Questions, answered in writing

A proxy is a server that makes web requests on your behalf. Instead of your computer connecting directly to a website, it connects to our gateway, which forwards the request and returns the response. The website sees our exit address rather than yours, which is what lets you control the apparent origin of your traffic.

Yes. Proxies are ordinary network infrastructure, used routinely by enterprises, security teams and researchers. What matters is what you do with them. Collecting public data is generally lawful; unauthorised access, fraud and circumventing security controls are not, and our Acceptable Use Policy prohibits them.

Data and engineering teams at market intelligence firms, e-commerce companies, ad tech platforms, cybersecurity vendors and AI labs — plus a large number of independent developers running smaller collection projects.

Yes. Every new account gets 1 GB of residential traffic with no card required. Enterprise evaluations can request a larger proof-of-concept allocation through sales.

The gateway has sustained 99.99% availability over the last twelve months. Live and historical figures are published on the status page, including per-product breakdowns and full incident write-ups.

A VPN routes all of your device's traffic through one endpoint that you configure once. A proxy network gives you programmatic control over millions of endpoints, per request, with targeting down to city and carrier. Different tools for different jobs.

Bandwidth products (residential, datacenter, mobile) are billed on gigabytes consumed. IP products (ISP, dedicated) are billed per address per month. You can pay as you go at the standard rate or commit to a monthly volume for a lower unit price.

No. We meter the response body of requests returning 2xx or 3xx. Connection setup, retries, blocked responses and CONNECT overhead are not charged.

Visa, Mastercard and American Express, PayPal, and bank transfer for invoices over $1,000. Enterprise customers can be set up on net-30 terms with a purchase order.

Monthly plan traffic expires at the end of the billing period. Pay-as-you-go balances do not expire for twelve months from purchase. If you routinely under-use a plan, downgrade — we will not stop you.

Yes, within 7 days of a purchase, provided you have used less than 20% of the allocation and the account has no policy violations. Full terms are in the Refund Policy.

Yes. Usage limits let you set daily and monthly caps on traffic and spend, with email alerts at any threshold and an optional hard stop at 100%.

Prices are shown excluding VAT. UK and EU customers are charged the applicable rate unless a valid VAT number is supplied, in which case the reverse charge applies.

Try datacenter first — it is by far the cheapest and if your target accepts it you are done. If you see blocks or ASN-based filtering, move to residential. Use ISP when you need residential trust with low latency and a static address, and mobile only when residential is being challenged.

Residential IPs are on real consumer devices, rotate constantly and are metered by bandwidth. ISP IPs are leased from consumer providers but hosted on our servers — static, unmetered, and roughly fifteen times faster to respond.

The published figure is unique addresses observed across the last 30 days. At any given moment around 40% of the residential pool is online. We would rather give you an honest rolling number than a cumulative all-time figure.

Yes, on every product, on port 1080. HTTP is on 8000 and HTTPS on 8443.

Up to 120 minutes on residential, 60 on mobile, 24 hours on datacenter. ISP and dedicated addresses are permanently static, so the concept does not apply.

Yes, on every plan including pay-as-you-go. Country, city and ASN targeting are included as standard rather than gated behind an enterprise contract. US traffic additionally supports state and ZIP targeting.

Either username and password on the proxy connection, or IP whitelisting where you register your server addresses and connect without credentials. Whitelisting is the better choice for CI and production infrastructure since there is no secret to leak.

By default every request gets a new exit address. To hold one, add a session identifier to the username — session-abc123 — and optionally a lifetime with time-10. Requests carrying the same session identifier route through the same exit until it expires.

407 means authentication failed. 502 with x-wproxy-error: no-peers means your targeting matched no available exits. 503 means you have hit a concurrency or rate limit. The full table with remediation steps is in the docs under Troubleshooting.

There is no global request cap. Per-domain concurrency defaults to 100 simultaneous connections and is configurable per proxy user. Account-wide concurrency depends on your plan.

Yes, and there are worked examples for each in the documentation, including the awkward parts like authenticated proxies in Chromium and per-context proxies in Playwright.

Yes, though we recommend creating a separate proxy user per workload. That way usage is attributable, limits are enforceable per team, and rotating one credential does not disrupt everything else.

Yes. The REST API covers provisioning, proxy user management, usage statistics, billing and account operations. Create keys under Dashboard → API.

From consumer devices whose owners opted into a bandwidth-sharing programme run by one of our vetted partners. Participants are compensated, see a plain-language disclosure before installing, and can withdraw at any time. We re-verify consent on a rolling 30-day cycle and terminate partners who cannot evidence it.

Unauthorised access to systems or accounts, credential stuffing, fraud, spam, malware distribution, CSAM, harassment, DDoS, and automated purchasing that circumvents retailer limits. The Acceptable Use Policy is the definitive list.

Connection metadata — timestamp, source, destination host, bytes transferred and status code — retained for 30 days for abuse handling and billing. We do not log request bodies, response bodies or full URLs.

Reports to abuse@wproxy.io are acknowledged within 24 hours and triaged the same business day. We can identify the responsible account from connection metadata, and we suspend confirmed violations immediately.

Yes. We act as a processor for traffic you route through us and as a controller for your account data. A DPA is available and can be countersigned electronically from the dashboard.

We respond to valid legal process from competent authorities. We require appropriate legal instruments, disclose only what the instrument compels, and notify the affected customer unless legally barred from doing so.