What proxy vendors disclose about their networks, September 2026

A residential proxy is somebody's home connection. The one fact a buyer cannot check alone is how that connection came to be for sale, and on 1 September 2026 most sellers still do not say. Ten of the 34 proxy sellers on this site name the channel on their own pages: a software kit inside other people's apps, a bandwidth-sharing app, an agreement with an ISP, or their own servers. Fourteen say the addresses are ethically sourced, or consented, and stop there, and that fourteen holds three grades of claim rather than one. Ten say nothing at all, and two of those could not be read: one site answers every request with a 403, and one renders as sixty-four characters of text without JavaScript.

The other two questions come out the same shape. Ten of 40 vendors state that a customer check applies before or at purchase, six state that no check applies by default, and 24 publish nothing either way. Twenty-five list their payment methods in text, six show logos with no sentence, and nine name no method at all. Fourteen name a cryptocurrency.

Two of those three numbers are lower than the ones the rest of this site prints, and the difference is the method, so the method comes first.

What discloses means here

Three questions, each answered only from the vendor's own public pages:

1. Where do the residential addresses come from?
2. What must a customer pass before buying?
3. How can a customer pay?

Each answer is coded into one of three states, and the coding is the same for every vendor:

The pages read are the ones the site's collector already reads for prices and policies (pricing, about, FAQ, terms), plus any page the vendor links as ethics, sourcing, trust or KYC. Every row names the page its quote came from. Where a page answered 404, 502 or 403, the row says so.

Three dates matter. The catalogue values this site renders on its vendor pages were read between 19 and 25 August 2026. Every quote in the tables below was re-read from its live URL on 1 September 2026 with the same page reader the collector uses, which keeps a quote only if it is on the page that day. 83 of the 84 quotes passed that check by plain fetch, and 9Proxy's needed a browser because the site ships no text without JavaScript.

A quote counts only if a visitor can see it. The check runs against the page's rendered text, with HTML comments, script and style blocks stripped before matching, so a string that survives only in raw HTML is not a quote. That rule was applied unevenly in the first pass, and a re-read on 2 September 2026 corrected three cells. Two printed quotes, RapidProxy's and Swiftproxy's, existed only inside HTML comments and were removed. One coding, Evomi's cryptocurrency flag, rested on a clause excluding cryptocurrency from refunds rather than on a method the page lists, and was reversed. Those three rows carry both dates, and each correction is described under the table it belongs to. Two of the 84 quotes did not survive it, leaving 82.

Three things were not done. No accounts were created and nothing was bought, because this is a study of what vendors state, not of what a signup form does. Nothing was inferred: a signup button is not a policy, "ethically sourced" is a claim and is recorded as one, and a pool size printed on a vendor's page is their number, never ours. And no vendor that says nothing is described as hiding anything. Silence is recorded as silence, with the page and the date.

Why the question matters, on the public record

On 12 March 2026 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published a notice on residential proxy networks. Its description of the supply is the whole question the first table below asks:

Residential proxies obtain residential IP addresses from devices in two ways: The owner of the device provides consent, or the owner of the device does not provide consent and is unaware their IP address is being used.

A vendor that names its channel has answered that question in public. A vendor that says "ethically sourced" has answered it with an adjective. A vendor that says nothing has not answered it, and a buyer has no way to tell which of the FBI's two ways applies.

On 2 July 2026 the FBI seized NetNut, and the seizure notice on its domain names the platform, its administrators, and its subscribers. Google's Threat Intelligence Group, in a blog post reported by Krebs on Security, said the network was widely resold and white-labeled by third-party proxy providers. That is why a silence matters more than it looks. A storefront with its own brand and pricing page can resell a network it never names, and nothing on that storefront tells a buyer so. NetNut is not on this roster; it is the first entry on the enforcement timeline. No vendor in the tables below is linked to it or to any other network by anything here, and none should be read that way. Nothing that follows names a vendor as a reseller of anything.

On 13 August 2026 the Cloud Security Alliance's AI Safety Initiative published a research note on what it calls a structural attribution blind spot: the same consumer devices, repurposed as proxy exits, now carry commercial scraping, fraud and reconnaissance traffic at once. The note argues that the pattern likely generalizes beyond a single platform, and says in the same sentence that this broader claim has not been confirmed across other residential proxy brands. The tables below cannot confirm or refute that claim and do not try to. They record what each brand says about itself, which is the one input a cross-brand check would need first.

Where the addresses come from

Ten of the 34 proxy sellers name the channel. Bright Data, Infatica and Massive describe a software development kit that app developers embed and that users opt into. PacketStream, ProxyRack, IPRoyal and Evomi describe an app or a program that pays people to share their connection. Oxylabs names a wholesale supplier, Honeygain, which runs such an app. Webshare names ISP providers as one part of its pool and a reward-for-bandwidth model for the rest. PrivateProxy says its residential addresses were provided directly by the ISP.

Fourteen make a claim and stop, and that group holds three different grades of claim rather than one. Five name a consent mechanism without naming the channel it runs through: DataImpulse, Decodo, IPBurger, Rayobyte and SOAX say the people whose connections they resell granted permission, opted in, or are compensated, without saying through what. Rayobyte's sentence is the most specific of them, and says permission was granted manually and intentionally. Seven state an adjective with no mechanism at all: Mangoproxy, Proxidize, ProxyEmpire, Proxy-Seller, RapidProxy, Swiftproxy and Thordata carry some form of "ethically sourced" with nothing behind it. Two, Gonzo Proxy and Pia S5 Proxy, describe the pool rather than the supply. A vendor in the first group is doing more than a vendor in the second, and the single count of fourteen does not show it.

Ten say nothing that could be found, and the six scraping APIs say nothing about whose proxy network sits underneath their product, which is the same question one layer up. The catalogue's field for that, the upstream supplier, is unknown on all six.

A row marked (affiliate) is a vendor this site earns commission on when a reader clicks through to it. Fifteen of the forty were commission partners on 2 September 2026. The mark appears in all three tables, the ordering of every table is alphabetical, and the code that orders any list on this site cannot read commission data.

Close calls in this table

Four rows rest on a reading a second reader could make differently. They are printed here rather than left in a working file.

• Webshare is coded as naming the channel because its sourcing page names ISP providers as one part of the pool. The other part is described as "Tier A model proxies", which names a model rather than a vehicle.
• Oxylabs is coded as naming the channel because its enterprise page names Honeygain, which runs a bandwidth-sharing app, as an exclusive wholesale partner. That naming sits in a link teaser. The page's own sentence says the addresses are "procured from carefully selected partners", which is the same grade of phrase this study records as a claim without a channel when another vendor uses it.
• Gonzo Proxy and Pia S5 Proxy are coded as a claim without a channel. "P2P network of real devices" and "a real consumer device on a real ISP" describe the pool, not how a device joined it or what its owner agreed to.

Webshare and Oxylabs are both inside the group of ten credited with naming the channel. A reader who overturns either call reads that number as nine, and a reader who overturns both reads it as eight.

The sourcing hub prints a different count: 26 of the 40 providers we track will not say. Both numbers are true and they measure different things. The catalogue counts a vendor as disclosed when a sourcing model could be established from any public record, including a page a vendor runs to recruit peers, and it was read between 19 and 25 August. This study counts only what the vendor's own pages say to a buyer, on one day. Of the 14 vendors the catalogue assigns a model to, nine name the channel on their pages, four make a claim without naming it (DataImpulse, Decodo, Rayobyte, SOAX) and one, NodeMaven, names nothing on any page read. One vendor the catalogue records as undisclosed now names a channel: Evomi's ethics page says it operates platforms that pay users for bandwidth. That is filed for the catalogue's verification loop and changes nothing on the vendor pages until a person accepts it.

Who they check before selling

Ten vendors state that a check applies to customers before or at purchase. The strongest statements are Bright Data's, whose KYC FAQ calls the process mandatory for every new customer on its residential network and says it may ask for a government-issued ID, and Proxidize's, whose verification page (last updated 26 August 2026 by its own dateline) says a customer must complete identity verification before using the proxies and must present a government-issued photo ID to do it. Froxy publishes a KYC policy under which an account that has not verified cannot bind a payment method. Oxylabs requires a questionnaire from every customer. Infatica says it enforces mandatory KYC for all customers. IPRoyal says it implements strict KYC throughout the customer journey. Decodo, SOAX, Thordata and Scrapfly describe a review or verification step in less specific terms.

Six state the opposite, or a condition. Evomi says KYC is not required by default. Webshare says there is no KYC unless suspicious activity is detected. Pia S5 Proxy says no KYC and no identity checks. Mangoproxy requires it only for card payments through Stripe, Gonzo Proxy only for financial websites, and NiuProxy only when a risk check is involved.

Twenty-four publish nothing on the question.

Close calls in this table

Six of the ten are specific about what a customer must pass. Four are not: Decodo, Scrapfly, SOAX and Thordata are coded as stating a check on the strength of a sentence describing a review or a verification step, with no document and no trigger named. A second reader could code those four as a claim rather than a stated check, which would read this number as six of 40 rather than ten.

The verification filter on this site counts something narrower and prints 17 of 39 on 1 September 2026, with one vendor held back as stale. That filter reads the catalogue's KYC field, which records three vendors as requiring identity documents from every new customer, 16 as signing up with an email address only, and two more as running no check at all. Its 17 is 15 of those email-only vendors plus the two coded as no check; the sixteenth email-only vendor, PrivateProxy, is the one held back as stale. The email-only value is a fact about a signup form, and this study does not count it, because a form is not a statement. The reading found seven vendors whose pages now describe a customer check the catalogue does not record: Decodo, Froxy, Infatica, IPRoyal, Proxidize, Scrapfly and Thordata. Those are filed for the verification loop with their quotes.

How they take payment

Twenty-five vendors list their methods in text. Six show a logo strip and no sentence: DataImpulse, Infatica, ProxyScrape and ScraperAPI, plus RapidProxy and Swiftproxy, which show a logo strip and no sentence at all. Nine name no method on any page read.

Fourteen name a cryptocurrency in text, and PrivateProxy accepts Bitcoin for orders of 500 proxies or more. The crypto filter prints 19 of 39, from catalogue values read 19 to 25 August. Of the catalogue's 19, eleven are confirmed in page text on 1 September. Eight are not: DataImpulse, Infatica and ProxyScrape show logos, Proxy-Seller and Shifter name no method, Rayobyte's page lists PayPal, Google Pay and card, Webshare's terms list PayPal or credit card, and Evomi's FAQ lists cards and PayPal. Three vendors name crypto in text and are not in the catalogue's count: Mangoproxy, Proxy-Cheap and SOAX. Eleven plus three is the fourteen. One page changed between the two reads. On 20 August Geonode's pricing page read "We accept credit cards, PayPal, and crypto payments." On 1 September the same page reads "PayPal is not currently supported."

Close calls in this table

• PrivateProxy's Bitcoin is recorded as conditional rather than as a cryptocurrency accepted, because the sentence attaches a minimum order of 500 proxies.
• Evomi was coded as naming a cryptocurrency in the first pass, on a clause excluding cryptocurrency from refunds. Reading an accepted method out of a refund exclusion is an inference, and this study's method allows none, so the cell was corrected on 2 September 2026 and the headline moved from fifteen to fourteen. The methods Evomi's FAQ lists are cards and PayPal.
• RapidProxy and Swiftproxy each carried a printed quote in the first pass, a notice that PayPal was down for maintenance. Re-read on 2 September 2026 against rendered text rather than raw HTML, that sentence is inside an HTML comment on both sites and no visitor sees it. Both quotes were removed. The B coding holds on the visible logo strip, which is the only thing either page shows a reader about payment.

Limitations

• Public pages, one read date. Sites change: Geonode's payment sentence changed between 20 August and 1 September, and Proxidize's verification page carries a 26 August dateline. A row is true of a page on 1 September 2026 and nothing later.
• Two sites could not be read: Storm Proxies answered 403 to every request, and 9Proxy renders no text without a browser. ScrapingBee's pricing and FAQ rendered under four thousand characters of text. Their rows say so rather than guessing.
• "No statement found" means not found on the pages listed in the row. A sentence may exist in a help centre, a dashboard, or a sales reply. It does not mean the vendor has no policy.
• The three states are a reading, and a reader may code a sentence differently. The quotes are printed so that disagreement is possible.
• English pages only, and the vendor's main domain plus any help centre it links. Localised sites were not read.
• This site earns affiliate commission on outbound clicks to some of the vendors it names. On 2 September 2026, 15 of the 40 vendors in these tables were commission partners: 9Proxy, ASocks, Crawlbase, Firecrawl, Froxy, Geonode, Gonzo Proxy, Mangoproxy, PacketStream, PrivateProxy, Proxy-Cheap, ProxyRack, ProxyScrape, Shifter and Webshare. Four of them, PacketStream, PrivateProxy, ProxyRack and Webshare, are among the ten credited with naming their sourcing channel, so the interest is concentrated in the group that scores best rather than spread evenly. Every one of those rows carries an (affiliate) mark in all three tables. The ordering of every table here is alphabetical, and the code that orders any list on the site cannot read commission data. The claim is that every cell can be checked, not that the site has no interest.
• Any vendor named here can contest a cell. Write to contact@proxy-compare.com, or use report a mistake, with the page and the sentence you dispute. A correction carries the date it was made, is printed on this page, and lands in the public change log.

Using the tables

Ask a vendor the three questions before paying, and expect an answer in the vendor's own words rather than an adjective. The pages behind each row are the ones to read. Where residential IPs come from explains the channels the first table names, what KYC means for proxy buyers explains the second, and how we check explains what a figure on this site has to carry before it is printed.

The three tables are one file. Download it as CSV, forty rows, every quote with its page and the date it was read.