Hey everyone, back in late 2025 I hit a wall with my side project. I was building a small e-commerce price-tracking tool for a few niche markets, pulling public data from competitor sites to spot trends and opportunities. At first I was using free proxies and a cheap VPN, but within days I was getting blocked left and right—CAPTCHA hell, IP bans, the works. My scraper was basically dead in the water.
I started digging through Reddit threads and proxy comparison posts looking for something reliable but still budget-friendly. That’s when Lumiproxy kept popping up. People were praising the massive IP pool, the low pricing, and the fact that it actually worked for real-world scraping without constant headaches. I decided to give it a shot, grabbed their trial, and ended up running a full 30-day test. Here’s what I learned—and why I’m still using it in 2026.
Why I Chose Lumiproxy Over the Big Names
I’ve tried Bright Data and Oxylabs in the past (great quality, but the price tag hurts when you’re bootstrapping). Lumiproxy caught my eye because:
- 90M+ residential IPs across 195 countries with city-level targeting. I needed clean US, UK, Canada, and India IPs specifically—Lumiproxy has millions in each of those.
- 99.5% success rate and ~0.6-second average response time. My scripts ran noticeably faster than with my old setup.
- True unlimited concurrent connections—no throttling when I scaled up to 200-300 threads.
- Both HTTP and SOCKS5 support, which most cheaper providers skip.
- 24/7 support via Telegram and WhatsApp—super helpful when I had a config question at 2 a.m.
The pricing sealed the deal. Pay-as-you-go residential proxies start at around $0.8/GB, and they often run promotions (I caught one that gave me a solid starter discount). If you need unlimited traffic for a day, it’s about $76, and static residential IPs are $3 each. No surprise overage fees, no minimums.
If you want to try it yourself, here’s my affiliate link: Lumiproxy
My Actual Use Case: Scaling Price Tracking Without Bans
I set up a Python scraper using rotating residential proxies to monitor about 50 competitor product pages across four countries, running checks every 15-30 minutes. Here’s how it went:
- Week 1: Trial mode. I started small—10 GB plan. Zero bans on major e-commerce sites. Success rate was consistently above 99%. Response times stayed under 1 second even during peak hours.
- Week 2-3: Scaled to 50-60 GB total. Added more targets and countries. Still smooth. The city-level targeting let me pull localized pricing data that my old VPN couldn’t touch.
- Week 4: Pushed it hard—ran unlimited mode for a couple of heavy days when I was backfilling historical data. No slowdowns, no blocks. Ended up collecting clean data on over 10,000 SKUs with almost no manual intervention.
Compared to my previous setup, downtime dropped from ~40% to under 2%. The data quality was night-and-day better because the IPs looked like real residential users.
A Few Real Talk Notes
Nothing’s perfect. TikTok and PayPal don’t play nice with proxies in general, so if that’s your use case, keep that in mind (Lumiproxy is upfront about it in their FAQ). Also, while the IP pool is huge, some super-niche locations have fewer options—but for standard markets, it’s more than enough.
Support was genuinely helpful. I messaged them on Telegram twice—once for proxy config help, once about billing—and got responses within minutes.
Final Verdict
If you’re doing any kind of serious web scraping, market research, SEO monitoring, or ad verification on a budget, Lumiproxy is legit one of the best values out there right now. It’s not the absolute premium tier like Oxylabs, but for 90% of real-world use cases, it performs just as well at a fraction of the cost.
I’m sticking with it for my projects, and if you’re in the same boat, I’d say start with their pay-as-you-go plan and see for yourself.
Grab it here if you want the discount: Lumiproxy (affiliate link—helps support more reviews like this).
Let me know in the comments if you’ve tried Lumiproxy or have questions—I’m happy to share more details from my setup!
