Bundled SDK or paid app: what the household actually agreed to
Residential proxy networks recruit household connections two ways: a bundled SDK inside a free app, or a paid bandwidth-sharing app. Proxy Compare records which model each of the 35 proxy sellers it tracks uses, and 21 publish neither, read 5 Oct 2026. What the household was told differs sharply between the two.
How we check · report a mistake
Every residential proxy provider recruits household internet connections one of two ways, and the difference decides how much consent is behind the bandwidth you are buying. This page is about proxy supply, what the person on the other end of your request was told, and what they got for it.
On this page (3)
Bundled SDK: the free app model
A software development kit is embedded in a free application: a VPN, a mobile game, a PC utility. The app's terms of service mention, somewhere, that spare bandwidth may be shared with partners. The user installs the app for its stated purpose, gets it free, and is usually not paid.
This is the model that produces the largest pools, and it is the model that produces enforcement actions. The consent exists in a legal sense and is close to invisible in a practical one, it lives in a screen almost nobody reads, attached to an app installed for an entirely unrelated reason.
Paid app: the explicit transaction
A standalone application pays people to share their connection. Sharing bandwidth is the whole point of the app; nobody installs it by accident. Payment is typically a few dollars a month.
On consent this is the stronger model, and providers using it tend to say so openly, because it is the one answer in this category that survives being said out loud. It is not a complete answer: the person still cannot usually see what traffic exits through their line, or refuse a particular use of it.
Why we do not grade these
We record which model a provider uses and quote what the provider says about it. We do not convert that into an ethics score, because the honest distinctions here are finer than a score can carry, and because a number would imply a precision we do not have.
What we will say plainly: a provider that publishes nothing has made a choice, and that choice is information.
What the 42 providers we track disclose
| Bundled SDK8/42 | Webshare, Decodo, SOAX, Oxylabs, Bright Data, NodeMaven, Massive, Infatica |
| Paid app4/42 | IPRoyal, DataImpulse, PacketStream, ProxyRack |
| Datacenter2/42 | Rayobyte, PrivateProxy |
| They do not say28/42 | Mangoproxy, RapidProxy, Proxidize, Swiftproxy, NiuProxy, Proxy-Seller, ProxyScrape, Geonode, 9Proxy, Storm Proxies, Shifter, Evomi, IPBurger, ASocks, Proxy-Cheap, Thordata, ProxyEmpire, Froxy, Pia S5 Proxy, Gonzo Proxy, Crawlbase, Firecrawl, ScraperAPI, Scrapfly, ScrapingBee, ZenRows, Fleetproxy, SearchApi |
“They do not say” is a finding, not a missing value, it means the provider publishes no statement, not that we did not look.
Questions
Which sourcing model should I prefer?
If your target tolerates datacenter addresses, that model has no consent question at all and is far cheaper, worth testing first. Among residential options, a paid app has the clearest consent story. A provider that publishes nothing is the one to ask directly before buying.
Do providers tell you which model they use?
Some publish a full account. 21 of the 35 proxy sellers we track publish nothing at all. We record that silence as a finding rather than leaving the field blank, because 'they do not say' is different from 'we did not check'.
The rest of this section
- Are residential proxies legal?
- How residential proxies actually work
- Where residential proxy IP addresses actually come from
- What regulators and prosecutors have actually done
- What proxy vendors disclose, September 2026, what actually happened
- The FBI seized NetNut. What it means if you were a customer, what actually happened
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