Decodo Review 2026: Smartproxy Rebrand, Pricing, Verdict

Decodo is Smartproxy under a new name — the rebrand took effect on April 22, 2025, and accounts, pricing, endpoints, and billing carried over unchanged. My verdict for 2026: it remains the value pick among major residential proxy providers, at $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go, subscriptions from $3.75/GB, a claimed 115M+ IP pool, and a 3-day free trial.

Smartproxy became Decodo: what changed and what did not

If you searched for a Smartproxy review and landed on Decodo's website, you are in the right place. Smartproxy officially rebranded to Decodo on April 22, 2025, according to the company's own rebrand announcement page, which describes "the official release on April 22nd."

The important part for existing users and anyone comparing providers: this was a rename, not a restructuring. Per the same rebrand page, the following carried over unchanged:

• Accounts and credentials — no re-registration required
• Subscriptions and billing — existing plans and payment details were preserved
• Pricing — no rebrand-driven price changes
• Proxy endpoints — integrations built against Smartproxy hostnames kept working

What did change is the brand itself: the name, the website domain (decodo.com), and the visual identity. The company positioned the rename as a shift from a proxy-first brand to a broader web-data-collection platform identity, reflecting its growing scraping API line alongside the classic proxy products.

Practically, this means two things for a 2026 buyer. First, any Smartproxy review written before April 2025 describes the same underlying service — but always check the numbers, because pricing has moved industry-wide since then. Second, third-party reputation earned under the Smartproxy name (review scores, benchmark placements) legitimately transfers to Decodo; this is not a troubled company hiding behind a new name.

Decodo residential proxy pricing (July 2026)

All figures below come from Decodo's published residential proxy pricing, checked July 17, 2026. Every price is quoted in USD and excludes VAT.

Three observations stand out:

1. The $11.25 entry point is the lowest committed plan among the four major providers we track. Oxylabs starts at $30/mo for 5 GB and Bright Data's cheapest subscription is $499/mo, according to their respective pricing pages (July 2026). Only pay-as-you-go options undercut it, and Decodo's own $4.00/GB pay-as-you-go rate matches Bright Data's promotional pay-as-you-go price.
2. The per-GB curve is smooth. You move from $3.75 to $2.75/GB across five self-serve tiers, so mid-size teams are not forced into an enterprise conversation just to get a fair rate — the pattern I check first on any usage-billed pricing page, because cliffs between tiers are where budgets quietly break.
3. Market context matters. Proxyway's Proxy Market Research 2026 (data collected March–April 2026) found that residential pricing stabilized after falling by up to 75% between 2023 and 2025, and that the median advertised pool reached 54M IPs. Decodo's rates sit comfortably in the value segment of that stabilized market without being grey-market cheap.

For a full cross-provider breakdown, see our proxy pricing comparison.

Features: what you get for the money

According to Decodo's residential proxy product page (July 2026):

• Pool: Decodo claims 115M+ ethically sourced residential IPs across 195+ locations. As with every provider, treat pool size as a vendor claim — no residential pool is independently audited.
• Geo-targeting: continent, country, state, city, ZIP code, and ASN level, at no additional cost. This matches Oxylabs' targeting depth and beats IPRoyal, which stops at city level per its own documentation.
• Session control: rotating sessions (new IP per request) and sticky sessions configurable from minutes up to days.
• Protocols: HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. Oxylabs additionally lists HTTP3; most workloads will not notice the difference, and I would not weight it in a shortlist unless you already know you need it.
• Performance claims: average response time under 0.5 seconds, 99.92% success rate, and 99.99% uptime. These are vendor-published figures, not our measurements — ProxyFacts has not yet run its own benchmark suite, and we will update this review when we do.

If you are new to this proxy type, our explainer on what a residential proxy is covers how these pools work and why they are priced per gigabyte.

Web Scraping API: the strongest free tier of the big four

Decodo's rebrand explicitly signaled a push beyond raw proxies, and the scraping API line shows it. According to Decodo's Web Scraping API pricing (July 2026):

• Free plan: $0/mo with 2,000 requests per month on standard proxies (an effective $0.50 per 1K), 10 requests per second, no credit card required.
• Core paid plan: $19/mo for 38,000 requests per month at $0.50 per 1K on standard proxies.
• Premium proxies plus JavaScript rendering: $1.50 per 1K requests across tiers.
• Guarantee: 14-day money-back on paid plans. Prices exclude VAT.

A permanent free plan — as opposed to a one-off trial — is unusual. Bright Data's Web Unlocker offers 5K free requests per month per its pricing page, but Decodo's free tier is the easiest way we know of to prototype a scraping job on a mid-market platform with zero payment details. If you are weighing a managed API against raw proxy access, our guide to scraping APIs versus proxies walks through the trade-offs.

Trial, money-back, and the real cost of testing

Decodo advertises a 3-day free trial with signup for residential proxies plus a 14-day money-back option on eligible subscriptions, per its product page (July 2026). Compare the field:

• Oxylabs: free residential trial available once per client, but requested via contact form or email — not self-serve.
• Bright Data: free trial with no credit card, but production access to the residential network still requires passing a human-reviewed corporate KYC.
• IPRoyal: no standard free trial for residential proxies; the official FAQ points buyers to the 1 GB pay-as-you-go minimum instead, and refunds apply only to provider-side failures reported within 24 hours.

Decodo is the only one of the four where an individual can go from signup to testing real residential traffic the same day, with a money-back safety net behind it. For evaluation friction, that is a clear win. If I were shortlisting providers, this is where I would start — and I would spend the 3 trial days on the hardest target in the pipeline, not the easiest.

Compliance and ethical sourcing

ProxyFacts only covers legitimate proxy use cases — price monitoring, SEO rank tracking, ad verification, market research, and AI training data collection — and we weigh a provider's compliance posture accordingly.

According to Decodo's security and compliance page and its ethical residential sourcing policy:

• Every customer goes through automated fraud checks, KYC verification, and third-party screening at registration.
• Suspicious activity triggers third-party ID verification, which is also required to unlock restricted target groups.
• Decodo actively blocks high-risk targets: banking, government portals, streaming platforms, app stores, and ticketing sites.
• The company states GDPR and CCPA alignment and publishes how residential IPs are sourced from consenting participants.

This sits between the extremes of the market. Bright Data restricts its residential network to verified companies that pass human-reviewed KYC — the strictest regime of the four — while IPRoyal makes KYC mandatory only for static residential (ISP) proxies. Decodo screens everyone but keeps signup self-serve, and enforces its rules at the target level by blocking abuse-prone categories outright. If you are unsure where lawful scraping ends, read our overview of whether web scraping is legal before you buy from anyone.

How Decodo compares with Oxylabs, Bright Data, and IPRoyal

All figures are from each provider's published pages, checked July 17, 2026; pool sizes are vendor claims.

Engineer’s take (Hinata): In this table, I would weight the trial row over the pool row. The jump from a claimed 115M to 400M IPs rarely changes outcomes for a team consuming tens of gigabytes a month, but evaluation friction decides whether you ever learn how a provider behaves on your actual targets. The cost trap to model up front is bandwidth, not rate: a scraper that fetches images, fonts, and scripts it never parses can double or triple the gigabytes you pay for, dwarfing the per-GB differences between these self-serve tiers. So my sizing order would be to measure real bytes per successful page on a small run first, then pick the tier — not the other way around.

The pattern: Oxylabs and Bright Data are enterprise-first platforms with bigger claimed pools and heavier onboarding — see our Oxylabs review and Bright Data review for the full picture. IPRoyal competes on never-expiring traffic and long sticky sessions (covered in our IPRoyal review). Decodo occupies the middle: near-enterprise feature depth (ZIP and ASN targeting, scraping APIs) at self-serve prices with the friendliest evaluation terms. Our ranked best residential proxies guide places all four in context.

Who Decodo is for

Based on the documented pricing and feature set, Decodo fits best when:

1. You are starting or scaling a mid-size scraping operation. Price monitoring and SEO rank tracking workloads in the 3 GB to 100 GB per month range hit Decodo's sweet spot — you get sub-$3.50/GB rates without enterprise sales calls.
2. You want to evaluate before committing. The 3-day trial plus 14-day money-back combination is the market's most forgiving.
3. You need granular geo-targeting on a budget. ZIP-code and ASN targeting at no surcharge is genuinely uncommon at this price tier and matters for ad verification and localized price checks.
4. You prefer an API for hard targets. The Web Scraping API's free plan lets you test managed extraction before spending anything.

Decodo is a weaker fit if you need the largest possible IP pool for heavy concurrent geo-diversity (Bright Data's claim is more than three times larger), if you require HTTP3, or if your legitimate use case involves target categories Decodo blocks outright.

Our methodology

ProxyFacts has not yet run first-hand performance benchmarks — every performance figure in this review is a vendor claim and labeled as such. Our evaluations are based on documented evidence: published pricing pages, official policy documents, and independent industry research such as Proxyway's annual market study, all fetched and verified on July 17, 2026. We disclose affiliate partnerships, and links to providers carry sponsored attributes. When our own benchmark suite goes live, this review will be updated with measured data.

Frequently asked questions

When did Smartproxy become Decodo? On April 22, 2025, according to Decodo's rebrand page. Accounts, subscriptions, pricing, endpoints, and billing carried over unchanged.

Is Decodo trustworthy after the rebrand? The rebrand was a rename, not a restructuring — the same company, plans, and infrastructure continue under the new name. Decodo publishes its ethical sourcing policy, runs KYC at registration, and blocks abuse-prone target categories.

Can I still use my Smartproxy credentials? Yes. Per the rebrand FAQ, existing credentials and endpoints kept working, so integrations did not need code changes.

Which is cheaper, Decodo or Oxylabs? At published July 2026 rates, Decodo is cheaper at every self-serve tier: its entry plan costs $3.75/GB versus Oxylabs' $6/GB, and its 100 GB rate of $2.75/GB beats Oxylabs' $4/GB at 125 GB. Oxylabs' $2.50/GB corporate tier requires a 1 TB commitment.