Colombia proxies
Two things are worth understanding about Colombia. A mobile address here is shared with noticeably more real subscribers than in Europe, which changes your request arithmetic. And postal addresses are not free text but a grid of numbered streets, which changes how you parse them.
What we have in Colombia
Prices are the same as in every other country we cover.
What Colombian addresses get used for
Marketplace price monitoring
Mercado Libre CO, Falabella, Éxito, Alkosto, Ktronix: Colombian storefronts and prices are separate from the Mexican and Argentine ones.
Property
Fincaraiz and Metrocuadrado: the main platforms, where listing addresses follow the local scheme.
Cars and classifieds
TuCarro, Carroya, OLX Colombia: local prices and local geography.
Local search and ad verification
google.com.co, El Tiempo, El Espectador, Semana: campaigns are bought for the local audience.
What looks different from outside Colombia
These serve a Colombian visitor something other than what a foreign one sees, because of broadcast rights and local catalogues. We sell addresses rather than a way past detection.
Which type to take for a Colombian job
Cities people ask for here
Cities are set with the _city_ suffix. The country is mountainous and intercity logistics are expensive, so availability and lead times genuinely differ between them.
The setups people take here most often
- 01Residential, country levelThe default for marketplaces and search results.
- 02Two cities for comparisonBogotá and the coast when measuring availability and delivery times.
- 03Mobile at a lower paceApps and platforms expecting a carrier, with careful request arithmetic.
- 04A fifty minute sticky sessionWhen a job has to run start to finish on one address.
Connection strings for Colombia
The country code is CO, upper case. The city goes after it with _city_, hyphens instead of spaces, in the order country, city, session, lifetime.
Colombian addresses come through rotation and sticky sessions, with the lifetime set by the ttl suffix.
Colombian exits, four ways
curl -x login_c_CO:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# held for fifty minutes, for a job that must not change address
curl -x login_c_CO_s_42_ttl_50m:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# the capital and the coast, which differ on availability
curl -x login_c_CO_city_Bogota_s_43_ttl_15m:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
curl -x login_c_CO_city_Barranquilla_s_44_ttl_15m:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# with the language header that matches the market
curl -H "Accept-Language: es-CO" -x login_c_CO:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.orgA mobile address here is shared with more people
The first thing, and it is purely technical.
Mobile internet is more widespread here than fixed-line, and carriers place a great many subscribers behind a single external address. The density of neighbours behind such an address is noticeably higher than in the European countries we cover.
The upside is obvious: the address looks entirely ordinary, because real people with ordinary behaviour genuinely sit behind it.
The downside is arithmetic. If a target rate limits per address, your request budget is shared with actual subscribers. A "so many requests per address per minute" figure carried over from a European project is too high here, and you will hit the limit sooner than predicted without doing anything wrong.
Hence the practice: on Colombian mobile addresses keep the pace below what you are used to, and treat a sudden refusal on an address that just worked as somebody else’s activity rather than your own. A retry after rotation helps here more often than switching address type.
Residential behaves normally, so volume collection goes there, and mobile is kept for targets that genuinely expect a carrier.
Addresses here are a grid, not free text
The second thing, and it concerns parsing rather than access.
Colombian postal addresses follow a regular scheme: the street type, its number, then the cross street and the distance to the entrance. A string like Calle 100 #7-23 is not a name but a coordinate in the city grid.
What that changes. A scraper storing a listing address as one string throws away structure that was already there. And matching listings by string equality misses, because the same address gets written with different abbreviations, spacing and punctuation.
Parse the address into components on intake and store them as fields: street type, street number, cross street, house number. After that matches are found reliably and duplicate listings become visible immediately.
A consequence for geocoding: parsed components locate a place more precisely than the whole string does, because the scheme is regular. This is the rare case where a local peculiarity makes the work easier once you know about it.
What actually blocks you on Colombian targets
The familiar split.
Marketplaces and the large chains filter server ranges and expect a home address: that means residential.
Publishers and government sites serve requests calmly.
Apps and the platforms grown out of them expect a carrier address more often than in Europe: the market here is mobile.
Search results are reachable but rate limited per address, and on mobile you share that limit with strangers, as described above.
Which exits you get here, and how stable they are
The Colombian pool in practical terms.
The pool is decent: a country of over fifty million people, with enough addresses for regular work.
The distribution is genuinely regional. Bogotá outweighs the rest, but Medellín, Cali and Barranquilla resolve reliably, so comparing cities is both possible and meaningful here: the country is mountainous, intercity logistics are expensive, and availability and lead times really do diverge.
Line quality varies: good in the large cities, worse in the remote departments. Do not shorten the thirty second timeout.
Sticky sessions hold an address for up to fifty minutes, and mobile rotates by physical reconnect: seconds rather than milliseconds.
Choosing the type for a Colombian target
The order here is short.
- Start with country-level residential: it passes on marketplaces, retail and search.
- If you are measuring availability and delivery times, add a second city: the regional difference here is real.
- Take mobile for apps and platforms that expect a carrier, and lower the pace from the outset.
- If a job has to run on one address, add a sticky session with a lifetime.
- A refusal on a mobile address after successful requests usually means somebody else’s activity behind it: rotate and retry rather than switching type.
What Colombian sites check beyond the address
A Colombian address opens the first gate; language and number parsing decide the rest.
Send es-CO. Colombian Spanish differs from both the Mexican and the Argentine varieties, so keyword lists from those markets transfer poorly and are built again from scratch.
The number format occurs both ways here, with a dot and with a comma as the thousands separator on different platforms. Pin the format per domain and range-check the result: peso amounts are large, and being out by three orders of magnitude looks plausible.
The time zone is UTC-5 with no daylight saving, one zone for the whole country.
Consent banners are less common than in the EU, but a city picker on first visit is frequent and stops collection at the first step.
What a month of Colombian work costs
Three scenarios at our prices, so you have something to check a quote against.
- Price monitoring across Colombian marketplaces, 25,000 listings a day with images blocked, roughly 110 KB per page. That is about 2.75 GB a day, around 82 GB a month: $82 on residential.
- A second city for availability comparison adds volume only in the categories where lead times and stock genuinely differ.
- Mobile is billed per day rather than per gigabyte: $5.76 per address per day, and given the reduced pace it is taken selectively rather than for volume.
The legal part, stated plainly
Colombia is not in the European Union, and GDPR does not apply here directly. Its own personal data protection legislation does, with its own regulator, and collecting data that identifies people in Colombia is governed by it regardless of where your company sits.
This is general information rather than legal advice. Our terms require lawful use and we act on abuse reports. Where the answer carries commercial risk, ask a lawyer.
Verifying a Colombian exit
Under a minute. The third command is the most useful one here: it shows how many distinct addresses rotation gives you before you plan your pace.
Three checks
# 1. is the exit Colombian, and where
curl -s -x login_c_CO:[email protected]:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# 2. does the fifty minute session hold
for i in 1 2 3; do
curl -s -x login_c_CO_s_42_ttl_50m:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org; echo
done
# 3. how many distinct addresses do twenty rotating requests give
for i in $(seq 1 20); do
curl -s -x login_c_CO:[email protected]:10000 https://api.ipify.org; echo
done | sort -u | wc -lQuestions people ask before buying Colombian addresses
Why does a mobile address hit limits sooner than expected?
Because many real subscribers sit behind it and you share the per-address request budget with them. Keep the pace below what your European projects use.
Is a refusal on mobile a block?
Usually it is somebody else’s activity behind the same address. Rotate and retry rather than switching address type.
How should listing addresses be stored?
Parsed into components: street type, street number, cross street, house number. The scheme is regular, so field matching works reliably where string matching does not.
Do I need city targeting?
If you are measuring availability and lead times, yes. The country is mountainous, intercity logistics are expensive, and the differences are real.
Will Mexican keywords work?
Poorly. Colombian Spanish differs from both the Mexican and the Argentine varieties; build the list again.
Do Colombian addresses cost more?
No. Prices are the same everywhere: residential from $1.00 per GB, mobile from $5.76 per day.