smallest tier a real buyer purchases.
Fit for an ecommerce store. Which mostly means static residential IPs in specific countries, not rotating bandwidth, for reasons I get into below.
The Comparison
| Provider | Entry residential price | Static IP price | Named sourcing program |
|---|---|---|---|
| IPRoyal | $7.00 per GB at 1 GB | $2.70 per IP, 30 days | Pawns.app |
| Bright Data | $8.00 per GB list, $4.00 promotional | $1.30 per IP | Bright SDK |
| Rayobyte | $3.50 per GB | $5.00 per IP | Cash Raven |
| Oxylabs | $6.00 per GB at 5 GB | $1.20 per IP | Honeygain |
| Infatica | $4.00 per GB | $1.95 per IP | Infatica SDK, partial |
| Decodo | $2.00 per GB | $0.27 per IP | None named |
| Webshare | $7.00 per GB list, $3.50 promotional | $0.30 per proxy | None named |
| Proxy-Cheap | $1.50 per GB at 3 GB | $2.44 to $2.71 per IP | None named |
| LumiProxy | $5.00 per GB at 2 GB | $6.00 per IP | None named |
Prices verified in September 2026. Treat every one as a figure to re-check at the cart, because this industry changes pricing constantly and several providers publish headline rates they do not sell at.
1. IPRoyal, Best Overall for a Store Owner
IPRoyal wins on the criterion that matters, and it is not close among the budget providers.
It names its sourcing program. Residential IPs come through Pawns.app, which is a real consumer application you can download, read the payout terms of, and leave at any time. IPRoyal’s own help documentation states that members can join or leave through the Pawns.app platform whenever they want.
The commercially interesting feature is that pay-as-you-go residential traffic does not expire. You buy a gigabyte, and it sits there until you use it. For a store owner who needs proxies for a few hours a month, that is worth more than a lower headline rate, because unused monthly allowances are pure waste.
Static residential runs $2.70 per IP for 30 days, dropping to $2.40 on a 90-day term, with unlimited traffic. That is the product most store owners should actually buy.
Now the criticism, because this article is not an advertisement. IPRoyal advertises “from $1.75 per GB”. The price at the smallest purchasable tier is $7.00 per gigabyte on subscription or $7.35 pay-as-you-go. The headline is four times cheaper than the entry price and requires a ten terabyte commitment to reach. That is the same pattern I criticised in the LumiProxy review, and it is just as misleading here.
The refund policy is also tight. You can only claim if you have consumed 100 MB or less, subscription disputes must be raised within 72 hours, and crypto payments are non-refundable entirely.
My full assessment is in the IPRoyal review.
2. Bright Data, Best for Serious Data Operations
Bright Data is the enterprise answer, with the most extensive compliance documentation in the industry, mandatory identity verification for residential access, and a named sourcing program in Bright SDK.
It is also the provider most exposed by independent research. Spur’s June 2026 study of smart TV applications named Bright Data as the publisher behind 367 flagged apps carrying proxy software development kits. That is not an accusation of illegality, and Bright Data publishes more about its sourcing than anyone. It does illustrate that a named program is not the same as a program you would necessarily be comfortable with.
Pricing is $8.00 per gigabyte list, currently discounted to $4.00, with ISP proxies at $1.30. There is a genuine free trial with no card required, which almost nobody else offers.
Worth knowing that Bright Data discontinued its mobile proxy product in April 2026. Details in my Bright Data review.
Need Compliance Documentation and a Real Trial?
Bright Data publishes the most extensive sourcing and compliance library in the category, and its free trial needs no credit card.
3. Rayobyte, Best Sourcing Disclosure of Any Provider
I want to give credit where it is due, because Rayobyte publishes the most specific consent terms I found anywhere in this market.
Its program is called Cash Raven, and rather than vaguely claiming ethical sourcing, Rayobyte publishes the actual technical conditions: devices only act as proxies when connected to WiFi, when idle, and when either plugged in or above 50% battery, with opt-out at any time and no questions asked.
That is a higher standard than IPRoyal’s disclosure, and I would rather concede it than pretend my top pick wins on every axis.
Residential starts at $3.50 per gigabyte, which is cheaper than IPRoyal’s entry tier. The catch for a store owner is that ISP proxies are $5.00 per IP, which is nearly double IPRoyal, and static IPs are the product you probably want.
4. Oxylabs, Premium and Well Tested
Oxylabs is a genuine tier-one provider with a 175 million IP pool claim, ISP proxies at $1.20 and residential from $6.00 per gigabyte at the 5 GB starter tier.
Its sourcing runs primarily through Honeygain, which Spur’s 2026 research describes as an Oxylabs subsidiary and which was named alongside Bright Data in that smart TV study. So the disclosure exists, and it comes with the same caveat.
The free trial is available once per user but has to go through sales, which is friction most small buyers will not bother with.
5. Infatica, Cheap With an Asterisk
Infatica sits mid-table at $4.00 per gigabyte pay-as-you-go with static ISP at $1.95 per IP, and it names an SDK as its sourcing mechanism.
Two things to flag honestly. Its own meta description advertises “from $0.3 per GB” against an on-page table starting at $4.00, which is a thirteen times gap and worse than anything else in this list. And Malwarebytes maintains a detection signature classifying its software as a potentially unwanted program. That is a vendor classification rather than any enforcement action, but you should know it exists.
6. Decodo, Cheapest Static IPs
Decodo, which was Smartproxy until it rebranded, has the most aggressive pricing here: $2.00 per gigabyte residential and static IPs at $0.27, which is an order of magnitude below most of this list.
It also offers the most usable trial arrangement, a three-day 100 MB trial plus a 14-day money-back guarantee.
What it does not have is a named sourcing program. Decodo claims ethical sourcing, and the page its own site links to for that claim returns a 404. For the price, plenty of people will accept that. I am telling you what you are accepting.
7. Webshare, Best Free Tier
Webshare gives you ten free proxies with no time limit and no credit card, which is the most generous free offering in the category and genuinely useful for testing whether proxies solve your problem at all.
Paid residential is $7.00 per gigabyte list, currently promoted at $3.50, and static proxies are $0.30 each. Note that the widely quoted $1.40 per gigabyte figure is the three thousand gigabyte rate, not anything a small buyer pays.
No named sourcing program.
The Two I Would Avoid
I reviewed both of these in full and reached the same conclusion for the same reason.
Proxy-Cheap publishes no sourcing statement, has no about page, and names no legal entity in any of its policies. LumiProxy does the same, contradicts its own IP pool figure on a single page, and its refund policy explicitly denies refunds even when the product does not match its advertised features.
Neither is a scam and both have satisfied customers. Neither will tell you where its network comes from, and after July 2026 that is a harder position to accept than it used to be.
Why the Sourcing Question Got Serious
Here is the context that makes this whole article different from the one I would have written two years ago.
A residential proxy routes your traffic through somebody’s home internet connection. The industry’s answer to how those people consented has historically been a shrug and the phrase “ethically sourced”.
Then the evidence arrived. Spur scanned 6,038 LG and Samsung TV apps in June 2026 and found proxy software development kits in 2,058 of them, with proxying continuing after the app was closed. Krebs on Security reported the FBI’s July 2026 seizure of NetNut, alleging a two million device botnet built without consent.
When you buy residential bandwidth, you are buying access to real people’s connections. If the provider will not tell you how it got them, you are choosing not to know. That is a defensible choice for a ten dollar test and a poor one for anything your business depends on.
Do You Actually Need Proxies?
Most people running a high-ticket store do not, and I would rather say that than sell you something you will not use.
You do not need proxies to check a competitor’s price occasionally, and you do not need them for supplier research, ad management, customer service or keyword work. Every tool in those categories runs its own infrastructure.
Two situations genuinely call for them. Multi-country geo verification, where you need to see what a customer in Germany or Australia actually sees, including currency, shipping options and whether your payment methods render. And ad verification, where you confirm your ads appear and your landing pages load properly from the regions you are buying traffic in.
Both need a handful of static residential IPs in specific countries. Neither needs rotating gigabytes. Buying rotating bandwidth for that work is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category.
And if you are building a scraping operation before the store is profitable, the scraping is not your bottleneck. In high-ticket dropshipping the edge is supplier relationships and presentation, not harvesting competitor prices faster than they change.
What I Would Buy
For geo and ad verification, which is the realistic use case: three to five static residential IPs in your target countries. At IPRoyal’s $2.70 per IP that is roughly $8 to $14 a month, with unlimited traffic and no metering anxiety.
For a one-off test to see whether proxies help at all: Webshare’s ten free proxies, which cost nothing and require no card.
For genuine data collection at scale with compliance obligations: Bright Data, and budget accordingly.
For anything where you cannot name your sub-processor to an auditor: none of the three providers without a named sourcing program.
How to Test a Provider Without Wasting Money
Every provider in this list will look fine on a generic IP checker. That tells you nothing, because the sites you care about are not generic.
Buy the smallest possible package. One gigabyte, or three static IPs. The entry tier is your test, not your deployment, and in this market the entry tier is usually the worst value per unit, which is fine when the purpose is finding out.
Test against the exact sites you need on day one. Your own storefront from the target country, your ad landing pages, the specific competitor site if that is the job. A proxy that passes every neutral test still gets blocked by the one platform you need.
If you bought static IPs, verify the country on day one and again a week later. Silent IP rotation on supposedly static products is one of the most common complaints across this entire category, and it breaks anything you automated.
Check the refund terms before you send a single request, because several providers void refunds the moment traffic passes. IPRoyal’s limit is 100 MB consumed. Crypto payments there are non-refundable outright.
And never route store admin, payment processor or bank logins through any proxy, from any provider, at any price.
Where This Sits in the Bigger Picture
One last piece of context, because tool selection is seductive and mostly beside the point.
Proxies are a diagnostic instrument. They tell you what a customer in another country sees. They do not improve what that customer sees, they do not get you approved with better suppliers, and they do not change your margin.
If your store is not converting, the answer is almost never in your proxy stack. It is usually in the offer, the trust signals, or the supplier terms underneath your pricing. Getting approved with better suppliers improves the margin on every future order, which compounds in a way a fifteen dollar proxy bill never will.
And if the niche itself cannot carry the margin, no amount of infrastructure fixes it. That decision belongs in the high-ticket niches list, before anything technical.
Buy the proxies when you have a specific question to answer. Then go back to the work that moves the number. Treating vendors as vendors, with contracts and named counterparties, is part of running a real company rather than a hobby, which is the same reasoning behind getting the business formation groundwork right early.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the cheapest residential proxy provider?
Decodo at $2.00 per gigabyte, or Proxy-Cheap at $1.50 at the 3 GB tier. Neither names a sourcing program, which is the trade you are making.
Which proxy provider is the most ethical?
On published disclosure, Rayobyte, which specifies the exact technical conditions under which a device proxies. IPRoyal and Bright Data both name programs too.
Do I need rotating or static proxies?
Static, almost certainly. Store owners need to look like a consistent resident of one country, repeatedly. Rotating bandwidth is built for scraping thousands of pages.
What happened to NetNut?
The FBI seized its domains on 2 July 2026 over an alleged botnet of around two million compromised devices. Its parent company said it would cooperate with law enforcement.
Is there a free proxy trial?
Webshare gives ten proxies free with no card and no time limit. Bright Data offers a genuine free trial. IPRoyal offers trials to verified companies only, not individuals.
Can I use proxies to log into my store admin?
Do not. It triggers security locks and routes your credentials through infrastructure you do not control.
Bottom Line
Buy IPRoyal if you want the best combination of named sourcing, non-expiring traffic and sane static IP pricing. Buy Bright Data if you have real scale and real compliance obligations. Use Webshare’s free tier to find out whether you need any of this.
Whatever you choose, buy static residential IPs rather than rotating gigabytes, start with three, and re-check the price at the cart rather than trusting the headline, because almost every provider in this market advertises a rate it does not sell at the entry tier.
And keep the spend in proportion. If proxies are costing more than about fifteen dollars a month for a store that is not yet profitable, the leverage is somewhere else entirely.
Spend Your Attention Where the Money Is
My team builds the store, secures the supplier approvals and hands you a business ready to take orders.
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Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.
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