Just as with bots, the quality of proxies can vary wildly. To help you avoid these pitfalls, we’ve gathered the best proxies in each category for you to peruse.

Due to the increasing sophistication of retailers’ bot protection methods, sneaker proxies are vital to the success of your bot. Without a proxy, your bot accounts will quickly be locked out of sites and experience miss after miss. It’s recommended that you always have a task to proxy ratio of at least 1:1 for the best chances of success.

Due to the increasing sophistication of retailers’ bot protection methods, sneaker proxies are vital to the success of your bot. Without a proxy, your bot accounts will quickly be locked out of sites and experience miss after miss. It’s recommended that you always have a task to proxy ratio of at least 1:1 for the best chances of success.

Why is this the case? Sneaker proxies make it look like your bots activities are coming from various genuine physical locations, rather than a single IP address that will be quickly flagged for attempting dozens of checkouts. This also applies to scraping, where bots send hundreds of requests per second to a website to check whether a product is available to purchase yet. Without a proxy, this would obviously be a non-human behavior. With proxies, the IP address is rotated with each request, making it difficult to distinguish from regular traffic.

Residential vs datacenter proxies

If you’ve looked into sneaker proxies at all, you’ll have heard multiple words floating about: “residential proxy”, “data center proxy”, “ISP proxy”. Which you choose is important, as they have varying costs and are suited to different tasks. Here are the basics:

Residential proxies:

• IP addresses provided by internet service providers (ISPs)
• Millions of IPs all across the globe that have the best chance of looking legitimate
• Higher ping than other proxy types – typically 1000 to 5000ms
• Typically cost between $10 and $20 per gigabyte of data used
• Good for sites that heavily ban proxies

Datacenter proxies:

• IP addresses come from a secondary company, such as a cloud provider, rather than an ISP
• Don’t look like a legitimate, home IP address to a sophisticated anti-bot system
• Number of proxies is more limited and they are primarily in US/EU rather than anywhere in the world
• Ping is good, at around 50-100ms
• Often don’t have a data cap, instead charging $25-50/month
• Datacenter proxies usually have an expiry date

ISP proxies:

• A combination of the above methods: low ping datacenter servers, with ISP-provided IP addresses
• Typically have no data cap
• Look legitimate and are unlikely to get blocked
• Can get shut off/blocked at certain times, making it hard to catch random restocks
• More expensive, at $50-60/month for 25 proxies

With those factors considered, you can see how different proxy types are suited for different use cases. The table below summarizes the most common ones and which proxy types are ideal.

Proxy quality is important

Choosing the right proxy for your situation is just one part of the equation. Just as with bots, the quality of proxies can vary wildly, with low-quality options suffering high ping or excessive caps, low proxy numbers, and location restrictions. Some even lie about their type, marketing regular data center proxies as ISP.

To help you avoid these pitfalls, we’ve gathered the best proxies in each category for you to peruse. Whichever proxy you choose, you should check your intended sites against their ban/compatibility list. As these lists are constantly changing, we can’t guarantee that the sneaker sites you frequent will be accessible at the time of reading.

Residential proxies

Residential proxies won’t do you much good on Shopify due to their slow speed, but they are suited to web scraping and non-hyped releases on sites with strong anti-bot measures. Here’s a list of the best residential proxies you can get for your sneaker bot, along with their pricing:

Bright data

Bright data is probably the most trusted brand in the proxy space at the moment. The company has won several awards for its service and is used by and partnered with various high-profile companies and organizations. I

It allows you to change between 72 million+ IPs across any country, city, or carrier at will.  Users additionally benefit from unlimited rotations, and lightning-fast, stable, 100% ethically sourced proxies.

Due to its significant credentials, Bright data’s monthly prices aren’t the cheapest in the industry, but they aren’t unreasonable, either:

• Experimenting: $300 ($15/gb)
• Starter: $500 ($12.50/gb)
• Production: $1000 ($10/gb)
• Plus: $3000 ($8.50/gb)

Bright data also offers a pay-as-you go service at $25/gb, and a yearly subscription with a 10% discount over its monthly plans.

There are no data limits on the proxies, with users able to top up once they reach they expend their monthly commitment. Users are able to manually set a limit in their dashboard to prevent over-spending.

Smartproxy

Smartproxy’s residential offering provides over 40 million rotating IPs using IPv4 and HTTPS addresses spread across over 195 locations. Its proxies have sticky sessions of up to 30 minutes and have an average response time of less than 3ms.

It has three tiers of monthly subscriptions available:

• Micro: $75 + VAT | 5 GB data ($15/gb) | 1 user | 1 whitelist limit
• Starter: $200 + VAT | 20 GB data ($10/gb) | 3 users | 3 whitelist limit
• Regular $400 + VAT | 50 GB data ($8/gb) | 5 users | 5 whitelist limit

Though you’re still looking at a hefty monthly bill, the nice things about Smartproxy is that they offer 24/7 support and a 3-day moneyback guarantee if the proxies don’t work for you.

NetNut

NetNut is another popular residential proxy provider that boasts rotating IPs, sticky IP sessions, dedicated private pools, and stable, quality performance. Their 20M+ worldwide proxies can bypass Captchas and offer a 7-day free trial so that you can test that yourself. They claim to be the fastest proxy provider on the market, 24/7 availability, and a near-0% fail rate.

All this functionality, however, means they’re a bit more expensive Smartproxy at the same amount of data, and its worth noting that only their production plan or higher offers IP whitelisting (though it does appear to be unlimited) . Their monthly plans are as follows:

• Starter: $300 | 20 GB data ($15/gb)
• Advanced: $600 | 50 GB data ($12/gb)
• Production: $800 | 100 GB data ($8/gb)

Ace proxies

Ace proxies doesn’t have the flashiest website, but it is quite affordable on the low-end. Its residential proxies start as low as $18 for a 1 GB plan and are spread across 130+ countries. It promises that your proxies will be exclusive to you and that they’re fast and secure.

One downside is that you’re limited on the number of proxies you can create depending on your plan, with the restrictions as follows:

• 1 GB plan: $17.49/gb | up to 100 proxies
• 2 GB plan: $29.99 ($15/gb) | up to 200 proxies
• 5 GB plan: $64.99 ($13/gb) | up to 500 proxies
• 10 GB plan: $124.99 ( $12.50/gb) | up to 1000 proxies
• 50 GB plan: $500 ($10/gb) | up to 5000 proxies
• 100 GB plan: $899.99 ($9/gb) | up to 10000 proxies

Proxydrop

Proxydrop proxies are geared specifically towards sneaker botting and have some useful features for botters as a result. With a sizable 28 million + proxies across the world, user:pass authentication, no expiration, and guarantees that you’ll be unbanned and unthrottled, they’re a good choice for those looking for something that will “just work”.

PacketStream

If price is a major concern, PacketStream may be the way to go. It’s able to offer worldwide proxies for the frankly insane price of $1/gb, while allowing users to share some of their own bandwidth for a reduction in costs.

PacketStream claims to have 99% uptime and over 7 million residential proxies, but in practice, its IP pool can be relatively small depending on the location you’re targeting. In the US, you should get along just fine, but more niche locations could be more of a struggle in regards to finding IPs that haven’t been banned/abused.

Still, for $1 per GB, it’s difficult to complain. Especially when you consider that this comes with no connection or IP limits. You just have to top up at least $50 to get started.

IPRoyal

If you sneakerbot irregularly and are fed up with monthly commitments, IPRoyal is a pretty great pick. You pay $3 per GB and there’s no minimum top-up. You do, however, get a 5% discount for every 5GB you buy. This makes its pricing great throughout pretty much its entire price range. It also has the features you’d expect, including sticky sessions, auto-rotate, and instant IP change.

The downside? Its residential service only has a pool of 100,000 proxies. That’s not a lot compared to the millions that other providers offer, but it is spread across 150+ countries at least. It should be fine for small-time use or those who are just starting to dip their fingers into botting. For reference, this is what the pricing looks like in popular increments:

• 1 GB: $3 ($3/gb)
• 2 GB: $6 ($3/gb)
• 5 GB: $14.25 ($2.85/gb)
• 10 GB: $27 ($2.70/gb)
• 50 GB: $120 ($2.40/gb)
• 100 GB:  $210 ($2.10/gb)
• 500 GB: $720 ($1.50/gb)

Datacenter proxies

There are fewer datacenter proxies out there than there used to be due to the rise of ISP, but there are still plenty of providers to go around. Here’s a summary of the prices and features of some of the best providers:

Razorproxy

Sometimes it doesn’t get much better than free. As a relatively new provider, Razoryproxy offers two free gigabytes of data on its shared datacenter proxy. It also offers dedicated datacenter plans, though there’s no free trial and, as you’d expect, they’re a little more expensive.

On the whole, though, Razorproxy has thousands of subnets, is low priced, and has no limits on threads, IPs, or connections. It also supports user:pass authentication and domain:port access. Here’s what the monthly pricing looks like at the time of writing:

Shared datacenter proxies

• 15 GB package: $15 ($1/gb)
• 50 GB package: $40 ($0.80/gb)
• 100 GB package: $60 ($0.6/gb)
• 250 GB package: $120($0.48/gb)

Dedicated datacenter proxies

• 10 IPs: $15 ($1.5/IP)
• 25 IPs: $35 ($1.4/IP)
• 50 IPs: $68 ($1.36/IP)
• 100 IPs: $132 ($1.32/IP)
• 250 IPs: $325 (1.3/IP)

Bright data

We talked about Bright data’s residential proxies already, but their shared data center ones come with similar credentials. They’re recognized by various publications and used by large businesses, with 700,000 IPs, 100% uptime, and 3000+ subnets. The proxies are naturally fast, stable, and are available in countries across the world.

You can pay for the proxies by usage or IP depending on your requirements, as well as per month, with pricing as follows:

• Pay as you go: $0.90/IP or $0.12/gb
• Monthly:
  • $500: $0.60/IP or $0.095/gb
  • $1000: $0.55/IP or $0.085/gb
  • $3000: 0.50/IP or $0.07/gb

ATC proxies

ATC proxies’ tier 9 datacenter network offers the features you’d expect from a sneaker proxy, such as IP: port and whitelisting, as well as guaranteeing their DC proxies are unbanned on all the popular sneaker sites.

Users get a private subnet, replacements if their proxy is banned, unlimited bandwidth, and locations across the world to swap between. Though pricing isn’t quite as low as razorproxy, it’s cheaper than Bright, which makes a good middle ground for price to performance. It also offers proxies specific to Supreme, Shoepalace, and Nile, which is always nice.

The price for its monthly data center plans is $0.5/IP regardless of how many proxies you buy, so no bulk discount.

ISP proxies

ISP proxies are expensive but tend to perform very well. Though they used to be more niche, lots of providers have managed to partner with ISPs to offer them these days, so you should have no trouble finding them. The question is instead which provider to choose. We’ll try to help with that below:

Bright data

Unsurprisingly as one of the best proxy providers in the world, Bright data makes the ISP list, too. Their proxy network is large, at 600,000+ IPs, while their uptime and ping are second-to-none and support is there 24/7.

You can expect to pay a premium for this premium service, but if you need the best of the best, it might be worth it. It’s important to note that Bright data’s monthly cost represents a minimum payment commitment. You per GB/per IP cost will come out of your monthly balance until it is completed:

• Experimenting plan: $300/month ($17.50/GB + $0.50/IP)
• Starter plan: $500/month ($12.50/GB + $0.50/IP)
• Production plan: $1000/month ($10/GB + $0.50/IP)
• Plus plan: $3000/month ($8.50 + $0.50/IP)

Bypass proxies

Bypass proxies are specifically targeted at those looking to avoid anti-botting measures and therefore have some quite nice features for sneaker botting. The important thing to note is that there are two tiers: Private ISPs and Retail ISPs.

It doesn’t widely publish the differences between the two on its website, but some digging on the official discord reveals a list of sites each is compatible with. The most noticeable difference is that retail ISPs aren’t designed to work with footsites.

Private ISPs, meanwhile, rotate refresh IP pools and source clean ranges constantly for the best possible chance of avoiding anti-bot measures. It’s worth noting, however, that while Bypass says a huge percentage of its IP pool does work on footsites, it doesn’t currently have a failsafe way to test them due to the introduction of various types of ban methods. As a result, it doesn’t offer a guarantee for footsites. All proxy providers face this challenge however, so it shouldn’t be seen as a major downside. After all, unblock residential proxies exist.

Here’s the current status of sites for each plan:

Now on to prices:

Retail ISPs

• Beginner: $2/IP/month | 25 proxies | Full price
• Intermediate: $1.90/IP/month | 50 proxies | 5% discount
• Pro: $1.80/IP/month | 100 proxies | 10% discount

Private ISPs

• Beginner: $3/IP/month | 25 proxies | Full price
• Intermediate: $1.75/IP/month | 50 proxies | 5% discount
• Pro: $2.50/IP/month | 100 proxies | 10% discount

Ace proxies

We’ve mentioned Ace proxies previously for their residential proxies, but their ISP proxies (referred to as static residential by them) are also worth considering. They’re stable and fast and should work with most sneaker sites, and their pricing tiers start relatively low, which is good if you don’t need that many IPs. You can have up to 100 threads per IP and use them on a maximum of 5 devices.

Here’s how much they cost:

• 1 IP/month: $6.99
• 3 IP/month: $16.99
• 5 IP/month: $24.99
• 1o IP/month: $39.99
• 20 IP/month: $79.99
• 25 IP/month: $89.99
• 50 IP/month: $174.99
• 100 IP/month $299.99
• 150 IP/month: $399.99
• 200 IP/month: $499.99

Ping proxies

Ping proxies self-describes itself as “the world’s most advanced proxy network”. Marketing hype or not, it has 250,000 confirmed checkouts with its proxies and an extensive network of 350+ ISP subnets.

It also offers 24/7 365 support via Discord, tier-1 networks in Ashburn, VA, London, and New York, and a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Its premium ISP proxies don’t come in especially cheap, but represent good value. They promise that their anti-bot prevention will help you to bypass Captchas and automated traffic restrictions while scoring from almost all sneaker websites.

Pricing looks like this:

• 10 proxies: $30/month
• 25 proxies: $68.74/month
• 100 proxies: $225/month