IPRoyal

Basic introduction

IPRoyal hasn’t been in the market for long. But it already offers a wide variety of products for sneakerheads and web scrapers on a budget. They’re priced aggressively enough to cause serious headaches for IPRoyal’s competitors, and for you to consider the company as your provider of choice. $4 for 1 GB of residential proxies and no monthly commitments? Now that’s something.

But low prices always carry compromises. What will IPRoyal’s be? 

And will its products pack enough punch to justify the provider over PacketStream or even premium competitors like Bright Data? 

Proxy basic information

IPRoyal started out in late 2020, so it’s one of the younger proxy providers.At first, it focused on renting IP space to other companies;however, the attention quickly shifter to selling proxies directly to customers.Today the company offers four different proxy networks and a beta-stage API for scraping Google.

IPRoyal clearly positions itself as an affordable service, in line with Storm Proxies and PacketStream.It primarily targets small-time clients willing to spend $10 to $100 dollars.That said, the provider wouldn’t mind selling you terabytes of residential traffic for a large project or reselling.

For now, IPRoyal seems to show special attention to sneakerheads.Its Discord and Twitter channels are full of shoe-related information.And the services cater to sneaker scalping with 24-hour plans, non-expiring traffic, and special residential proxy endpoints for stores like Nike.

However, it wouldn’t be fair to treat IPRoyal as solely a sneaker-oriented provider. It tries to cover – and offers enough flexibility – for most use cases.According to the CEO Karolis Toleikis, IPRoyal’s ambition is to grow into a top three provider in the near future. Despite a solid start, there are still ways to go.

IPRoyal Proxy Networks

IPRoyal sells every kind of proxy network available.You can buy access to dedicated datacenter addresses (which also have a plan for sneaker releases), residential proxies, ISP proxies, and IPs connected to a 4G network.

Two of the networks rotate automatically, while the datacenter and ISP proxies come in lists of static addresses.

Datacenter Proxies

IPRoyal controls an undisclosed amount of datacenter proxies.The proxies are dedicated for your exclusive use, meaning that nobody else will be using them at the same time.Like similar services, they ensure unlimited bandwidth and connection requests.

The IPs are located either in the US or Western Europe.Here’s the full list of available locations: Reston, LA, Chicago, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and France.However, when we shopped around, a half of the locations were unavailable.This raised serious questions about IPRoyal’s stock, especially considering that it leases subnets to others.

ISP Proxies

Like the datacenter proxies, these IPs come in lists and have few limitations.The difference is that they’re associated with internet service providers and not cloud hosting services.In other words, they’re harder to detect.

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies are IPRoyal’s highlight.The provider doesn’t advertise IP numbers much – but from what we know, its network of peer-to-peer proxies exceeds 250,000 monthly addresses.

The residential proxies come from over 150 locations: you can choose not only countries, but also cities and even regions like Africa.There are also special endpoints for shoe stores (Nike, MESH), which shows the attention IPRoyal gives to sneakerheads.

The rotation options are also generous: the dashboard lets you enter any time frame between one second and 24 hours.Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually keep the IP for the whole duration.

Mobile Proxies

IPRoyal only sells mobile proxies in Lithuania, which limits their usefulness if you’re accessing location-sensitive data.On the bright side, they have flexible rotation options, with the ability to fetch a new address via an API call.

Pricing

IPRoyal’s pricing depends on which service you choose.The datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxy plans all use a subscription-based pricing model, where you buy access for a month.In some cases, you can get IPs for a day only – it’s mostly relevant for sneakerheads that need proxies for a particular release.

The datacenter and ISP plans on display top out at 50 IPs;and while you can enter any amount in the dashboard, the rate decreases by only 10%.With this and unpredictable stock in mind, I wouldn’t choose them as an enterprise.

That said, they can be an attractive choice for small-time users.For example, Rayobyte (a mid-range provider) would charge you a quarter more for 5 datacenter IPs, and twice more for as many ISP proxies.