Proxy-Cheap is cheaper. IPRoyal will tell you where its IP addresses come from. That is the entire decision, and which way you go depends on whether you are spending ten dollars to answer a question or building something your business depends on. I run Ecommerce Paradise, and I have reviewed both of these providers in full. Here is the head to head.
The One That Names Its Sourcing
IPRoyal sources through Pawns.app, a named opt-in program you can download and inspect, and its pay-as-you-go traffic does not expire.
The Short Answer
Buy IPRoyal if this is for your business. It costs more per gigabyte at the entry tier, and it publishes a named sourcing program, a legal entity and a refund policy that actually grants refunds.
Buy Proxy-Cheap only if you want the cheapest possible static IP for a task that does not touch customer data, and you have read and accepted what it does not disclose.
If you were hoping for a closer contest, the pricing section below is genuinely close. The disclosure section is not close at all.
Price Head to Head
| Product | Proxy-Cheap | IPRoyal |
|---|---|---|
| Advertised headline | $0.49 per GB | $1.75 per GB |
| Actual entry price | $1.50 per GB at 3 GB | $7.00 per GB at 1 GB |
| Headline to reality gap | About 3x | 4x, needs a 10 TB commitment |
| Static residential per IP | $2.44 to $2.71 a month | $2.70 for 30 days, $2.40 on 90 days |
| Traffic expiry | Not documented | Pay-as-you-go traffic does not expire |
| Minimum order | About $4.50 | $7.00 |
On rotating bandwidth, Proxy-Cheap genuinely wins. $1.50 against $7.00 at the entry tier is not a close call, and anyone telling you otherwise is not looking at the real numbers.
On static residential IPs, which is the product a store owner should actually buy, they are within about thirty cents of each other. At that point the price difference stops being a reason to choose either one.
Both advertise a headline they do not sell at. I criticised IPRoyal for this in the IPRoyal pricing breakdown and I am not going to pretend it is only a Proxy-Cheap problem.
Sourcing Head to Head
This is where the comparison stops being competitive.
IPRoyal names Pawns.app as its sourcing program. It is a real consumer application you can download. It pays participants from a five dollar minimum through PayPal, Bitcoin, ACH, Venmo and gift cards. IPRoyal’s help documentation states that members can join or leave at any time.
Proxy-Cheap publishes nothing. No sourcing statement, no named program, no about page, and no legal entity named in the terms of service or the privacy policy. You cannot determine who you are contracting with.
Neither company has been connected to any wrongdoing. But the standard exists, other providers meet it, and only one of these two does.
Why This Stopped Being Theoretical in 2026
If this section had been written in 2024 it would have read like a philosophical preference. It does not read that way now.
On 2 July 2026 the FBI seized the domains of NetNut, a mainstream proxy provider whose parent company trades on NASDAQ, over an alleged botnet of roughly two million compromised devices running proxy software their owners never consented to install.
Weeks earlier, security firm Spur found proxy software development kits in 2,058 of 6,038 smart TV apps it examined, with proxying continuing after the app was closed.
Neither IPRoyal nor Pawns.app was named in that research. Proxy-Cheap was not named either, but for a different and less reassuring reason: a company that publishes no program and no supplier chain cannot be found by that kind of research in either direction.
Refunds Head to Head
| Proxy-Cheap | IPRoyal | |
|---|---|---|
| Refund window | First order only, once ever | Residential, if 100 MB or less consumed |
| Conditions | Requires closing your account and completing identity verification | Subscription disputes within 72 hours |
| Crypto payments | Not specified | Explicitly non-refundable |
| Free trial | None | Companies only, after verification |
Neither is generous. IPRoyal’s is narrow but coherent, and it does not require you to close your account and submit identity documents to recover a few dollars.
Proxy-Cheap’s condition is the strange one. To get your money back you hand identity documents to a company that will not name its own legal entity in any document.
Reviews Head to Head
| Proxy-Cheap | IPRoyal | |
|---|---|---|
| Trustpilot | 3.0 across about 761 reviews | Substantially better, with far more volume |
| Distribution | 64% five star, 23% one star | Less polarised |
| Independent benchmarking | Absent from Proxyway 2026 | Among the 13 providers formally tested |
The benchmarking line matters more than the star ratings. Proxyway’s 2026 proxy market research formally tested thirteen providers and IPRoyal was one of them. Proxy-Cheap does not appear anywhere in it.
That is not proof that Proxy-Cheap performs badly. It does mean nobody independent has ever measured it, so every performance claim on its site is self-reported.
Features Head to Head
| Proxy-Cheap | IPRoyal | |
|---|---|---|
| Protocols | HTTP and SOCKS5 | HTTP and SOCKS5 |
| Product lines | Rotating residential, static residential, mobile, datacenter | Rotating residential, static residential, datacenter, mobile, Web Unblocker |
| Country targeting | Yes | Yes, 31+ countries on static |
| Static IP pool | Not published | Over 500,000 |
| Payment methods | Cards, crypto | Cards, PayPal, Alipay, 25 cryptocurrencies |
| Identity verification | Required for refunds | Optional, unlocks more ports and PayPal |
| Named legal entity | None in any policy | Yes |
Technically these are close cousins. Both sell the same four product categories over the same protocols with country-level targeting, and neither has a feature the other lacks in any way that would decide a purchase.
The differences that matter are all in the last three rows, which is the pattern across this whole comparison.
One detail worth flagging on IPRoyal: identity verification is optional rather than mandatory, but completing it unlocks additional ports, PayPal as a payment method, and access to government and banking domains. If you plan to use proxies against any regulated site, do the verification early.
Which Should You Buy?
Buy IPRoyal if the proxies touch anything your business depends on, you might ever need to name your sub-processor to an auditor or an enterprise customer, you want traffic that does not expire between occasional uses, or you simply want to know who you are paying.
Buy Proxy-Cheap if you want rotating bandwidth at the lowest price for a throwaway task, you have accepted the disclosure gap deliberately rather than by not reading, and nothing sensitive routes through it.
Buy neither if you are not sure why you need proxies at all, which is the situation most store owners are actually in.
The Question Underneath
Most people running a high-ticket store do not need proxies, and I would rather say that than sell you the winner of a comparison you should not be running.
You do not need them to check a competitor’s price occasionally. You do not need them for supplier research, ad management, customer service or keyword work.
Two situations genuinely call for them. Seeing your own storefront the way a customer in another country sees it, including currency, shipping options and payment method rendering. And verifying that your ads and landing pages appear correctly from the regions you buy traffic in.
Both need a handful of static residential IPs. Neither needs rotating gigabytes, which is the product Proxy-Cheap wins on and the product most people mistakenly buy.
If you are building 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 how you present products, not from harvesting competitor prices faster than they change them.
What I Would Actually Buy
Three static residential IPs in the countries you sell into, on IPRoyal’s 90 day term at $2.40 each, with unlimited traffic. That is $7.20 a month and it covers both real use cases permanently.
If you want to test whether proxies help at all before spending anything, Webshare gives ten free proxies with no card and no time limit, which is a better first step than either provider here.
The full field, including the providers that beat both of these on specific axes, is in my roundup of the best residential proxy providers for ecommerce.
Need Compliance Documentation Instead?
Bright Data publishes the most extensive sourcing library in the category and runs a genuine free trial with no card required.
Setting Either One Up
The mechanics are similar whichever you pick, and a few habits save money and trouble.
Buy the smallest possible package first. The entry tier is your test, not your deployment.
Test against the exact sites you care about on day one, not a generic IP checker. Your own storefront from the target country, and your ad landing pages. A proxy that passes neutral tests 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 rotation on supposedly static products is one of the most common complaints in this category and it breaks anything automated. My IPRoyal setup walkthrough covers the configuration steps.
Never route store admin, payment processor or bank logins through any proxy. It triggers security locks and puts your credentials through infrastructure you do not control.
The Vendor Question
One point that applies well beyond proxies, and it is the reason I keep coming back to disclosure.
Once you hold customer data and operate as a real entity, every vendor becomes part of your risk surface. If an insurer, an enterprise buyer or an auditor asks who processes your traffic and where, you need an answer.
With IPRoyal you have one. With Proxy-Cheap your data processing agreement would run to a brand rather than a company, because no legal entity is named anywhere. That is not a defensible position in any kind of review, and it is the same discipline as getting your business formation groundwork right rather than improvising it later.
Cheap infrastructure with unclear provenance looks like a bargain until the day it does not.
Rotating Versus Static, and Why It Decides This Comparison
The terminology in this category is deliberately confusing, and getting it wrong is what makes people pick the wrong provider.
A rotating residential proxy gives you a different IP address on every request, drawn from a large pool, billed by the gigabyte. It exists for scraping thousands of pages where being a different apparent person each time is the entire point.
A static residential proxy gives you one fixed IP in one country that stays yours, billed per IP, usually with unlimited bandwidth. It exists for looking like a consistent, ordinary resident of a specific place.
Now look back at the pricing table. Proxy-Cheap’s advantage is entirely in the rotating column. On the static column the two providers are effectively tied.
So the question “which is cheaper” has a different answer depending on which product you buy, and almost every store owner should be buying the one where the price difference disappears. That is why the disclosure question ends up deciding it.
Three Ways People Waste Money Here
Buying rotating when the job needs static. The most expensive mistake by a distance. You pay per gigabyte for constantly changing identities when you needed one fixed identity with unlimited traffic.
Budgeting from the headline. Both providers advertise a rate they do not sell at the entry tier. Plan from the cart price, not the landing page.
Scaling before testing. Buy the minimum, test against your real targets, and only then decide. Both providers have refund terms narrow enough that a large first order is effectively unrecoverable.
Where Proxy Spend Belongs in a Store Budget
Some perspective, because tool selection is where people hide from harder work.
Proxies are a diagnostic instrument. They tell you what a customer somewhere else sees. They do not improve what that customer sees, they do not win you better supplier terms, and they do not change your margin on a single order.
If this line item is climbing past about fifteen dollars a month on a store that is not yet profitable, you are optimising the wrong thing. The work that compounds is getting approved with better suppliers, because better terms improve the margin on every future order.
And if the margin never worked in the first place, that is a niche problem rather than a tooling problem, which is what the high-ticket niches list exists to settle before anything technical.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is cheaper, Proxy-Cheap or IPRoyal?
Proxy-Cheap, clearly, on rotating bandwidth: $1.50 per GB against $7.00 at the entry tier. On static residential IPs they are within about thirty cents of each other.
Which has better sourcing disclosure?
IPRoyal, by a wide margin. It names Pawns.app as its opt-in program. Proxy-Cheap publishes no sourcing information and names no legal entity.
Does either offer a free trial?
Neither offers one to individuals. IPRoyal offers trials to companies after verifying registration and ownership.
Which is better for an ecommerce store?
IPRoyal, for the static residential IPs a store actually needs, the non-expiring traffic and the ability to name your vendor.
Is Proxy-Cheap safe to use?
It is a functioning service with hundreds of positive reviews and no connection to any known wrongdoing. The issue is that it declines to publish the information that would let you verify anything.
What Changed My Mind While Researching This
I went into these two reviews expecting to write that Proxy-Cheap was the sensible budget pick and IPRoyal was the one you pay a premium for without much to show for it. On raw specifications that is roughly true.
Two things moved me. The first was reading Proxy-Cheap’s refund policy properly and realising it asks you to submit identity documents to a company that will not name itself. That asymmetry is hard to unsee once you have noticed it.
The second was the timing. I published the Proxy-Cheap review with the sourcing criticism in it, and then the NetNut seizure landed a few weeks later and made the criticism look understated rather than pedantic. A mainstream, publicly traded, independently benchmarked provider turned out to be running on devices whose owners had not agreed to anything.
That does not make Proxy-Cheap guilty of anything, and I want to be careful about that. It does mean the question “where do these IP addresses come from” moved from a nice-to-have to the first thing I check, and only one of these two providers has an answer.
If you are spending ten dollars to find out whether your German storefront shows the right currency, none of this matters much. If proxies are becoming part of how your business operates, it matters a lot.
Bottom Line
Proxy-Cheap wins on rotating bandwidth price and loses on everything that matters for a business buyer: sourcing disclosure, named legal entity, refund terms, and any independent measurement of whether the product performs.
IPRoyal costs more at the entry tier, advertises a headline it does not sell at, and runs a tight refund policy. It also tells you where its network comes from, which after the events of July 2026 is not a small thing.
For a store owner the answer is IPRoyal, buying static IPs rather than bandwidth, for about seven dollars a month. And for most people reading this the better answer is to work out whether you need proxies at all before buying either.
Spend Your Attention Where the Money Is
My team builds the store, secures the supplier approvals and hands you a business that is 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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