SOAX is the fifth provider we added to our tracked pricing dataset, and on price alone it rewrote our tables: at a $500 monthly budget it now buys more residential traffic than any other provider we track. It is also the only one of the five whose sourcing and KYC policies we could not find published anywhere we looked.
Both of those things are true at once, and this review is mostly about how to weigh them against each other.
Key takeaways
- Pricing is credit-based, not per-gigabyte: 1 credit = $1, and traffic draws down credits at a rate set by your plan AND the destination geography — so the same plan buys different amounts of data depending on where you scrape.
- Tier-1 rates (July 2026, plus VAT): Sandbox $0/mo at $5.00/GB, Builder $200/mo at $3.00/GB, Team $500/mo at $2.20/GB, Scale $1,500/mo at $1.50/GB, Enterprise $3,000/mo at $0.85/GB.
- At a $500 budget SOAX buys about 227 GB — the most of any provider we track — but at a fixed 500 GB per month Decodo is cheaper ($1,375 vs $1,500), so the winner depends entirely on which question you are asking.
- The entry barrier is the harshest we track: no free trial, a paid 3-day 400 MB trial at $1.99, and no money-back guarantee stated on the pricing or residential pages.
- Sourcing and KYC are unverified: soax.com/ethics and soax.com/ethical-proxies both returned HTTP 404 on July 26, 2026. We record that as 'not published where we could find it', not as evidence of wrongdoing.
- SOAX states it does not operate proxy servers in the State of Texas, citing the regulatory landscape for IP-address usage and anonymity there.
Pricing: credits, not gigabytes
Every other provider we track sells you gigabytes. SOAX sells you credits, and the number of gigabytes a credit buys is variable. One credit is one US dollar. When your traffic runs, credits are drawn down at a per-GB rate determined by two things: which plan you are on, and which geography you are scraping.
That second variable is the one that breaks naive comparisons, and it is worth understanding before you read any price table — including ours.
| Plan | Monthly | Credits | Tier-1 rate | Derived GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sandbox | $0 | 0 (pay as you go) | $5.00/GB | — |
| Builder | $200 | 200 | $3.00/GB | ~66.67 GB |
| Team | $500 | 500 | $2.20/GB | ~227.27 GB |
| Scale | $1,500 | 1,500 | $1.50/GB | 1,000 GB |
| Enterprise | $3,000 | 3,000 | $0.85/GB | ~3,529.41 GB |
The gigabyte figures in that last column are derived, not published: they are credits divided by the Tier-1 per-GB rate. We show the arithmetic rather than a headline number because SOAX does not publish a GB allowance, and quoting one as though it were official would misstate the vendor's own terms. Unused credits roll over for 60 days on monthly billing, or 365 days on annual.
The geography multiplier
The per-GB rate above applies to Tier-1 destinations. Cheaper geographies cost less:
- Tier 2 runs from $3.75/GB on Sandbox down to $0.55/GB on Enterprise
- Tier 3 runs from $2.00/GB on Sandbox down to $0.35/GB on Enterprise
This cuts both ways, and it is the single most important thing to understand about SOAX's pricing. If your targets sit in cheaper tiers, your effective rate can fall well below the headline and SOAX becomes dramatically cheaper than anything else we track. If you are scraping Tier-1 markets — which most price-monitoring and ad-verification work does — you pay the Tier-1 rate and nothing below it.
We use Tier 1 throughout this site as the conservative, most-comparable figure. A vendor whose price depends on your traffic mix cannot be reduced to one number honestly, so we quote the worst case and tell you the lever exists.
Where SOAX actually wins
Run the numbers through our own cost model and SOAX's advantage turns out to be narrow but real, and it depends on which question you ask.
If you have a fixed budget, SOAX wins clearly. At $500 a month its Team plan buys roughly 227 GB at $2.20/GB — against Bright Data's 141 GB on the $499 plan and Decodo's 125 GB pay-as-you-go. That is about 60% more traffic than the runner-up for the same money.
If you have a fixed volume, the picture reverses. At 500 GB per month, Decodo's enterprise range works out to roughly $1,375, against SOAX's $1,500 Scale plan. SOAX still beats Bright Data's $1,999, but it is no longer the cheapest.
The reason is plan granularity. SOAX's steps are far apart — $200, then $500, then $1,500 — so between two steps you are either buying credits you will not use or paying a rate above the tier you nearly reached. Decodo's enterprise band is continuous across 250–1,000 GB and fills exactly that gap.
What your budget buys
| Provider | Traffic for the budget | Effective $/GB | Unspent |
|---|---|---|---|
| DecodoMost traffic+VAT50GB | 50 GB | $3 | $0 |
| Bright Datapay-as-you-go | 37.5 GB | $4 | $0 |
| SOAX+VATpay-as-you-go | 30 GB | $5 | $0 |
| IPRoyalpay-as-you-go | 28.6 GB | $5.25 | $0 |
| OxylabsBasic | 20 GB | $5 | $50 |
At $150 a month, Decodo buys the most traffic — about 50 GB.
Ranked by the published route that buys the MOST traffic; a tie goes to the cheaper rate. "Effective $/GB" is on what you actually spend, and "Unspent" is budget a plan step-up leaves stranded. Decodo's and SOAX's prices exclude VAT, so a VAT-liable buyer gets roughly 17% less traffic for the same budget. Published rates as of 2026-07-26 (USD); verify before buying.
You can model your own budget against every provider we track in the cheapest residential proxies guide, and the usage-first view at 10, 100 and 500 GB is in the residential proxy pricing comparison.
What we could not verify
This is the part that decides our rating, so we want to be exact about what we did and did not find.
SOAX publicly positions its network as consent-based and ethically sourced. We could not locate a first-party page substantiating it. Specifically, on July 26, 2026:
soax.com/ethicsreturned HTTP 404soax.com/ethical-proxiesreturned HTTP 404- Neither the pricing page nor the residential proxies page describes the opt-in mechanism, peer compensation, or any named partner app or SDK
- Neither page states customer KYC or vetting requirements, restricted target categories, or membership of an industry body
We record this as unverified rather than repeating the vendor's claim as fact, because that is the rule this site applies to every provider. It is worth stating plainly what that does and does not mean: this is a documentation gap on our side. It is not evidence that SOAX's sourcing is improper, and nothing here alleges that it is. Pages move, and a policy can exist at a URL we did not try.
But the gap matters more in 2026 than it would have a year ago. Every other provider we track publishes something you can hold them to — Bright Data documents human-reviewed company KYC, Oxylabs and Decodo publish sourcing policies and are EWDCI members, IPRoyal names Pawns.app and its per-GB peer payment. When the FBI seized NetNut's domains over alleged botnet ties, the practical lesson for buyers was that an unverifiable answer to "where do these IPs come from?" is itself a risk signal, particularly when the network is widely resold under other brands. Our guide to ethical proxy sourcing covers what a good answer looks like.
If you are evaluating SOAX, this is the question to put to their sales team in writing before you commit a budget.
The Texas exclusion
One operational detail that rarely appears in comparison tables: SOAX states that it does not include or support proxy servers located in the State of Texas, citing the regulatory landscape there around IP-address usage and anonymity.
For most workloads this is irrelevant. For a few it is disqualifying — US regional price checks, state-level ad verification, or any compliance work that requires a Texas-resident exit node. Check this before you sign, because no amount of geo-targeting configuration will work around it.
Features and vendor claims
| Dimension | SOAX |
|---|---|
| Claimed pool | 155M+ residential IPs across 195+ geos (vendor claim, not audited) |
| Geo targeting | Country, region, city, ASN |
| Sessions | Rotating per request; sticky with custom session lengths |
| Protocols | HTTP(S), SOCKS5, UDP/QUIC |
| Claimed performance | 99.95% success rate, 0.55 s response, 99.9% uptime (vendor claims) |
| Trial | No free trial; paid 3-day 400 MB trial at $1.99; no money-back stated |
| Credit expiry | 60 days rollover (365 days on annual billing) |
| Sourcing / KYC | Not published at the URLs we checked (2026-07-26) |
| Scraping API / unblocker | Marketed, but per-request pricing not published — excluded from our cost comparisons |
The 155M+ pool claim would place SOAX third among the providers we track, behind Bright Data and Oxylabs and ahead of Decodo. Like every pool figure on this site, it is a vendor claim and has not been independently audited — treat it as a sense of scale, not a benchmark.
The scraper API and web unblocker are worth a separate note. Both are marketed, but neither carries published per-request pricing on the pages we fetched. We therefore exclude SOAX from our scraping API cost comparisons rather than estimating a rate, which is the same treatment we give any unpriced product.
- Cheapest headline rates we track at volume: $0.85/GB on Enterprise at Tier 1, and as low as $0.35/GB on Tier-3 geographies
- Buys the most traffic of any tracked provider at a $500 fixed budget (~227 GB at $2.20/GB)
- Credits roll over 60 days (365 on annual), softening the usual month-end waste of plan-based billing
- Broad protocol support including UDP/QUIC, which none of the other four tracked providers list
- Geo targeting down to ASN, matching the more granular providers
- No sourcing or ethics policy at the URLs we checked — the only tracked provider where we could not verify this
- No published customer KYC or restricted-target policy
- No free trial; the paid 3-day 400 MB trial at $1.99 has no stated money-back guarantee
- Credit pricing plus geography tiers make the true cost hard to forecast before you run real traffic
- Wide gaps between plan steps ($200 → $500 → $1,500) strand budget between tiers
- No proxy servers in the State of Texas
- Scraper API and unblocker pricing unpublished, so total platform cost cannot be modelled
Verdict
Verdict
3.5/5
Use SOAX if your volume is high, your targets sit outside Tier-1 geographies, and you are able to get sourcing and KYC answers in writing from the vendor before you commit.
Choose something else if you need a free trial to evaluate, you need Texas exit nodes, you need per-request scraping-API pricing you can forecast, or you need a published compliance posture you can hand to a reviewer. The best residential proxies pillar ranks the alternatives, and cheapest residential proxies models what each budget actually buys.
SOAX
Verify current rates, and ask for the sourcing and KYC policy in writing — we could not find either published as of July 26, 2026
This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Our tests and rankings are independent and never influenced by partners.
All figures on this page were fetched from SOAX's pricing page and residential proxies page on July 26, 2026, in USD and excluding VAT. Plan gigabyte figures are derived from published credit allowances at the Tier-1 rate. We have not independently benchmarked SOAX's network performance, and the pool, success-rate and uptime figures above are vendor claims.