Running a Proxy Business for 16 Years: Interview with Anonymous Proxies
Valentin Ghita shines a light on how the industry has evolved over the years, and how Anonymous Proxies has changed with it.
Valentin Ghita
- Published:
The proxy server market has exploded over the last five years: it now holds over 250 active providers. The largest companies like Oxylabs and Bright Data make hundreds of millions per year, and 2025 alone saw at least 50 new brands enter the fray.
In the context of this craziness, often accompanied by churn and burn, it feels almost surreal to find a provider that’s been operating for over fifteen years: longer than said Bright Data, or most competitors for that matter. What’s more, it sells mainly server-based proxies and not residential IPs which have generated the lion’s share of demand.
So when Anonymous Proxies approached us and offered to do an interview, of course we had to agree. Valentin’s answers give us the opportunity to learn how the market has changed over the decades and how his company had to adapt to avoid falling into irrelevance like many of its peers.
You’ve been running your own proxy software since 2010, reportedly without outside funding. That’s a long time to be in this business. Can you briefly recount your journey?
“We started selling proxies in 2010, out of a small Romanian software company, and we have never taken outside money. Without investors, every new product had to pay for itself fairly quickly, so we built what customers kept asking for and skipped the rest.
At the start, the market wanted private proxies: a few clean, dedicated IPs that nobody else was using. Over the years we added SOCKS5 for software that doesn’t speak HTTP, ISP proxies, and rotating residential and mobile options. More recently came a WireGuard VPN and three protocols for people who live behind national firewalls: Shadowsocks, Trojan and Amnezia.
We also write our own software, including the dashboard customers use. It took longer to build that way, but we can fix things quickly when a customer runs into a problem, and the team can stay small.”
You claim to have served over 100,000 customers, more than the population of Andorra! Has their profile and use cases evolved over time? In what ways?
“Andorra can relax. Sixteen years is a long time, and plenty of people buy proxies for a single project and move on.
Who those customers are has changed a lot. Around 2010, much of the demand for private proxies across the market came from SEO software: rank trackers, scrapers and posting tools that needed a few dozen clean IPs.
Our customers today are more mixed. Some run dozens of accounts in anti-detect browsers and want one stable IP per profile that looks like a home connection. Data teams care about price per IP and throughput. Gamers want a steady route and a buffer between attackers and their home IP.
People in countries where news sites and messaging apps are blocked use our Shadowsocks, Trojan and Amnezia servers simply to reach the open internet, and they are the newest group for us.”
The proxy server market itself has probably changed significantly. How do you see it now and compared to earlier days?
“It is a different industry now. In 2010 a proxy was mostly a datacenter IP, and the main question was whether it was private or shared. Most websites blocked by IP address and not much else, so a clean address went a long way.
Detection is the biggest change. Sites now check what kind of network an IP belongs to and combine that with browser fingerprints and behavior, so plain datacenter IPs work on fewer targets than they used to. That is a large part of why ISP proxies became their own category.
Residential proxies also grew into a huge business, and parts of it were built on infected devices whose owners never agreed to anything. Enforcement has caught up: Google and the FBI disrupted the NetNut network in July. Buyers now ask where IPs come from, which few of them did a few years ago.
The economics moved as well. IPv4 addresses got cheaper (large blocks fell below $20 per IP in May 2025, the lowest since 2019, and below $13 by the end of that year), which made it easier for new sellers to enter at low prices.
At the top, the largest companies are consolidating: in October, Oxylabs, Decodo, Webshare, ScrapingBee and Honeygain came together under one umbrella, Source, and AI companies have become some of the biggest buyers of web data. A small provider can’t win on size in that market, so we compete on reliability and on serving customers the big networks don’t focus on.”
Many of your peers, such as HighProxies or MyPrivateProxy, failed to adjust and have more or less fallen off. We took a glance at your company accounts, and it looks like your turnover has also dropped from its peak of 4.9M RON (~€916k) in 2020 to 1.78M (~€332k) in 2025. How are you handling the competition?
“You read the accounts correctly. 2020 was our peak, and revenue has come down since. As we see it, two things drove most of the drop. Prices per IP fell across the market as IPv4 got cheaper and new providers arrived, and many buyers moved jobs that used to run on datacenter IPs over to large residential networks.
We chose not to chase volume with outside money or to race everyone to the lowest price. We kept the team small, stayed profitable in every one of those years, and put our effort into products where a small provider can compete on quality: dedicated ISP IPs, SOCKS5 with UDP support, and protocols for restrictive networks. The decline has also slowed sharply: revenue in 2025 was down 4.4% on 2024.
HighProxies and MyPrivateProxy are a useful reminder that a long history protects nobody. Our plan is to stay small and keep serving the customers who need what we do well.”
Your main products seem to be datacenter and ISP (static residential) proxies. Which is more popular? Has the ratio been changing?
“We don’t publish the split, but the trend is easy to describe. Datacenter proxies are still the workhorse for jobs where speed and price per IP matter more than looking like a home user, such as SERP checks, monitoring and scraping sites with moderate protection.
Compared with a few years ago, more of the new customers we talk to start with ISP proxies, mostly people running accounts in anti-detect browsers. They want an IP that is registered to a consumer internet provider, stays the same for months and belongs only to them, so the ratio has been moving toward ISP.”
How do you source your proxies?
“It depends on the product. Our datacenter IPs run on servers connected through Tier-1 carrier networks. ISP proxies use IP ranges leased from internet service providers, so they are registered to consumer ISPs, but they are hosted on server hardware, which gives them datacenter speed. Rotating residential and mobile IPs come from real devices on home and mobile connections.
Where those devices come from is the question to ask any residential provider after this year’s NetNut case, which showed what a pool built on infected devices looks like.
Our dedicated and ISP IPs belong to one customer at a time. That matters as much as speed: an IP with one user has one history, and that history is what makes it trustworthy to the sites our customers visit.”
You’ve implemented interesting features. For one, we love the ability to choose specific IPs in an excel-like dashboard. But there are also some we’re less familiar with, such as the Shadowsocks, Trojan, or Amnezia WireGuard protocols. Can you share the reasoning behind them?
“The IP picker came from how our customers work. If you run fifty accounts, you want to know which IP and city each one uses, and you want to spread them out so one blocked range doesn’t take everything down with it. A table you can filter by country, state, city and IP type is the fastest way to do that, so we built the dashboard around one.
The protocols are for a different kind of customer: people who can buy a proxy but can’t use it, because their country inspects traffic and blocks anything that looks like a VPN or a proxy. Russia, Iran and China are the obvious examples.
Shadowsocks encrypts the whole stream, so there is no protocol header for a filter to match. Trojan runs inside a real TLS session, usually on port 443, so it looks like ordinary HTTPS. Amnezia keeps WireGuard’s cryptography and speed, but sends junk packets, pads the handshake and randomizes header values, which leaves filters much less to fingerprint.
Our Shadowsocks and Amnezia servers are dedicated, so each customer gets an IP nobody else uses, which makes it far less likely to land on the blocklists that catch commercial VPNs.”
Ethical proxy sourcing and use are becoming important considerations. As a company that sells hardened proxy servers, and has a rather small denylist, how do you prevent abuse?
“On hardened: the word comes from our gaming page, where it means our network absorbs attacks aimed at a customer’s IP, such as a DDoS against a gamer, so they never reach the customer’s home connection. It has nothing to do with shielding abusive traffic.
On abuse itself, the most useful thing we do is structural. Our dedicated and ISP IPs belong to one account at a time, so a complaint points to one customer and not to a shared pool. Our terms prohibit unlawful use, and our fair usage policy lets us throttle bandwidth, limit connections, block specific targets or suspend an account.
We keep the list of blocked targets short and handle everything else account by account, which works better for us than a long list of domains that would need updating every week.”
Aside from Israel and Lithuania, Romania appears to be another popular hub for proxy server businesses. Are there any particular conditions to facilitate this?
“Infrastructure is part of it. Romania has had some of the fastest fixed broadband in Europe for years, and Bucharest has been in or near the top ten cities worldwide for fixed broadband speed in Ookla’s index since 2023. A lot of hosting and networking know-how grew up around that.
People are another part. There is a deep pool of network and software engineers, many of whom have spent their whole careers on this kind of infrastructure. Costs are also lower than in Western Europe, while you still operate inside the EU, under EU rules and close to EU customers.
From where we sit, the scene also looks different from Israel’s and Lithuania’s, which grew around a few large companies. Romania has many smaller, often self-funded businesses like ours.”
Having witnessed so much already, where do you see yourself in the future? Do you have any plans you’re excited to share?
“Mostly more of what we already do well: ISP coverage in more countries, since that is where demand is moving, and new ways to stay connected on restrictive networks as censorship gets more sophisticated. We also want to be more open about where each type of IP comes from and how we handle abuse. Buyers are right to ask.
Further out, I expect IPv6 to become a normal part of proxy infrastructure as more of the web supports it properly, and we want to be ready when that happens.”
Valentin Ghita
Content and Research at Anonymous-Proxies