Soax

Basic introduction

I remember first testing SOAX in 2021. Still a very fresh provider, it already looked promising: the proxies rarely failed, offered flexible filtering options, and had decent management tools. Though painfully slow and still unfinished, the overall service was good enough for SOAX to become our Discovery of the Year.

Now, SOAX can no longer be called a newbie. Its set of features is still unique for the price, granting the provider our Best Starter Package award in 2022. But has SOAX fixed its flaws? And has it grown strong enough to compete with the market leaders: Oxylabs, Bright Data, and Smartproxy?

General Information

SOAX is one of the newer residential and mobile proxy providers. It’s a UK-based company established in 2019 and run by an international staff.

The company positions itself somewhere in-between penny-pinching services with limited features and enterprise-facing behemoths like Bright Data or Oxylabs. In other words, its pricing plans and use cases fish for small to medium businesses, similarly to, say, Smartproxy.

SOAX invests a lot into getting your eyeballs. You can find it on most review platforms like TrustPilot, G2, or Capterra, tech websites like Trustpilot, and even Sourceforge! At one point, the provider used questionable growth hack tactics, such as spamming its website with thin Google-oriented pages; but that remains in the past.

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are SOAX’s main and more affordable service. It consists of around 5 million monthly addresses from various countries around the world.

Features

IPs: 5 million

Locations: 150+ countries

Filtering: Country, state, city, ASN

Rotation: 90-600 seconds, as long as available

Format: Gateway address

Concurrency: 300-600 ports, plan based

Protocols: HTTP(S) over SOCKS5

Authentication: Credentials, IP whitelisting

The residential proxies cover most countries in the world. You might have trouble reaching remoter African locations, but the network has grown strong enough to provide an acceptable number of IPs nearly everywhere. You can check their coverage with available ASNs using a map on SOAX’s dashboard.

The IPs inevitably rotate. You can opt to rotate them organically – that is, keep an IP address for as long as it’s online – or force rotation after some time. The rotation options range from 90 to 600 seconds, and you can specify a custom duration. This level of control you get is pretty amazing.

If a 90 second rotation is too long for you (and it is pretty long for tasks like web scraping), there’s an option to unlock faster rotation intervals. However, this is considered a premium feature, and enabling it costs extra.

SOAX’s residential proxies support HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 protocols. However, you can only use them to access website traffic through ports 80 and 443. So there’s not much difference between the two out of the box. You can get more ports open if your use case adheres to SOAX’s terms of use.

Both user:pass and whitelisted IP authentication are available. But to enable the former, you still have to whitelist an IP address first. Two IP slots are given for free; additional slots can be bought for an extra fee.

Pricing

Format: Subscription

Model: Traffic + ports

Starting price: $99 for 8 GB & 300 ports

Trial: 100 MB for $1.99

SOAX offers monthly plans based on traffic. Unlike most competitors, it also factors in the number of ports you can access at once.

The plans start at $99. For this price, you get 8 GB of data ($12/GB) and 300 ports at your disposal. The plans on display lead up to $700 for 100 GB ($7/GB) and 600 ports. If you want more data, or more ports, you’ll be asked to talk with SOAX’s staff for a custom quote.