Public Proxy
A free, openly available proxy that anyone can connect to without authentication - typically slow, unreliable, and insecure.
A public proxy is a free proxy server that anyone can use without signing up or authenticating. Lists of public proxies circulate online, harvested from misconfigured servers or offered openly. They cost nothing, which is their only real advantage.
Public proxies are unreliable by nature. Because they are open and unpaid, they are overloaded by thousands of users, frequently offline, and often already banned on popular targets. Speeds are poor and connections drop constantly. For any serious task, the time lost to dead and blocked IPs outweighs the zero price.
They also carry security risk. A public proxy operator can see and log your unencrypted traffic, inject content, or harvest credentials. You have no idea who runs a public proxy or what they do with the data passing through it. Never send sensitive information - logins, personal data, payment details - through a public proxy.
For legitimate work, paid proxies from a known provider are the standard. You get authenticated access, IP pools that are maintained and rotated, predictable performance, and an operator accountable for the service. Free public proxies are best treated as throwaway tools for trivial, non-sensitive experiments only.
Why the free ones are free
Public proxy lists circulate thousands of addresses that anyone can use without registering. They come from three places, and none of them is a business model: misconfigured servers whose owners do not know they are open, deliberately operated honeypots, and compromised machines.
The practical qualities follow. Availability is measured in hours, speed is whatever is left after everyone else, and reliability is a coin flip on every request.
The security problem is worse than the reliability one. Whoever runs the proxy sits between you and the destination. Anything not protected by TLS is readable, and even with TLS the operator learns which sites you visit and when. Some inject content into pages that are not encrypted.
Why we do not publish a free list
There is no version of this that is safe for work involving credentials:
The honest comparison
Public proxy unknown operator, no accountability, hours of life
Our cheapest IPv6 at $0.20 per address per month, dedicated
datacenter IPv4 from $1.15, unmetered traffic- If you are testing a script and do not want to pay, use a single cheap datacenter address rather than a public list. The debugging time you save exceeds the cost immediately.
- Never send credentials through a public proxy. That includes logging into anything, and it includes API keys in headers.
- Public lists are also useless as a benchmark: they die between your test and your deployment.
- We do not have a free tier and will not pretend otherwise. Providers that do exist, and for a first experiment that may be the honest answer.
Public proxy misconceptions
Free is not cheap
The cost moves from money to debugging time, failed runs and exposure.
Elite labels on public lists mean nothing
Nobody verified them. Test the headers if you insist on using one.
They are not anonymous
You have simply chosen an unknown operator instead of a known one.
They are not suitable for scraping either
Their addresses are already blocked almost everywhere, because thousands of people used them first.
Public, shared and dedicated, next to each other
Three words that get used loosely and mean very different things about who else is on the address with you.
| Kind | Who else uses it | What it costs | What it is actually for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public, also called free | Anyone who found the same list, often thousands | Nothing | Learning what a proxy is. Nothing that matters |
| Shared | A limited number of paying customers at once | Least of the paid options | Volume work where a repeated address is acceptable |
| Dedicated | Only you, for the term you paid for | Most per address | Accounts and anything where the address must stay yours |
| Rotating residential | Nobody holds it: you get a different one per request | Per gigabyte rather than per address | Collection at scale where no single address matters |
The row people misread is the last one. Rotating is not the same as shared: you are not queueing behind other customers on one address, you are getting a new address each time. Neither is it dedicated, because none of those addresses is reserved for you.
Questions people actually type
What is a public proxy?
An open proxy whose address and port are published for anyone to use, usually on a free list. Nobody is accountable for it, nobody knows why it is open, and everyone who found the list is using it at the same time.
Are free public proxies safe?
Treat them as hostile. Whoever runs the machine sees every unencrypted request that passes through it, and can alter what comes back. Some open proxies exist precisely for that. Never send credentials, payment details or anything you would mind a stranger reading through one.
Why do public proxies stop working so fast?
Because they were never maintained. Many are misconfigured servers that get fixed, or compromised ones that get cleaned. Those that survive are used so heavily that the address is blocked everywhere worth visiting long before you try it.
Is a public proxy anonymous?
Less than nothing. The destination sees an address shared by thousands, which is itself a strong signal of automation, and the operator of the proxy sees you. You have added an observer, not removed one.
Can I use public proxies for scraping?
You can, and the arithmetic rarely works. The addresses are slow, mostly dead by the time you use them, and already blocked on the sites worth scraping, so you spend engineering time on retries and validation to save a few dollars. That is the real cost, and it is usually higher.
Why do you not publish a free list?
Because a free list is either other people's open servers, which we will not point traffic at, or our own paid addresses being burned in public. Neither is a service. We would rather explain why the free option fails than hand you one that does.
See this in practice
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