Free vs paid proxies: what free proxy lists really cost you

A proxy from a public list costs nothing to try, which is exactly why it is a bad deal for anything that matters. Nobody vets those servers, nobody answers for them, and many stopped working long before the list was updated. Paid proxies are not magic either, but you get authentication, a choice of IP type and location, and a company with terms you can hold it to. Here is what the difference looks like in practice.

Where free proxies come from

Free proxy lists collect open proxies: servers that forward traffic for anyone who connects, with no password. Some are misconfigured servers or devices whose owners never meant to share them. Others are set up on purpose, and whoever runs one sees every connection that passes through it. The lists rarely say which is which, and you have no way to check.

What researchers found

In 2018, a team of researchers tested open proxies at scale: more than 107,000 proxies listed on aggregator sites, probed with 13 million requests over 50 days. From the paper's abstract:

• Most did not work. More than 92% of listed proxies did not respond to proxy requests.
• Some tampered with pages. The researchers found proxies that modified HTML to mine cryptocurrency in the visitor's browser.
• Some attacked encrypted traffic. They detected TLS man-in-the-middle attacks.
• Some infected downloads. Programs fetched through some proxies had been modified to include remote access trojans and other malware.

The paper, An Extensive Evaluation of the Internet's Open Proxies, by Mani, Vaidya, Dworken and Sherr, is on arXiv. The numbers are from 2018, but the model behind free proxy lists, unvetted servers run by unknown people, has not changed.

What any proxy can see

This part applies to every proxy, free or paid. The difference is whether you trust the operator.

• On http:// sites, the proxy sees everything: the full address, headers, cookies, form fields and the page that comes back, and it can change any of it.
• On https:// sites, your client asks the proxy to open a tunnel with CONNECT and runs TLS through it. The proxy sees the hostname and port, when you connected and how much data moved, but not the pages or what you send, as long as certificate checks stay on.

The hostname is never hidden from the proxy. The test proxy we use for the code in these guides logged the target of every HTTPS connection, such as api.ipify.org:443, without decrypting anything.

The setting that makes a bad proxy dangerous

TLS protects you only if your client verifies certificates. A proxy attempting a man-in-the-middle attack has to present a certificate of its own, and a client with default settings refuses it with an error. Many scraping tutorials make that error go away by turning verification off:

• Python Requests: verify=False
• curl: -k or --insecure
• Node.js: rejectUnauthorized: false, or the variable NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0

With verification off, a malicious proxy can read and change HTTPS traffic as easily as plain HTTP. Through any proxy you do not control, keep verification on, and treat a certificate error as a warning rather than a bug to silence.

Why free proxies fail on real sites

Even with security set aside, free proxies are poor tools for scraping and automation:

• Most are dead, and the working ones come and go, so any list goes stale quickly.
• Everyone uses the same ones. A listed proxy carries traffic from everybody who found it, so popular sites have often rate-limited or banned its IP already.
• No choice of location or IP type. You get whatever the list has, usually without knowing what it is.
• No session control. You cannot hold one IP through a login flow or rotate when you want to.
• No one to ask. When it breaks, there is no support and no refund, because there was never a deal.

What paying gets you

A paid service changes who the proxy works for:

• Authentication. Only requests carrying your credentials use your account.
• A known IP type. You choose residential, mobile, ISP or datacenter for the job.
• Targeting and sessions. Country, state or city, and sticky sessions when a flow needs one IP.
• An operator with terms. A company you can identify, with an acceptable use policy and support.
• A way to test first. Good providers let you try the service on your own targets before you spend much.

Paying does not change what a proxy can see. A paid proxy still sees hostnames, and still sees everything on plain HTTP. Pick a provider you are willing to trust, use HTTPS everywhere, and keep certificate checks on.

What paid costs at NyxonProxies

Paid does not have to mean a subscription. NyxonProxies runs on a prepaid balance: you top up in crypto from $1, and the balance does not expire. Traffic is billed per gigabyte at flat rates, as of 23 October 2026:

• Residential Budget: $0.35/GB
• Datacenter: $0.36/GB
• Shared ISP: $0.50/GB
• Residential: $1.10/GB
• Mobile: $1.25/GB

Every bandwidth product has a minimum order of 1 GB. Linking Discord under Freebies adds 250MB of Residential Budget at no cost, which is the legitimate version of a free proxy: a real pool, behind your own credentials, to test before you pay.

Free options that are not open proxies

• Provider trials, like the 250MB above, give you a real pool for a short test.
• Tor is free and run by volunteers, and the same 2018 study found no Tor exit relays manipulating content or attempting TLS man-in-the-middle attacks. It is built for anonymity, not scraping: it is slow, and many sites block or challenge Tor exits, whose addresses are public.
• Your own server. A small cloud server running a proxy costs little and gives you one datacenter IP that only you use.

If you test a free proxy anyway

• Use it only for public pages you would be comfortable loading from any network.
• Never log in to an account through it.
• Never download files through it, least of all programs.
• Keep certificate verification on, and stop at the first certificate error.
• Assume it logs everything, because you cannot know that it does not.

FAQ

Are free proxies safe? Not for anything sensitive. You cannot know who runs them; researchers have caught open proxies injecting cryptominers, attacking TLS and planting malware in downloads; and any proxy sees the hostnames you visit.

Why do free proxies fail on big sites? Their IPs are shared by everyone using the same list, so popular sites have often rate-limited or blocked them already.

Is a paid proxy completely private? No proxy is. A paid provider still sees hostnames and plain HTTP traffic. The difference is that it is a known company with terms, and you decide whether to trust it.

Does NyxonProxies have a free trial? Linking Discord under Freebies gives you 250MB of Residential Budget traffic.

Try it

Create an account, link Discord under Freebies, and run the free 250MB through your own targets with credentials from the Generate page. The proxy testing guide shows what to check, the proxy vs VPN guide explains what each one encrypts, and the pricing page lists every product.