FAQ
Every question, sorted by topic
Grouped so you can jump straight to the part you are unsure about. If your question is not here, ask it in Discord, and the ones that come up often end up on this page.
Getting started
What do I need to sign up?
Email and a password. No company name, no phone number, no “tell us about your use case” form.
Do you offer a free trial?
Not a free tier, but the minimum top-up is $5 and it never expires, which is about as close as we can get without attracting the kind of traffic that gets an IP pool blocked.
Do I have to talk to a salesperson?
No. There is no demo to book and no minimum commitment. Sign up, add $5, get your credentials.
Where do I find my proxy host, port and login?
On the service page in the dashboard. Each service you buy lists its own host, port, username and password there, ready to copy. There is no single gateway address shared by everyone, so code samples on this site write HOST, PORT, USERNAME and PASSWORD where your own values go.
Which product should I buy?
The cheapest one that works. If the site loads fine and you only need a different location, rent a Datacenter IP. If you get captchas, empty pages or instant blocks, Residential is the one to try. If a login or session needs the same address for weeks, ISP keeps it for you. When you are unsure, describe the job in Discord before you spend anything.
Products
What can I buy today, and how is each one billed?
Residential: billed by the gigabyte of traffic you use. ISP and Datacenter: rented by the IP, for a term you choose.
When can I buy the Scraper API and Unblocker API?
Not yet. A line marked coming soon has no price and no checkout until it opens, and Discord hears first when that happens.
Can I choose the country or city?
ISP and Datacenter: yes. You choose the country, region and city when you order. ISP: you can also pick the ISP. Residential: no. The pool picks the exit IP, and your usage log shows which country each request left from. City targeting, on ISP and datacenter IPs, is offered only where we can verify the city. Where we cannot, we do not offer it. Residential exits are chosen by the pool, so residential has no country or city choice.
How long can I rent ISP and Datacenter IPs for?
ISP: 30, 90 or 365 days. Datacenter: 30, 60, 90 or 365 days. The order form shows the price for each term, and the IPs stay yours until the term ends.
Residential proxies
Can I choose which country my requests come from?
No. Residential has no country, region or city setting, and the pool decides the exit address. If location matters, ISP and datacenter IPs can both be chosen by country, region and city.
How is traffic counted?
Each request is logged with its own byte count, and your bill is the sum of those rows. The honesty page walks through the meter, including which requests are billed at zero.
What is the smallest amount I can buy?
1 GB of traffic. Your balance tops up from $5, and whatever you leave unspent stays on the account.
Could I get the same IP twice?
It can happen. The pool is shared and addresses are handed out per request. If you need one address you can count on for weeks, ISP proxies are made for that.
Does a bigger order lower the rate?
Yes. The price per gigabyte steps down as a single order grows, reaching $1.75/GB at 1000 GB. The step depends on the size of that one order, so several small orders are each priced as small orders.
Should my first project use residential?
Only if the site blocks servers. When you are unsure, try a datacenter IP first. If it gets blocked, switch lines; your balance stays on the account for the next order.
ISP proxies
Can I choose the internet provider?
Yes. ISP is the one line where you pick the provider as well as the country, region and city.
How long can I keep an address?
Terms run for 30, 90 or 365 days. You can renew before the term ends.
What will a renewal cost?
The entry rate, $3.20/IP, even if your first order was big enough for a lower step. Budgeting from the real renewal price now saves a surprise later.
Can I change the IP during a term?
Not automatically. The address is fixed for the term, which is what this line is for, though the premium tier lets you swap it by hand. For a new address on every request, use residential.
Why would a site treat an ISP IP differently from a datacenter one?
A site that looks up who owns an address sees a consumer internet provider instead of a hosting company. Some sites let such addresses through where they would challenge a server.
How small can my first order be?
1 IP, paid from a balance that tops up from $5. The per-IP rate drops as one order grows, reaching $1.50/IP at 500 IPs.
Datacenter proxies
Can websites tell this is a datacenter IP?
Many can, since the ranges hosting companies use are public. Plenty of sites do not mind. The ones that do tend to answer with captchas or blocks, and that is the sign to try residential.
Can I choose the country?
Yes, along with the region and city, when you place the order.
Will other customers use my IP?
Only on a shared tier, where up to 3 customers use one address. On a dedicated tier the IP is kept for you.
What happens when the term ends?
The service stops unless you renew it before then. Renewals are charged at the entry rate per IP.
How many IPs should I start with?
1 IP is enough to see whether a target accepts datacenter traffic. Once it does, a larger single order lowers the rate per IP.
Do I need special software?
No. Any client that can use an HTTP or HTTPS proxy will work, which covers curl, Python requests, Node and most scraping tools.
Metering
What exactly counts as a gigabyte?
Response bytes plus response headers, measured at our proxy. Request bytes are not billed. A connection failure, such as a timeout, a connection reset or a 407 or 502 from our gateway, is billed at zero and still appears on your meter marked free. Anything the site sends back, a 403, a 429 or a captcha page included, counts as traffic.
How do I know your usage meter is honest?
Because you can check it. Every request you make is logged with its own byte count and you can export the whole lot as CSV, then compare it against your own client-side numbers. If the two disagree, tell us and we will fix the bill.
Am I charged for requests that fail?
Connection failures (timeouts, resets, and errors from our own gateway such as a 407 or a 502) are billed at zero and still shown, marked free. Anything the site sends back is traffic, 403s, 429s, 5xx pages and captchas included: inside an HTTPS tunnel our proxy cannot see the site’s status code, so the meter counts the bytes that crossed it.
What if my byte count and yours disagree?
If your count and ours differ by more than 1%, we re-bill the session at your number first and investigate afterwards. You do not have to prove anything to get that.
Can I download my usage log?
Every request is logged on its own line with an ID, host, country, status code and byte count. You can export the whole log as CSV at any time and add up the column yourself.
Pricing and balance
Why are you cheaper than the big providers?
We sell a short catalogue instead of a sprawling one, support happens in a public Discord instead of a call centre, and we have no sales team. That is most of the difference. The rest is that we are small and would rather grow on price than on marketing spend.
How much does it cost?
Residential: $5.50/GB for the smallest order, down to $1.75/GB from 1000 GB. ISP: $3.20/IP for the smallest order, down to $1.50/IP from 500 IPs. Datacenter: $1.90/IP for the smallest order, down to $0.89/IP from 500 IPs. Every step in between is on the pricing page.
How do I get the volume price?
Order more at once. Each product has a ladder of order sizes, and a bigger order gets a lower rate per unit, with nothing to claim and nobody to email. A renewal is charged at the entry rate, whichever rung the first order reached.
Does my balance expire?
No. Top up $5 and use it whenever. There is no monthly fee, no plan, and nothing that quietly resets at the start of the month. Residential traffic you have bought does not expire either.
Does unused residential traffic expire?
No. Residential traffic you have bought stays on your account until you use it, and nothing resets at the start of the month. ISP and datacenter IPs work differently: they are rented for a term and stop when it ends unless you renew them.
Is there a subscription or a monthly fee?
No. You pay as you go from a prepaid balance. There is no plan to cancel, and keeping a balance costs nothing.
What is the smallest amount I can top up?
$5. It goes into your balance, and whatever you do not spend stays there.
Are there port, thread or monthly fees?
No port fees, no thread fees, no monthly minimum. Balances never expire.
Payments
Can I pay in crypto?
Yes. We take Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, USDC and Litecoin through CoinGate. Cards work too if you prefer.
Can I pay by card?
Yes: Visa / Mastercard. Card and crypto cost the same, with no surcharge on either.
What currency are prices in?
USD. Your balance is kept in the same currency.
Do you store my card number?
No. Card payments go through our payment processor, and we never see or store the card number. Crypto payments go through CoinGate.
Refunds
What if I top up and it does not work for me?
Ask for your unused balance back within 30 days and we refund it the way you paid: a card top-up to that card, a crypto top-up to the wallet it came from, in the same coin. We do not ask why. See the refund policy on our honesty page.
How do I ask for a refund?
Email [email protected] from your account address, or ask in Discord. Say “refund”. If you paid in crypto, we may ask you to confirm the address of the wallet you paid from. You do not need to give a reason.
Where does a crypto refund go?
Back to the wallet the payment was sent from, in the coin you paid with, at the coin amount we received for the unused part. The network fee for sending it comes out of the refund. If you paid from an exchange, it goes to a wallet you control instead once you show us the exchange’s withdrawal record for that payment. It cannot go to any other wallet or coin, or onto your balance.
How long does a refund take?
If a refund takes longer than five working days, chase us in Discord in public. We would rather answer that in front of everyone.
Do I get back traffic lost to an outage?
If our service was broken for a stretch, we credit the traffic you burned during it back to your account without waiting to be asked.
How long do I have to ask for a refund?
30 days from the top-up, for the unused part of it to go back to the card or wallet that paid. After that the balance still never expires; it just stops being refundable. If we close your account, or you leave over a change to our terms, there is no window.
Do I get my balance back if you close my account?
Yes, the whole unused part, however long ago you topped it up, paid back to the card or wallet it came from, whether or not we were right to close it. If we closed it by mistake, the whole balance comes back with an apology from a person. The one exception is a balance that was itself paid for fraudulently.
IPs and labels
What does an IP label tell me?
Every IP carries two labels: country, and network type (residential, ISP or datacenter). We re-check both weekly against independent sources as well as what our upstream told us.
What if an IP turns out to be mislabelled?
Report a mislabelled IP and we credit back the traffic you spent on it, pull the IP from the pool, and tell you in Discord when it is out.
Could a datacenter IP be sold to me as residential?
Datacenter IPs are never sold as residential. That is the single most common lie in budget proxies and it is the easiest one to avoid telling.
Are these IPs sourced ethically?
Our residential IPs come from people who opted into an SDK and get paid for it, and who can leave whenever they want. We do not buy pools from brokers who cannot tell us where the IPs came from.
Acceptable use
What can I not use ProxyPanda for?
Anything aimed at people instead of data: credential stuffing, fraud, spam, CSAM, harassment, or attacks on infrastructure. We enforce it. Anyone we remove for it still gets their whole unused balance back, however long ago they topped it up, unless that balance was itself paid for fraudulently.
What is fine to use it for?
Fine by us: scraping public data, price and rank tracking, ad verification, testing your own systems, and getting around a geo-block to read a news site. The acceptable use policy has the full list.
What happens if a site owner reports my traffic?
We check the report against our usage metadata: the destination hostname, the time and the exit IP. We do not have request contents, so that is what we can check. For anything on the banned list we suspend straight away and tell you what the report said. For anything else we contact you first, so you can explain or stop.
Can I appeal a suspension?
Yes, in Discord or by email to [email protected]. If we suspended you in error, the account comes back with its balance intact.
How do I report abuse coming from your network?
Email [email protected] with the IP, the timestamps and a sample of what you saw. A person reads it, and there is no form to fill in first.
Support and Discord
Where do I get help?
In Discord, at discord.gg/proxypanda. Ask in #help and the answer comes from us or from someone who solved the same thing before. You can join without an account, so it is fine to ask before you buy.
How quickly do you answer?
Discord is usually answered within the hour during European daytime, and slower overnight. There is no 24/7 phone line and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Can I use email instead of Discord?
Yes, write to [email protected]. Discord is usually quicker, and an answer given there helps the next person with the same question.
How do I find out if something is down?
When something breaks, the bot says so in #status before you have to ask. Degraded pools, maintenance windows, and the all-clear.
Can someone help me set up my code?
Paste your snippet in #code. Python, Node, Go, curl, Scrapy, Puppeteer: someone has wired it up before and will show you the four lines you need.
Question not on the list?
Ask it in Discord. The answer comes from us or from someone who already solved it, and good questions end up on this page.