Dataimpulse Review
Dataimpulse’s proxy network is small and not always residential. But it performs decently and offers some of the lowest rates in the market.
Residential proxies have been getting cheaper, but they’re still expensive. With providers like PacketStream going to the dogs and IPRoyal raising prices, there’s been a lack of a truly affordable but still decent service. Dataimpulse has stepped in to fill in that gap.
At $1 per gigabyte, Dataimpulse is currently the cheapest residential proxy service out there. But is this provider worth your money, given its price and young age? Let’s find out.
General Information
Dataimpulse is a residential proxy provider started in late 2022. The company is registered in Estonia, but it belongs to the Ukrainian development agency Softoria. Some of their other products include DataforSEO and ZoogVPN.
Dataimpulse initially sold only residential proxies. However, it expanded the service with datacenter and peer-to-peer mobile IPs in the first half of 2024.
The provider doesn’t disclose its IP sources – only that they were acquired ethically. After doing some light digging, I found links to the Traffmonetizer bandwidth sharing app. That’d mean Dataimpulse is building its own proxy pool and not simply reselling, which is good news if you’re looking for IP diversity.
Otherwise, the provider is still new, and there’s little information about it on public sources: no social media profiles and a fledgling thread on the Blackhatworld forum.
Dataimpulse Proxy Networks
Dataimpulse sells three kinds of proxy servers:
- Datacenter proxies from dozens of countries in a rotating pool format.
- Residential proxies with 100+ locations to choose from.
- Mobile proxies with a small but growing network of IPs from end user devices.
This review will focus on the provider’s residential proxy pool, which we had the chance to test multiple times. You’ll find a detailed description with performance benchmarks in the expandable drop-down below.
Residential
Residential proxies are Dataimpulse’s star product. They’re sourced through the TraffMonetizer app, which is a Honeygain alternative. In other words, people get paid for selling their traffic.
Pool Size & Coverage
Dataimpulse’s advertised proxy pool is one of the smaller on the market. But as we know, marketing numbers can’t be trusted – we’ll find out more accurate numbers in the performance benchmarks below.
In theory, the proxy network has global coverage. In reality, you’ll get a usable number of IPs (100 or more online at once) in around 100 countries. Dataimpulse provides a very useful real-time table with available proxies on the dashboard.
The targeting options are modest for now: basically, individual countries. That said, the provider has several tricks up its sleeve. For one, you can select multiple countries at once. And secondly, instead of selecting an ASN, it’s possible to filter out the ISPs you don’t want.
Features
Dataimpulse’s proxies can rotate with every connection request, or they can last for up to 120 mins. The default sticky session length is 30 mins.
Another thing to note is that Dataimpulse limits the number of threads you can establish at once. But 2,000 isn’t a low number, so it shouldn’t bother the majority of customers.
In addition, Dataimpulse has a toggle for filtering out less anonymous proxies. We’re not quite sure what the feature actually does, but it seems like it ensures stricter IP selection (in other words, keeps the datacenter proxies out).
Finally, Dataimpulse allows blocking hosts, which can work as a makeshift ad blocker to conserve traffic use.
Integration & Use
The residential proxy network is accessible using a backconnect gateway server. It sends your requests through Dataimpulse’s load balancer before reaching the end device.
To configure the proxy server, Dataimpulse adds parameters to the username. Sticky sessions are made by changing the port number: 10,000, 10,001, etc. The system generates usernames and passwords automatically.
Authentication by IP whitelisting is more limiting: it’s not possible to filter by country, which means you’ll be getting proxies randomly. If you rely on this authentication method, it may be a good idea to contact Dataimpulse for a custom approach.
Both HTTP and SOCKS5 protocols are available. The latter doesn’t support UDP at this time.
Pricing Plans
Dataimpulse’s service is based on the pay as you go model – you buy some traffic, and it stays there until used.
The rates are very affordable – at $1, Dataimpulse challenges PacketStream for the position of the undisputed price king. Unfortunately, you’ll encounter the same caveat: the minimum transaction amount is $50, whether you buy or top-up a plan. The latter can only be done manually for now.
To try out the service, Dataimpulse offers a paid trial for $5. It comes with 5 GB of data, which is generous for the price.
Performance Benchmarks
We tested Dataimpulse’s residential proxies in March 2024, for the annual Proxy Market Research.
#1: Pool size & composition
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point, ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs.
** Combines Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands.
Dataimpulse had one of the smaller proxy pools among the providers we’ve tested. Still, it managed to beat IPRoyal and PacketStream, which is nothing to scoff at considering how new this business is.
One problem we encountered was that our IP database identified a significant portion of the proxies as non-residential addresses. This was especially prevalent in Australia – only one in three proxies we received came outside of a data center! It’s hard to treat Dataimpulse’s Australian pool as residential at all.
However, we didn’t enable the anonymous filter, which would’ve likely increased the ratio of residential IPs in exchange for size.
#2: IP quality
We checked 20,000 proxies in the Global pool and 10,000 proxies in the US using the IPQualityScore database.
To our surprise, Dataimpulse’s proxy network was among the least abused, at least according to IPQualityScore data. We’d attribute the result to two factors: 1) building a home-grown proxy pool; 2) not having reached the popularity of major competitors yet.
As Dataimpulse becomes more popular, given its friendly stance towards reselling, we can expect the score to return to the mean.
#3: Infrastructure performance
This benchmark shared the same parameters as the pool test. Our scraper was located in Germany for the Global pool, and we also had scrapers in the US and Singapore for individual country pools. We targeted a global CDN – it pinged a server nearest to the proxy IP and had a response size of several kilobytes.
Dataimpulse’s infrastructure did okay – over 98% of our requests were completed successfully, which is on par with IPRoyal. Some of the more common errors were timeouts and bad requests (error code 400). Both can and hopefully will be improved with time.
The response time metrics put Dataimpulse among the slower providers. For context, the leaders returned a response over three times faster in general. That said, Dataimpulse was relatively quick in the UK and India.
#4: Performance with popular targets
We made ~2,600 connection requests to each target using US-filtered proxies. Our computer was located in the US. Note that your results may differ based on your web scraping setup.
How to Use Dataimpulse
Registration
To register with Dataimpulse, you have to fill in a four-step form. It asks for an email address, name and surname, use case, and your contact details on one of several platforms (such as Skype or Viber). I entered a Skype ID but received no message, which raises questions about the necessity of this step.
It’s also possible to register using the single-sign on services of Google or LinkedIn.
Dashboard
Dataimpulse has built a functional dashboard for managing access to the service. It allows buying a plan, configuring proxy gateways, tracking usage statistics using several metrics, accessing help docs and information about IP availability in various locations.
There’s not much more to ask for other than the ability to have multiple users with different permissions. For now, the only way to achieve something similar is by getting a new plan.
Subscription Management
Dataimpulse offers full self-service, meaning that you can buy and start using its proxies without human interaction.
To get a plan, you need to select a product, name the plan, choose the amount of traffic you need, and then pay. The supported methods are card and PayPal (both through Stripe) or cryptocurrencies. There’s no wallet functionality, so each purchase will require a new transaction.
Of course, the term plan isn’t completely accurate, as Dataimpulse uses a pay-as-you-go model. Instead, you should treat plans more like workspaces. It’s possible to create multiple plans for the same product.
Afterwards, you can view and download the generated invoices in the dashboard. This page is tucked away under user preferences and doesn’t appear in the main navigation bar.
Proxy Management
Dataimpulse has a dashboard widget for generating proxy lists, as well as an API for doing the same programmatically.
The widget lets you choose a country, rotation type (every request or session), connection protocol, output format, and how many proxies you’d like to generate. It then produces a list on the fly. There’s also a dynamic cURL string for quickly trying out the proxy connection. Simple and functional.
Usage Tracking
Dataimpulse provides a graph for tracking data use. You can freely filter it by date range and plan. The three available metrics are money spend, traffic, and requests.
In addition, there’s a table for usage details. It shows which websites you accessed with a plan, how many requests you made, and how much traffic you spent each minute in one minute intervals. For example, on July 24, at 7:28 AM, we made 20 requests to Amazon and spent 5 MB.
The table is highly customizable, and it can show some (though definitely not all) connection errors. But if you work with proxies all day, getting information about what happened each minute quickly becomes spammy, especially when there’s no way to get a broader view. This reduces the tool’s utility.
Documentation
Dataimpulse’s documentation includes API instructions on the dashboard, integration tutorials with various operating systems, antidetect browsers, and other tools, as well as several quick-start guides.
All in all, you should be able to find most information by yourself.
Hands-On Support
Dataimpulse’s customer service works 24/7 over live chat. We contacted the support representatives several times throughout multiple days, asking general questions about the product’s features and integration. The replies came within several minutes and were able to provide satisfactory answers. Overall, we were happy with the help we received.
Conclusion
Dataimpulse is by no means perfect. Its proxy pool isn’t very large, nor does it perform flawlessly. More importantly, a significant number of the IPs we tested weren’t residential at all. In addition, you may miss certain features that you’ve come to expect from more expensive providers, such as city-level targeting.
On the other hand, Dataimpulse is already big enough to sustain larger operations in major locales. If we’re right about its IP sourcing, you can get your hands on a unique proxy pool, which is always a bonus. And, of course, there’s the matter of price – very few providers can give you the rates to match.
Can Dataimpulse compare to market leaders like Oxylabs and Bright Data? For now – certainly not. But it can definitely put up a fight against PacketStream, which is a direct competitor, and other similar services. Not bad for a company that’s been in business for less than a year.
So if your target doesn’t require advanced IP filtering, or the very best infrastructure performance, you can surely give Dataimpulse a try.
Dataimpulse Alternatives
Smartproxy costs a bit more, but it has a great user experience and more performant proxies. It’s probably the main alternative you should consider.
IPRoyal is another relatively cheap option. It has a home-grown proxy pool, more targeting options, and traffic that never expires.
Bright Data can offer you way more power and flexibility, and it’s one of the top choices overall. The main trade-off, however, is the price.
Recommended for:
Anyone looking for cheap residential proxies.
