The SOAX alternative when you want prepaid proxies and no monthly plan

SOAX is a proxy network sold on subscriptions. Its home page shows a menu of residential proxies, mobile proxies and managed data scraping services, with no static ISP, datacenter or Mac product on it. It also describes a managed data acquisition service, where it builds and runs custom data pipelines to a schema you set, and it makes a claim to power over 5,000 product teams.

Its service-level agreement shows it is operated by SOAX LTD, a company registered in England and Wales with its office in Uxbridge, which is the sort of plain detail we wish every shop printed on a page you can read.

The catalogue overlaps with ours on residential and mobile bandwidth and nowhere else. We sell static ISP IPs and Mac servers, which it does not list. It sells managed data collection, which we do not. The sections below take each product in turn and say who we think wins it.

SOAX does not publish one price per gigabyte. Its pricing page lists a free Sandbox plan and four paid monthly plans: Builder at $200, Team at $500, Scale at $1,500 and Enterprise at $3,000 a month before VAT. The paid plans include 200, 500, 1,500 and 3,000 prepaid credits on Builder, Team, Scale and Enterprise, one credit being about one dollar of usage.

The rate on top of that depends on where the exit IP is. It sorts countries into three geo tiers set by the exit IP's country, with the United States in tier 1 and India in tier 2, and tier 1 the dearest. Its price list shows $5.00 per GB on Sandbox, $3.00 on Builder, $2.20 on Team, $1.50 on Scale and from $0.85 on Enterprise, for a tier 1 exit such as the United States. Cheaper countries cost less: $4.00, $2.25, $1.65, $1.15 and from $0.55 per GB in tier 2, and $2.00, $1.20, $0.90, $0.60 and from $0.35 in tier 3, across the same five plans in the same order.

It also says what it counts. Its pricing page describes data counted in both directions, including partial responses, retries and interrupted connections, at one billion bytes to the GB. Expect VAT and other taxes added on top of its published prices, worked out from the billing address. So the figure on the page is the start of a bill, not the end of it.

Ours is simpler and less flexible. Essential is $1.50/GB and Premium is $3.00/GB, whatever the country: our list price is one rate per pool. A purchase runs 0.1 to 1,000 GB. See pricing for the published sheet.

The honest comparison is at your monthly volume. On a high-volume plan its United States rate falls well below its own entry rate, and a paid plan only makes sense if you will use the credits it includes. A small buyer does not have to take a paid plan: Sandbox has no plan fee, and what you pay there is its per-GB rate, the highest in its price list. The next section takes that case.

The way into SOAX with no commitment is a free Sandbox plan with no subscription fee and no included credits, where top-up credits are bought at Sandbox rates, the highest per-GB rates in its price list. Its pricing FAQ is plain that it has no free trial, with Sandbox as its no-commitment option.

That is a fair offer for a small buyer. Nothing renews on Sandbox and there is no plan fee, so a few gigabytes cost you only the per-GB rate. That rate is its highest, and which of us is cheaper depends on the country of the exit IP and on the pool you would use here, so price your own countries on both sheets. For some buyers SOAX will be the cheaper start. Credits you buy there lapse on a clock, and a paid plan does renew: the pricing page describes a plan fee paid upfront that renews each month, where cancelling stops the next renewal and unused time is not refunded.

Our model is the other shape. Load any amount from $0.50 into the pool you need, spend it at your own pace, and nothing renews or lapses. Our way in is 1 GB of Premium free when a new account links Google.

SOAX prices its two networks the same. The pricing page describes one rate across residential and mobile, set by the plan and by the country of the exit IP. If you use both, that is easy to budget.

We price them apart. Residential is $1.50/GB on Essential and $3.00/GB on Premium, and mobile is $3.00/GB. See residential proxies and mobile proxies for how each pool works.

Which is cheaper depends on the country, the plan and the volume, and the answer changes as you move between them. Run the same small test on both and compare what your targets return, then price the volume you would actually buy.

On targeting, its pricing table lists country, region, city and ISP targeting on Sandbox, Builder and Team, with ASN and ZIP added from the Scale plan, while its residential page names targeting by country, region, city, ISP or ASN, without naming a plan, so its own pages differ on which plans get ASN. Its FAQ gives 195+ countries. Ours is country, US state and ASN on every pool, with city on Premium Residential and city, in the US, on Mobile, across 150 countries.

On sessions, its home page describes rotation per request, after a set number of requests, after a set time or on error, and sticky sessions that lock requests to a single node. That is a flexible rule set, and we found no maximum length for a sticky session on the marketing pages we read. Its developer documentation, which we did not read for this page, may give one. Ours is up to 24 hours (120 minutes on Essential), stated the same way on every page. If a multi-step flow has to survive, compare the maximums before you choose.

On protocols, the two are close. SOAX lists HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 over TCP and UDP, with username and password or IP allowlist authentication. We run HTTP on port 7777 across every pool, and SOCKS5 on port 1080 on Premium, Mobile and ISP.

This is the part of SOAX built for teams. It sells proxy packages and team seats, where each package has its own authentication, routing, limits and usage tracking, with per-package guardrails that set traffic caps, limit protocols and whitelist or blacklist domains, plus an API with usage analytics. If several people or projects share an account and you want to cap and separate them, this is a real advantage.

Support is tiered by plan: basic support on Sandbox, 24/7 support on the paid plans and a customer success manager on Enterprise. Ours is Discord tickets and email, answered by the people who run the service.

On reliability, its SLA describes a 99.9% availability target on its Premium service tier, measured on its own platform and not a promise of success at any target site. Its pricing page lists the Premium service tier on Enterprise only, with Sandbox, Builder, Team and Scale on its Standard tier. Its home page shows a 99.9% guaranteed uptime figure, without naming a plan, so a reader who sees only the home page may take the figure to cover every plan; the SLA gives it to Premium only. The SLA says plainly that success at a given site is not part of the target. If a written availability commitment matters to you, read it before you decide.

This is where the two shops feel most different. SOAX describes credits that expire 60 days after they are added on Sandbox or a monthly plan, and 12 months after on an annual plan, so a balance has a clock on it. We sell a prepaid wallet with no expiry date under normal circumstances, as our Terms set out.

On refunds, neither of us promises one. Its pricing page describes payments for plans and top-up credits as generally non-refundable, with exceptions under its Billing and Refund Policy, and its terms set out no refund once you have started to use the platform or consumed credits, and refunds otherwise at its reasonable discretion, with exceptions for a confirmed and material service failure, a duplicate or erroneous charge reported within 30 days, and refunds that mandatory consumer law requires. Ours is a request within 14 days of a top-up for unused paid balance, which we consider in good faith and decide at our discretion, under the refund policy. Used gigabytes are not refundable; the policy also lists duplicate charges, our own billing errors and a verified failure to deliver.

On running out, its pricing page describes usage that stops when the prepaid balance reaches zero, unless an approved business account has postpaid billing agreed in writing. Ours is a prepaid wallet, so it stops at an empty wallet and carries on when you top up.

On payment, SOAX's pages do not agree with each other. Its pricing page says it accepts most major credit and debit cards, with the methods open to each customer shown when paying and bank transfer for approved business accounts. Its home page FAQ lists payment by card (instant), bank transfer (1 to 3 days) or crypto (after identity checks); its residential page and its mobile page carry the same card, bank transfer or crypto line, with crypto after identity checks and the same card, bank transfer or crypto line, with crypto after identity checks. Its terms add a cryptocurrency payment clause under which crypto payments are not refundable to the original wallet and the method may be withdrawn at any time. So crypto is available there after identity checks, and bank transfer is open to everyone on some pages and to approved business accounts on another. We take Visa, Mastercard and Amex through Stripe, or SOL, which is the only cryptocurrency we accept.

Here the catalogue stops overlapping. Its home page shows a menu of residential proxies, mobile proxies and managed data scraping services, with no static ISP, datacenter or Mac product on it, so we have nothing to set beside ours for static IPs or for servers.

We sell single IPs from $1.25 per IP a month (minimum 50 IPs), or a whole /24 for $255 a month, and each IP is static and held by one customer at a time. See ISP proxies for the ranges. They are sold in restock windows, members first and then everyone, so there can be a wait.

We rent Macs. Our prices are from $32 a day or $160 a month, and our lines run 1 or 2.5 Gbps, by build. The table below is read live from our catalogue on every request, and out-of-stock builds are marked rather than hidden.

If you run a team, buy a lot of bandwidth every month, need a written availability target, or want the collection done for you, buy from SOAX. Its rate per gigabyte falls steeply as the plan grows. We would not pretend a different shop is a substitute for the one your job needs.

If you want a wallet that does not renew or lapse, a stated window in which to ask for a refund, static ISP IPs or Macs, the shape of our shop fits. Ours is a wallet from $0.50 with no subscription. If you buy small, SOAX's Sandbox is also a plan-free start, so price your countries on both sheets before you decide.

On price per gigabyte, there is no honest one-line answer. Put the monthly volume you would really buy, and the countries you would buy it in, into both price lists and compare the totals, not the headline rates.

SOAX's own pages carry customer quotes and its own customer counts. We quote none of the scores here: a copied score is a claim we cannot keep current, and a stale one misleads the person reading it. The one figure we repeat is that it makes a claim to power over 5,000 product teams, labelled as its own claim.

Read independent write-ups of it before you pay, and read the recent ones rather than the oldest. For our side, the trust page lists what we can prove rather than what we claim.