A Stella Proxies alternative, compared fairly

Stella runs residential, mobile, static ISP and servers, so the catalogue covers most of what a data team needs. The company is Stella Proxies LLC, under New York law, and the domain has been registered since registered in April 2021.

Its strongest asset is age. A shop taking payments since 2021 has processed disputes, survived a market shift and kept its network running, and that counts for something when you are about to send traffic through someone else's addresses.

Its weakest asset, for a buyer, is documentation. Targeting, session length and protocol support are the three things a technical buyer checks first, and Stella publishes almost nothing about any of them.

Stella's residential pricing is $10.00/GB for 1 GB, falling to $6.00/GB at 250 GB, on a plan with a 30-day service term.

That is several times our rate, and the reason is structural rather than greedy. A fixed monthly plan with a service term carries the provider's cost whether you use the bandwidth or not, so the per-gigabyte figure has to absorb idle capacity. A prepaid wallet does the opposite: you pay for what you spend, and the provider carries less risk.

Our Essential pool is $1.50/GB and Premium is $3.00/GB, both drawn from a wallet that starts at $0.50. If you use a lot of bandwidth predictably, a monthly plan can still work out; if your usage is lumpy, the wallet is the cheaper model almost every time.

The term is the other difference. Theirs is a term you buy into; ours is a balance you top up. See residential proxies for how metering works.

Stella prices mobile at $11.00/GB for 1 GB, falling to $6.55/GB at 100 GB, each plan on a 30-day term.

We charge $3.00/GB for a mobile pool that is on real phones on carrier networks in 150 countries, with US state and city targeting. At the entry tier that is a large difference, and it compounds as you scale.

The honest caveat is that mobile pricing is rarely the deciding factor once a target is fingerprinting the connection, because at that point you pay whatever the working pool costs. What we can say is that ours is documented: the pool, the targeting and the session rule are all published, and theirs is a price and a term.

This is the section where we lose, and it is worth being precise about why.

Stella sells packs of 25, 50 or 100 static IPs a month, from $36.95 for 25, located in Ashburn, Virginia. We sell single IPs from $1.25 per IP a month (minimum 50 IPs), or a whole /24 for $255 a month, and each whole /24 goes to one customer.

If your job needs a handful of addresses, a pack of 25 is the right shape and we do not have it. A whole subnet is the better unit for anything that has to look like a real network, but it is the wrong unit for a small, fixed set of targets, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

They also carry $350 to $375 a month for a /24 of 254 IPs, on named carrier ranges, on named carrier ranges. That is a real product with a real use case, and if carrier identity matters to your work it is worth pricing against ours before deciding.

Stella sells user:pass proxies only, with no SOCKS5 and no IP-whitelist authentication. That is one format and one authentication method, and the help centre confirms there is no SOCKS5 and no IP whitelisting.

Targeting is described as global access, with no country list, city targeting or session length published. For a buyer who needs a specific city or a specific carrier, that is not enough information to plan against.

Our side is fully specified. HTTP runs on port 7777 on every pool, SOCKS5 on port 1080 on Premium, Mobile and ISP. Country, US state and ASN live in the username on every pool, and Premium and Mobile add city. The API reference shows the exact syntax, and it does not need a login.

Stella's terms make no mention of refunds. That is not the same as refusing refunds, but it does mean the policy is silent, and silence is what a dispute has to work around.

Ours is on the page: refund requests within 14 days of a top-up, handled under the refund policy.

Sign-in is sign-in with Discord there. On our side it is Google, Apple, email, a passkey or Discord, so an engineer who prefers a passkey is not forced through a third-party account.

On third-party reputation, Stella has a claimed Trustpilot profile with dozens of reviews. We do not copy scores onto these pages; the link is there if you want to read it in full.

Stella lists VPS and RDP servers from $35 to $55 a month. We do not sell Windows servers, and if that is what you need, they are the right shop.

What we sell instead is Mac minis, from $32 a day or $160 a month, with a day rental counted from when the machine is ready. A build you need for a weekend costs a weekend.

The two catalogues barely overlap here, so the decision is simple: Windows means them, macOS means us.

Stella is a real shop with years of history, and on static IPs it sells something we do not: small packs of addresses on named carriers, with a free trial to test them on. If that is your job, buy there.

On bandwidth the comparison is not close. Their residential entry rate is $10.00/GB for 1 GB, falling to $6.00/GB at 250 GB and ours is $1.50/GB; their mobile rate is $11.00/GB for 1 GB, falling to $6.55/GB at 100 GB, each plan on a 30-day term and ours is $3.00/GB. The gap is a pricing model, not a trick, but it is still a gap you pay.

The third difference is paperwork. They sell one protocol, publish almost no targeting detail, and their terms do not mention refunds. We publish all three. If you are wiring a pipeline rather than clicking a form, that is the difference that decides it.

Stella has a claimed Trustpilot profile with dozens of reviews. We link it rather than quoting a figure, so you can read the reviews in context and at their current date.

Our own record is the trust page: what we can prove about the business, rather than what we claim.