The State of Free Proxies — August 2026
We continuously test the public free-proxy pool through our own endpoint. Of 56,902 proxies tracked, only 600 (1%) are alive right now — and across 70,819 liveness checks in the last 7 days, just 28%succeeded. Here's the full picture.
Most free proxies are dead on arrival
Across 70,819 individual liveness checks over the past 7 days, only 28.4% returned a working response. At any given moment just 1.1% of the 56,902 proxies we track are reachable. Free proxies are shared, unstable, and short-lived — fine for a throwaway test, not for anything that has to keep running.
Which protocols survive best
0% leak your real IP
Of the live proxies we could classify, 0 are transparent — they forward your real IP in request headers, offering no anonymity at all. 405 are elite (no proxy headers) and 56are anonymous. If you can't verify a free proxy's anonymity, assume it's transparent.
Where live free proxies are right now
Browse the live lists by country and protocol.
How fast the survivors are
Live proxies average 2636 ms to our echo endpoint, and only 17% respond in under a second. Average uptime across the live set is 40%.
How we measure this
We ingest candidates from public aggregator lists, then validate each one by routing a real HTTP request through it to a first-party echo endpoint, re-checking the pool every 30 minutes. A proxy counts as alive only if it returned a correct response within the timeout on its most recent check; uptime is an exponentially-weighted average of its check history. Country is resolved from the proxy IP via MaxMind GeoLite2. Figures refresh every few hours and cover the trailing 7-day check window. We never route customer traffic through these proxies and never warrant them.
Data as of Aug 17, 2026, 9:56 AM UTC.
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