The Shifter alternative for prepaid bandwidth, mobile and long sessions

Shifter has been running residential proxies since 2012, one of the older names in this market. Its catalogue today is residential proxies, ISP proxies, a Web Scraping API and a SERP API. It splits that side into three residential pools: Full Geo on 205M+ IPs, and Country Geo and Non-Geo on a separate 31M+ network, and you choose a pool by how much targeting you need.

That is a sensible design: a buyer who does not care where an exit sits should not pay for city targeting. We do something similar with Essential and Premium, with two pools rather than three, and none that gives up location entirely.

What the catalogue leaves out matters just as much. There is no mobile proxy product; mobile exits appear only inside its Scraping API plans, from the Growth plan up. There are no Mac servers. And the ISP product is built on a different idea of what static means.

Shifter's headline rates are low, and they are real. The pool with the most targeting runs from $0.75 per GB on Full Geo, with country, state, city and ASN targeting. One step down, it charges from $0.48 per GB on Country Geo, which targets by country only. The cheapest option runs from $0.10 per GB on Non-Geo, a worldwide mix with no targeting.

Those floors are reached on the larger plans. The mid-sized plans run $50 for 50 GB up to $299 for 400 GB on the Regular Full Geo tier, and above that sit Enterprise plans from $599 for 800 GB to $7,499 for 10 TB, all at $0.75 per GB.

Our rates are $1.50/GB for Essential, $3.00/GB for Premium and $3.00/GB for Mobile. From Shifter's Regular tier up, their per-gigabyte rate is below our Essential rate, and their Full Geo pool, which targets by city and ASN as our Premium does, costs a fraction of Premium. We are not going to argue with that arithmetic.

It turns only for the small buyer. Shifter's smallest plans work out above our Essential rate, and they are monthly commitments. If you need a few gigabytes this week and none next month, the real comparison is a wallet against a subscription. See pricing for our published sheet.

Shifter sells fixed monthly subscriptions, each with a set amount of traffic, on month-to-month terms that renew automatically until cancelled in writing. It currently adds a second month free on its plans, with full traffic included. For a team with steady usage that is an easy way to buy, and the free month is a genuine discount.

We sell bandwidth the other way round. You load a wallet for the pool you need, any amount from $0.50, and spend it at your own pace. Nothing renews, and the balance has no expiry date under normal circumstances, as our Terms set out.

Which model is cheaper depends on how evenly you buy. A buyer who uses every gigabyte of a large plan every month gets Shifter's best rate and should take it. A buyer whose usage comes in bursts pays for the quiet months too. A wallet charges nothing for a month you did not use.

Refunds follow the same pattern. Shifter offers a 3-day money-back guarantee on every plan. Ours are requests within 14 days of a top-up, under the refund policy. The longer window helps while you are still testing a pool.

Shifter's pricing page offers sticky sessions of 1 to 30 minutes. Its home page says sticky sessions of up to 60 minutes, set with a TTL parameter. The two pages disagree, so we quote both; either way, a Shifter session is measured in minutes.

On Premium and Mobile, we hold one exit up to 24 hours (120 minutes on Essential). Essential's shorter window, the one in brackets, puts it in the same range as Shifter.

So the split is clean. For a scrape that rotates on every request, session length does not matter and Shifter's rate wins. For a sign-in or a multi-step flow that has to stay on one address, Premium or Mobile is the pool, and Shifter publishes no equivalent.

Protocols are close. Shifter supports HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 on every plan, with username and password authentication on every request. We run HTTP on port 7777 on every pool and SOCKS5 on port 1080 on Premium, Mobile and ISP. If your tool needs SOCKS4, Shifter has it and we do not.

Shifter has no mobile proxy product; mobile exits appear only inside its Scraping API plans, from the Growth plan up. If you need phones on carrier networks as raw proxies for your own client, there is no Shifter plan to buy.

Our Mobile pool is $3.00/GB, on real phones attached to carrier networks in 150 countries, with US state and city targeting. It is the pool to use when a site checks the network type rather than only the country.

The Scraping API is a fair route if all you want is pages back, but you never hold the connection yourself. See mobile proxies for how our pool is built.

Shifter's ISP product is good at something ours is not. It offers 120 countries, 1,800+ cities and 900+ ISPs, and its entry plan is 25 IPs for $42/month, falling to $1.26 per IP on the 200-IP plan. Ours covers US ranges today, international to follow, and the smallest purchase is 50 single IPs.

The difference is in what stays fixed. Shifter's ISP proxies are locked to your chosen city and ISP for the billing period, while the address behind each proxy can refresh over time. Shifter presents that as an advantage, since a home connection's address changes now and then, and for some work it is one.

Ours are the other kind. A /24 costs $255 a month, and its addresses stay put for as long as you hold it, assigned to exactly one customer. If a target has allowlisted your addresses, an address that refreshes is the very thing you are trying to avoid.

So pick by the job: a few proxies across many countries, Shifter; a block of US addresses that looks like one stable network, us. Ours are sold in restock windows, members first and then everyone. See ISP proxies.

Shifter's catalogue is residential proxies, ISP proxies, a Web Scraping API and a SERP API, so there is no Mac to compare against. We include this because browser work on residential exits often needs a Mac to run from, and one provider means one bill.

Ours are from $32 a day or $160 a month; the shortest is a day rental from $32, 24 hours counted from when the Mac is ready. The table below is read live from our catalogue, so it shows stock and price as of this page load.

Shifter sells a Web Scraping API and a SERP API, each from $44/month. We sell neither. If you would rather send a URL and receive structured data than manage proxies yourself, Shifter has that product and we do not.

Its network is also larger than ours, with three residential pools: Full Geo on 205M+ IPs, and Country Geo and Non-Geo on a separate 31M+ network. It offers unlimited concurrent connections, and it adds a dedicated account manager and a 99.9% uptime SLA on Enterprise plans.

Our support is Discord tickets and email, answered by the people who run the network. If procurement needs a named account manager and an SLA on paper, Shifter is the bigger operation.

On bandwidth bought in bulk, Shifter is cheaper than we are, and its catalogue is broader where data teams need it: residential pools priced by targeting, ISP proxies in many countries, and scraping and SERP APIs. For high-volume collection at a steady monthly rate, Shifter is the better buy.

The case for us is a different kind of buyer. You want to prepay rather than subscribe. Your sessions have to outlast Shifter's minutes, which is what Premium and Mobile are for. You need phones on carrier networks, a block of US addresses that do not refresh, or a Mac. Shifter sells none of those.

So: buy from Shifter if volume and price per gigabyte are the whole decision. Come here if the decision also includes how you pay, how long a session holds, or a product Shifter does not make.

Proxyway published a hands-on review of Shifter's residential proxies in November 2023. It predates these prices, so read it for how the network behaved under test, and check pricing on Shifter's own pages.

We quote no scores here; a copied figure is a claim we cannot keep current. Our own record is the trust page.