operated by ProxyUniverseMost provider comparisons rank vendors one to ten, which is useless because the vendors are not competing for the same buyer. This one sorts them by tier and states plainly what you get and what you give up at each level — including the cases where the expensive option is the correct one.
| Tier | Who it is for | What you give up |
|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | Companies with procurement. Contracts, DPAs, SLAs, account managers, deep first-party tooling | Price, and a signup process that screens you |
| Mid-market | Agencies and serious solo operators wanting one competent vendor with open signup | SLAs, and the lowest prices |
| Budget | Anyone testing, or running easy targets at volume | Depth in unusual countries and on well-defended sites |
| Wholesale / aggregator | People who want many pools cheaply and will handle their own problems | SLA, account manager, formal contracts |
Correct choice if procurement is involved. Business qualification at signup stops most individuals.
Read the reviewUnmatched managed unblocking. KYC, a real learning curve, and invoices that depend on configuration.
Read the reviewOpen signup, clear dashboard, fair pricing. A genuinely good default for one-vendor setups.
Read the reviewLong country list and a mobile pool at mid-market pricing. Rollover instead of expiry.
Read the reviewReal value for testing and easy targets. Judge it on cost per success, not cost per gigabyte.
Read the reviewNot a proxy provider. Excellent for code, unusable for browsers, phones and antidetect profiles.
Read the explainerProxy-Seller sells mainly dedicated per-IP proxies rather than per-gigabyte residential, which is a different purchase with different economics — covered in the per-IP vs per-GB breakdown. LunaProxy and the former PYPROXY, PIA S5 and 922 S5 services all traced back to overlapping infrastructure, which is why they had correlated outages; see the LunaProxy page and PIA S5 status.
To be explicit about our own position: we are the wholesale tier. Fifteen independent networks behind one balance, residential from $0.65/GB, traffic that does not expire, entry at a few dollars, payment in crypto or by card, no qualification call. What we do not sell is an SLA, a contract or an account manager — if you need those, buy from Oxylabs and do not let anyone talk you out of it.
The structural argument for this tier is not price. It is that no single pool works everywhere, and switching networks should be a dropdown rather than a new signup.
There is no single answer, and any page that gives you one is selling something. The tier you need is set by your constraints: whether you require a contract and an SLA, how much you spend monthly, how hard your target sites are, and whether your traffic comes from code or from a browser.
Wholesale or reseller access, which currently starts around $0.65/GB against enterprise list prices several times higher. You give up SLAs and account managers. For individuals and small teams that is usually a trade worth making.
Buy the smallest possible amount from two or three, run your actual target, and count successful requests per gigabyte. Advertised pool sizes, country counts and per-GB headline rates predict almost nothing about your specific job.
Only if you need what enterprise sells: a signed contract, a DPA, VAT invoices, an SLA you can escalate against, or an account manager. Those are procurement requirements, not technical ones. If nobody in your organisation will ever ask for them, you are paying for paperwork.
Yes, and serious operations do, because every pool has targets it handles badly and every pool has bad weeks. The friction is running several accounts, balances and invoices — which is the specific problem an aggregator with one balance across many networks exists to remove.