IPRoyal Alternatives: 7 Proxy Providers Worth Comparing in 2026

IPRoyal is my default recommendation for a store owner buying proxies, but it has three specific weaknesses: no free trial for individuals, a headline price four times below what you actually pay at the entry tier, and a refund window that closes at 100 MB. If any of those is what sent you looking, there is a better fit for you below. I run Ecommerce Paradise, and these are the seven providers worth comparing against it.

Why People Leave IPRoyal

Worth naming the actual reasons, because the right alternative depends entirely on which one applies to you.

You wanted a free trial. IPRoyal’s residential page has a “start free trial” button, but its own help documentation says trials go to companies after verification of registration and ownership. Individuals are told to buy the minimum traffic. If you wanted to test before paying, you were misled by a button.

The entry price shocked you. Advertised at $1.75 per gigabyte, charged at $7.00 on the 1 GB tier. The advertised rate needs a ten terabyte commitment.

You need cheaper static IPs. At $2.40 to $2.70 per IP, IPRoyal is mid-market. Two providers below are dramatically cheaper.

You want city or ASN level targeting. IPRoyal’s static product is country level across 31 or more countries. Some competitors go finer.

The Alternatives at a Glance

Provider	Entry residential	Static IP	Free trial	Named sourcing
IPRoyal	$7.00 per GB	$2.70	Companies only	Pawns.app
Bright Data	$8.00 list, $4.00 promo	$1.30	Yes, no card	Bright SDK
Rayobyte	$3.50 per GB	$5.00	Yes	Cash Raven
Webshare	$7.00 list, $3.50 promo	$0.30	10 proxies free, no card	None
Decodo	$2.00 per GB	$0.27	3 days, 100 MB	None
Oxylabs	$6.00 per GB	$1.20	Once, via sales	Honeygain
Infatica	$4.00 per GB	$1.95	7 days for $4.00	Infatica SDK
Proxy-Cheap	$1.50 per GB	$2.44 to $2.71	None	None

Prices verified September 2026. Re-check at the cart, because most providers here advertise a rate they do not sell at the entry tier.

1. Webshare, If You Want to Test Free First

The single best answer to IPRoyal’s missing free trial. Webshare gives you ten proxies free, with no credit card and no time limit, which is the most generous free offering in the category.

Its static proxies at $0.30 each are also the cheapest credible option on this list by a wide margin, roughly a ninth of IPRoyal’s price.

The catch is sourcing. Webshare names no opt-in program. And note that the widely quoted $1.40 per gigabyte residential figure is the three thousand gigabyte rate, not what a small buyer pays, which is $7.00 list or $3.50 on the current promotion.

Switch if you want to establish whether proxies solve your problem before spending anything.

2. Decodo, If Static IP Price Is the Priority

Decodo, which was Smartproxy before it rebranded, is the most aggressive pricing on this list: $2.00 per gigabyte residential and static IPs at $0.27.

It also has the most usable trial arrangement after Webshare, a three day 100 MB trial plus a 14 day money back guarantee, which is a genuinely better refund position than IPRoyal’s 100 MB ceiling.

No named sourcing program, and the page its own site links to for its ethics claim returns a 404.

Switch if you need many static IPs cheaply and have accepted the disclosure gap deliberately.

3. Rayobyte, If Sourcing Ethics Is Why You Are Here

Rayobyte publishes the most specific consent terms of any provider I looked at, and that includes IPRoyal.

Its program is Cash Raven, and rather than claiming ethical sourcing vaguely, Rayobyte publishes the technical conditions: devices proxy only when on WiFi, when idle, and when either plugged in or above 50% battery, with opt-out at any time and no questions asked.

Residential is $3.50 per gigabyte, half IPRoyal’s entry rate. The trade is static IPs at $5.00, nearly double.

Switch if disclosure is your deciding criterion, or you buy rotating bandwidth rather than fixed IPs.

4. Bright Data, If You Have Real Scale

The enterprise option, with the most extensive compliance documentation in the industry, mandatory identity verification for residential access, and ISP proxies at $1.30 that undercut IPRoyal by half.

It also runs a genuine free trial with no card required, which directly solves IPRoyal’s weakest point.

Two honest caveats. Residential list price is $8.00 per gigabyte, currently promoted at $4.00, so budget for the list price returning. And Bright Data was named in Spur’s June 2026 smart TV research as the publisher behind 367 flagged apps carrying proxy software development kits, which is worth knowing even though Bright Data discloses more than anyone.

It also discontinued mobile proxies in April 2026. Full detail in my Bright Data review.

Switch if you are running genuine data collection with compliance obligations.

5. Oxylabs, The Other Premium Option

A genuine tier one provider with ISP proxies at $1.20, residential from $6.00 at the 5 GB starter tier, and a 175 million IP pool claim.

Sourcing runs primarily through Honeygain, which Spur’s research describes as an Oxylabs subsidiary and which was named alongside Bright Data in that same smart TV study. So the disclosure exists with the same caveat attached.

The trial is once per user and has to go through sales, which is friction most small buyers will not bother with.

Switch if you want premium infrastructure and cheap ISP proxies and do not mind talking to a salesperson.

6. Infatica, Cheap With Two Asterisks

Mid table at $4.00 per gigabyte pay-as-you-go with static ISP at $1.95, and it does name an SDK as its sourcing mechanism.

Two things to know. Its own meta description advertises from $0.30 per gigabyte against an on-page table starting at $4.00, a thirteen times gap that is worse than anything else here. And Malwarebytes maintains a detection signature classifying its software as a potentially unwanted program, which is a vendor classification rather than any enforcement action, but you should know it exists.

Switch if you want cheaper static IPs than IPRoyal from a provider that at least names its mechanism.

7. Proxy-Cheap, Cheapest Bandwidth

The lowest entry price for rotating residential at $1.50 per gigabyte, and static IPs priced within thirty cents of IPRoyal.

It publishes no sourcing statement, has no about page, and names no legal entity in any policy. Its refund applies to your first order only and requires closing your account and completing identity verification.

I compared the two directly in Proxy-Cheap versus IPRoyal.

Switch if rotating bandwidth price is the only thing you care about and nothing sensitive routes through it.

One I Would Not Recommend

LumiProxy charges $6.00 per static IP, more than double IPRoyal, while advertising a headline 6.4 times below its entry bandwidth price. It contradicts its own pool figure on a single page, names no legal entity, has never been independently benchmarked, and its refund policy explicitly denies refunds even where the product does not match its advertised features.

It is not a scam and it has satisfied customers. It is simply worse than IPRoyal on every axis except entry bandwidth price.

And One That No Longer Exists

If you were considering NetNut, stop. The FBI seized its domains on 2 July 2026 over an alleged botnet of around two million compromised devices running proxy software their owners never consented to install. Its parent company trades on NASDAQ and said it would cooperate with law enforcement.

NetNut was formally benchmarked by Proxyway three months before the seizure. That is the clearest possible argument for treating sourcing disclosure as a primary criterion rather than a nice-to-have, because performance testing would never have caught it.

What the Cheap Ones Are Actually Saving You Money On

Worth understanding, because the price spread on this page is enormous and it is not mostly about infrastructure quality.

Static IPs range from $0.27 to $6.00 across these providers, a twenty-two fold spread for what is nominally the same product. Infrastructure costs do not vary by twenty-two times.

Some of the spread is genuine: pool quality, how quickly IPs get flagged and replaced, whether the network is actually residential or datacenter dressed up, and how much support costs to run.

But a meaningful part of it is compliance overhead. Running a named opt-in program means paying participants, building an app, maintaining consent records and employing people to handle it. Bright Data’s mandatory verification and use-case review costs money. Rayobyte’s published technical conditions constrain when devices can be used at all, which shrinks usable supply.

A provider that publishes nothing has none of those costs. That is not proof of anything improper, and cheap providers can be perfectly legitimate. It does mean that when you see a price far below the market, the honest question is which cost the provider is not carrying.

For a ten dollar test, buy the cheap one. For anything ongoing, understand what you are buying at that price.

Migration Checklist

If you have decided to move, here is the sequence that avoids the usual problems.

Note every place your current proxy credentials appear. Browser profiles, scripts, scraping tools, testing setups. Proxy credentials get pasted into more places than people remember, and a missed one fails silently weeks later.

Buy the minimum at the new provider while the old one is still running. A month of overlap costs a few dollars and prevents discovering the replacement is blocked by the one site you needed.

Run both against the same target and compare. Same storefront, same country, same time of day. That is the only benchmark that matters, and it takes ten minutes.

Check whether your old provider owes you anything before cancelling. IPRoyal’s pay-as-you-go traffic does not expire, so an unused balance stays usable and there is no rush to cancel.

Then update credentials everywhere in one sitting rather than as things break.

What Nobody Tells You About Proxy Shopping

Three things I wish someone had told me before I spent time on this category.

Pool size claims are marketing. They are self-reported, never audited, and vary between pages on the same website. Do not let a hundred million IP claim influence a decision.

Headline per-gigabyte pricing is close to meaningless because it almost always refers to a volume tier no small buyer reaches. Every single provider on this page does this, including my recommended one.

And the thing that actually determines whether a proxy works for you is whether your specific target sites block it, which no comparison table can tell you. That is why every recommendation here ends with buying the minimum and testing against your real targets rather than trusting anyone’s ranking, including mine.

Which One Is Right for You

Want to test free: Webshare, ten proxies, no card.

Cheapest static IPs: Decodo at $0.27, or Webshare at $0.30.

Best sourcing disclosure: Rayobyte.

Enterprise with compliance needs: Bright Data.

Cheapest bandwidth: Proxy-Cheap at $1.50.

Best all round for a store owner: IPRoyal, which is why it is the default. Named sourcing, non-expiring traffic, and static IP pricing that matches the job.

Before You Switch, Check You Need Proxies at All

Most people running a high-ticket store do not, and switching providers is a poor substitute for asking the prior question.

Two situations genuinely call for proxies. Seeing your own storefront the way a customer in another country sees it, including currency, shipping options and payment method rendering. And confirming your ads and landing pages appear correctly from the regions you buy traffic in.

Both need three to five static residential IPs in specific countries. Neither needs rotating gigabytes, which is what most of the price competition on this page is actually about.

If you are standing up a scraping operation before the store is profitable, the scraping is not the bottleneck. In high-ticket dropshipping the edge comes from supplier relationships and presentation, and getting approved with better suppliers improves the margin on every future order in a way no proxy ever will.

If the margin never worked to begin with, that is a niche question rather than a tooling one, and it belongs in the high-ticket niches list.

How to Switch Without Wasting Money

Buy the smallest package at the new provider before cancelling the old one. Overlapping for a month costs a few dollars and protects you from discovering the replacement does not work against your specific targets.

Test against the exact sites you care about, not a generic IP checker. Your own storefront from the target country and your ad landing pages.

Check refund terms before sending traffic. Several providers here void refunds the moment data passes, and IPRoyal’s own window closes at 100 MB.

If you buy static IPs, verify the country on day one and again a week later. Silent rotation on supposedly static products is among the most common complaints across this whole category.

And keep the vendor question in view. Once you hold customer data, every supplier is part of your risk surface, which is the same discipline as getting your business formation groundwork right rather than patching it together later.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best IPRoyal alternative?

Webshare if you want a free trial, Decodo if you want the cheapest static IPs, Rayobyte if sourcing disclosure is your priority, and Bright Data if you have enterprise scale.

Is there a proxy provider with a genuine free trial?

Webshare gives ten proxies free with no card and no time limit. Bright Data offers a free trial with no card. Decodo offers three days and 100 MB.

Which alternative has the cheapest static IPs?

Decodo at $0.27 per IP, then Webshare at $0.30. Both are a fraction of IPRoyal’s $2.70.

Why is IPRoyal still the default recommendation?

Named sourcing through Pawns.app, non-expiring pay-as-you-go traffic, inclusion in independent benchmarking, and static IP pricing that fits what a store owner needs.

Should I avoid providers with no named sourcing program?

For anything your business depends on, yes. For a ten dollar throwaway test it is a defensible risk, taken knowingly.

Bottom Line

If you left IPRoyal because there was no free trial, go to Webshare. If you left over static IP pricing, go to Decodo. If you left over sourcing ethics, Rayobyte publishes better terms than IPRoyal does. If you need enterprise compliance documentation, Bright Data.

For most store owners, though, the reason to leave does not survive contact with the alternatives. IPRoyal’s combination of named sourcing, non-expiring traffic and sane static pricing is hard to beat once you account for all three, and the cheaper options mostly get cheaper by not telling you things.

Whichever you pick, buy static IPs rather than rotating gigabytes, start with three, and keep the whole line item under fifteen dollars a month.

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