Every free proxy API works the same way: it hands you a list of addresses somebody else scanned off the open internet. Understanding where that list comes from tells you exactly what you can and cannot build on it.
Public proxy APIs return open proxies: servers somewhere in the world that accept connections from anyone, either because they were deliberately left open or because they were misconfigured. The API did not create them and does not run them. It scanned for them, checked whether they answered, and put the survivors in a list.
That single fact explains every property of free proxies. Nobody is paid to keep them up, so they disappear without notice. Nobody controls who else is using them, so the addresses are already rate-limited or blocked on popular targets. And nobody is accountable for what passes through, which is why you never send a login or anything private through one.
Most free APIs are a plain HTTP GET returning text or JSON:
curl "https://example-free-list.net/api?protocol=http&country=us&format=json"
The part people skip is validation. Between the moment the list was built and the moment you use it, a large share of the entries are already dead. Any serious use of a free list needs a checking step of its own:
curl -x http://IP:PORT -m 8 -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n" https://httpbin.org/ip
Run that across the list, keep what answers 200 inside your timeout, and expect to repeat it constantly. In practice teams spend more engineering time maintaining the checker than the free addresses ever save them.
Free lists are usable for one thing: reading public pages where you do not care which address the request came from, and where being blocked is merely inconvenient. Everything else fails, and it fails in ways that look like bugs in your code rather than a proxy problem — random timeouts, captchas that appear only sometimes, responses that differ between runs.
The reason is that a datacentre address shared by strangers is exactly what anti-abuse systems are built to spot. No amount of retry logic fixes an address whose reputation is already spent.
A paid residential gateway inverts the model. Instead of a list of addresses you must test, you get one hostname, one port and one set of credentials, and the pool behind it rotates for you:
curl -x http://USERNAME-country-us:PASSWORD@gw.pyproxy.com:1111 https://httpbin.org/ip
The same line works for every request; there is no list to refresh and nothing to validate. Add
-country-us to pick a country, or a session token to hold one address for about thirty
minutes. Billing is per gigabyte, so a test costs cents rather than a subscription.
If you want to compare honestly, take the target that matters to you and run it both ways. That is the only benchmark worth anything, and it is why the first gigabyte here is free.
Not for anything private. Whoever runs an open proxy can read unencrypted traffic passing through it and can see which sites you request even over HTTPS. Use them for public pages only, and never for logins.
Because nobody is paid to keep them running. They are other people's servers, found by scanning, and they go away when the owner notices or reboots. Expect most of any list to be dead within hours.
No. Shared datacentre addresses are the first thing anti-bot systems block, so you get inconsistent results that look like bugs in your own code. Rotating residential traffic billed per gigabyte is the working equivalent.
Yes. Create an account, link Telegram and one gigabyte lands on your balance with no card and no deposit, which is enough to run your real target and compare.