IPRoyal hasn’t been in the market for long. But it already offers a wide variety of products for sneakerheads and web scrapers on a budget. They’re priced aggressively enough to cause serious headaches for IPRoyal’s competitors, and for you to consider the company as your provider of choice. $4 for 1 GB of residential proxies and no monthly commitments? Now that’s something.
But low prices always carry compromises. What will IPRoyal’s be? And will its products pack enough punch to justify the provider over PacketStream or even premium competitors like Bright Data? Let’s find out.
If you’ve come from Google, you may be interested in the IPRoyal Pawns app. We compare it with similar services here.
General Information
IPRoyal started out in late 2020, so it’s one of the younger proxy providers. At first, it focused on renting IP space to other companies; however, the attention quickly shifter to selling proxies directly to customers. Today the company offers four different proxy networks and a beta-stage API for scraping Google.
IPRoyal sources residential proxies via a proxyware app called IPRoyal Pawns. For a while, it resold proxy infrastructure alongside, while trying to build a pool of its own. The source abruptly terminated the contract, but IPRoyal was able to get back on its feet and now controls a monthly network of around 250,000 residential addresses.
IPRoyal clearly positions itself as an affordable service, in line with Storm Proxies and PacketStream. It primarily targets small-time clients willing to spend $10 to $100 dollars. That said, the provider wouldn’t mind selling you terabytes of residential traffic for a large project or reselling.
For now, IPRoyal seems to show special attention to sneakerheads. Its Discord and Twitter channels are full of shoe-related information. And the services cater to sneaker scalping with 24-hour plans, non-expiring traffic, and special residential proxy endpoints for stores like Nike.
However, it wouldn’t be fair to treat IPRoyal as solely a sneaker-oriented provider. It tries to cover – and offers enough flexibility – for most use cases. According to the CEO Karolis Toleikis, IPRoyal’s ambition is to grow into a top three provider in the near future. Despite a solid start, there are still ways to go.
IPRoyal Proxy Networks
| Datacenter | Residential | ISP (static residential) | Mobile |
| ✅ (dedicated, sneaker plans) | ✅ | ✅ (dedicated) | ✅ |
IPRoyal sells every kind of proxy network available. You can buy access to dedicated datacenter addresses (which also have a plan for sneaker releases), residential proxies, ISP proxies, and IPs connected to a 4G network.
Two of the networks rotate automatically, while the datacenter and ISP proxies come in lists of static addresses.
| Datacenter | ISP | Residential | Mobile | |
| Number of IPs | Over 2 million | |||
| Type | Dedicated | Shared | ||
| Countries | 6 | 18 | 150+ | Lithuania |
| Targeting | City (US) | – | Country, state, city | – |
| Rotation | – | Every request, 1 s – 24 hrs | 1, 5, 10 mins, API request | |
| Concurrency | Unlimited | One IP at a time | ||
| Protocols | HTTP(S), SOCKS5 | |||
| Sub-users | – | Available | – | |
| Other features | 99.9% uptime | High-end pool | ||
Datacenter Proxies
General as well as sneaker-oriented plans.
IPRoyal controls an undisclosed amount of datacenter proxies. The proxies are dedicated for your exclusive use, meaning that nobody else will be using them at the same time. Like similar services, they ensure unlimited bandwidth and connection requests.
The IPs are located either in the US or Western Europe. Here’s the full list of available locations: Reston, LA, Chicago, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and France. However, when we shopped around, a half of the locations were unavailable. This raised serious questions about IPRoyal’s stock, especially considering that it leases subnets to others.
There are general as well as specialized sneaker proxy plans to choose from. Both have the same specs, but the shoe plans ensure you won’t be banned at the time of release. They require entering your preferred sneaker website (only one) before purchase. We don’t recommend datacenter IPs for sneaker copping, as both the market and shoe stores have moved past them.
ISP Proxies
A treat for sneakerheads.
IPRoyal’s ISP proxy service began with only US and Austrian IPs, but it’s grown to be quite large. Nowadays, you can choose from 18 locations that range from US to India and Australia:
In reality, we couldn’t buy proxies from around a half of the advertised countries, so their actual availability may not reflect marketing claims.
Like the datacenter proxies, these IPs come in lists and have few limitations. The difference is that they’re associated with internet service providers and not cloud hosting services. In other words, they’re harder to detect.
Residential Proxies
A fully-featured (but not very large) pool of IPs.
Residential proxies are IPRoyal’s highlight. The provider doesn’t advertise IP numbers much – but from what we know, its network of peer-to-peer proxies exceeds 250,000 monthly addresses.
The residential proxies come from over 150 locations: you can choose not only countries, but also cities and even regions like Africa. There are also special endpoints for shoe stores (Nike, MESH), which shows the attention IPRoyal gives to sneakerheads.
The rotation options are also generous: the dashboard lets you enter any time frame between one second and 24 hours. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually keep the IP for the whole duration.
One interesting option is the ability to toggle IPRoyal’s high-end pool. It reportedly leaves in only the fastest and most stable IPs; however, it also reduces the pool size even further. This is an important detail, as IPRoyal can’t brag about having a large residential network in the first place.
Mobile Proxies
Lithuanian IPs from dedicated mobile devices.
IPRoyal’s mobile proxy network is based on dedicated devices with SIM cards inside them. It means you can access one IP at a time, but the service doesn’t limit traffic and you can rotate to a new address whenever you want. This model is popular among multiple account managers.
IPRoyal only sells mobile proxies in Lithuania, which limits their usefulness if you’re accessing location-sensitive data. On the bright side, they have flexible rotation options, with the ability to fetch a new address via an API call.
IPRoyal Pricing
IPRoyal’s pricing depends on which service you choose. The datacenter, ISP, and mobile proxy plans all use a subscription-based pricing model, where you buy access for a month. In some cases, you can get IPs for a day only – it’s mostly relevant for sneakerheads that need proxies for a particular release.
The residential proxies, on the other hand, allow paying as you go. There are no monthly plans: you simply buy the amount of traffic you need and use it for as long as you like. This model strongly resembles PacketStream, but it’s not quite the same: IPRoyal applies an increasing discount the more you buy. It scales well and reaches 80%, making IPRoyal one of the cheapest residential proxy providers:
While IPRoyal aims to sell you terabytes of residential traffic, the other products aren’t nearly as ambitious. The datacenter and ISP plans on display top out at 50 IPs; and while you can enter any amount in the dashboard, the rate decreases by only 10%. With this and unpredictable stock in mind, I wouldn’t choose them as an enterprise.
That said, they can be an attractive choice for small-time users. For example, Rayobyte (a mid-range provider) would charge you a quarter more for 5 datacenter IPs, and twice more for as many ISP proxies.
The mobile proxies follow a different model altogether: they charge a fixed amount for access to ports. One port equals one IP address at a time, with the ability to rotate to new ones. This is the main limitation; in exchange, you get unlimited traffic.
IPRoyal Performance Benchmarks
We last tested IPRoyal for 2022 Proxy Market Research using a custom script. Our requests came from a server in Germany.
Dedicated Datacenter Proxy Benchmarks
We benchmarked 100 dedicated proxies in the US. We made 1,500 connection requests to each of seven high-profile websites. We also tested the proxy connection speed by running a DigitalOcean speed test.
| Avg. success rate | Avg. response time | Download speed |
| 93.78% | 1.36 s | 121.46 Mbps |
The datacenter proxies performed very well for an affordable service. They managed to reach the target over 90% of the time and had some of the lowest response time among similar services we’ve tried.
Let’s have a look at performance with individual websites:
| Success rate | Errors | Blocks | Response time | |
| AliExpress | 100% | 0% | 0% | 0.99 s |
| Amazon | 77.14% | 2.08% | 22.66% | 2.86 s |
| Booking | 100% | 0% | 0% | 2.41 s |
| Craigslist | 99.93% | 0.07% | 0.64% | 1.12 s |
| Homedepot | 98.99% | 12.25% | 1.01% | 0.85 s |
| Indeed | 80.49% | 19.51% | 0% | 1.18 s |
| Walmart | 99.94% | 0.07% | 0% | 1.30 s |
Amazon and Indeed were the only two websites to give these proxies any trouble. Most of the time, however, they connected successfully and very quickly.
Residential Proxy Benchmarks
Our primary benchmark targeted Cloudflare’s Trace tool. It connects to the nearest Cloudflare data center and doesn’t block requests, making the website a perfect target for testing residential proxy infrastructure.
The testing parameters were:
- 1 million connection requests over 18 days using the unfiltered gateway.
- 300,000 connection requests over 14 days using US, UK, DE, FR, and RU gateways.
- 50,000 connection requests over 7 days using CA and AU gateways.
We also made ~1,000 connection requests to each of 10 high-profile websites to see how the proxy server performs in real conditions.
Unique IPs
| Gateway | Unique IPs |
| Unfiltered | 232,759 (23.91%) |
| United States | 12,367 (4.38%) |
| United Kingdom | 4,792 (1.63%) |
| Germany | 4,397 (1.55%) |
| France | 6,101 (2.28%) |
| Russia | 22,477 (9.9%) |
| Canada | 1,315 (2.68%) |
| Australia | 337 (0.81%) |
IPRoyal had a respectable number of proxies in its global pool, but we found the country gateways lacking. Fewer than 5% of the requests returned a unique IPs in the US, and the Austalian gateway coudn’t muster even 1,000 proxies. Knowing that IPRoyal is among the cheaper options, and that it condones reselling, these proxies are unlikely to have a good IP reputation.
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- Comparing IPRoyal’s unfiltered gateway results.
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- Comparison of unique residential IPs in country gateways
Put into context, IPRoyal compares favorably to other affordable providers like PacketStream and Rayobyte. However, it can’t hold a candle against premium proxy vendors like Oxylabs or even mid-rangers like Smartproxy.
One more thing: note how similar IPRoyal looks in relation to PacketStream. While we can’t state anything conclusively, it looks like there might be some reselling going on.
Pool Composition
| Global | US | UK | DE | FR | RU | CA | AU |
| 95.98% | 89.34% | 96.42% | 91.13% | 95.86% | 98.33% | 99.15% | 96.35% |
Around 96% of the IPs belonged to landline or mobile internet service providers, which is a solid result and par for the course with residential proxies. Only the US had around 8% datacenter addresses; we know from previous years that IPRoyal added unused ISP proxies to this pool, so it might be the case this time around too.
Success Rate
Though IPRoyal was in the bottom half by success rate, its residential proxies still managed to do well. It beat not only Shifter, which historically had a mediocre performance, but also some premium services like GeoSurf and NetNut.
Response Time
Connection speed is an area where IPRoyal failed to shine. When connecting via random locations, its response time was the slowest out of the providers we tried. Smartproxy was twice and Oxylabs nearly thrice as fast.
| US | UK | DE | FR | RU | CA | AU | |
| IPRoyal | 3.11 s | 1.55 s | 1.70 s | 1.85 s | 1.35 s | 1.32 s | 2.50 s |
| PacketStream | 3.08 s | 1.59 s | 1.75 s | 1.74 s | 1.36 s | 1.39 s | 2.63 s |
| Rayobyte | 1.65 s | 1.77 s | 1.64 s | 2.17 s | 2.14 s | 1.20 s | 2.11 s |
| SOAX | 1.92 s | 1.68 s | 2.79 s | 2.16 s | 1.40 s | 1.56 s | 2.69 s |
| Smartproxy | 1.14 s | 0.60 s | 0.60 s | 0.66 s | 1.33 s | 1.67 s | 1.67 s |
To our surprise, IPRoyal was slowest in the US. This is unusual considering that we tested locations like Australia. It’s possible that the server might have been overloaded, though our benchmarks did run for 14 days.
Results with Popular Websites
| Success rate | Errors | Blocks | Response time | |
| AliExpress | 98.00% | 2.00% | 0% | 4.53 s |
| Amazon | 93.50% | 3.44% | 3.06% | 6.37 s |
| Bing | 98.36% | 1.64% | 0% | 4.65 s |
| Booking | 97.46% | 2.54% | 0% | 6.46 s |
| Craigslist | 85.52% | 2.93% | 11.55% | 6.91 s |
| 96.66% | 3.34% | 0% | 5.62 s | |
| 56.02% | 24.44% | 19.54% | 2.58 s | |
| 88.85% | 7.01% | 4.14% | 5.46 s | |
| Walmart | 97.15% | 2.85% | 0% | 4.98 s |
| Yahoo | 98.31% | 1.69% | 0% | 4.06 s |
| Total | 94.65% | 2.94% | 2.41% | 5.36 s |
IPRoyal’s residential proxies performed very decently, as long as we didn’t try them with the most popular websites: Amazon, Craigslist, or Google. The first two had obviously seen these IPs more than once, which should be expected given the size of the proxy pool. Google was particularly merciless, with every second request failing to connect. That said, many proxy providers block Google outright, so at least you can target it here.
How to Use IPRoyal
Registration
To start using IPRoyal, you must first fill in a registration form. It requires entering your name, surname, and phone number as personal details, and you might need to confirm the registration via your phone.
Once done, you get to enter the dashboard, where you can buy and manage access to IPRoyal’s proxy networks.
KYC
IPRoyal doesn’t require undergoing a know-your-customer process. However, it monitors traffic and may require doing so if it observes you visiting websites the system considers suspicious.
IPRoyal’s KYC prompt.
Dashboard
IPRoyal’s dashboard is divided into self-contained sections for each product. They let you buy proxies, authenticate them, and track use where possible. They even have separate order histories – almost as if you were using six different dashboards instead of one.
So, you only need to leave your tab to change the account settings – or deposit money if you choose to.
If you deposit at least $200, IPRoyal enables its reseller tools: a separate dashboard for managing sub-users and an API for doing the same tasks programmatically. The API documentation is well maintained and supports over a dozen programming languages.
IPRoyal dashboard’s main screen.
Subscription Management
IPRoyal lets you buy proxies using two methods. One is to deposit money onto the platform; the second is to create orders directly.
The difference is that the former option lets you pay with Bitcoin. Presumably, you can also use it to extend monthly subscriptions without making additional money transfers. However, you won’t be able to top up your residential traffic allowance – the best IPRoyal can do for now is send an email once it runs low.
Proxy Setup
Once you’ve bought a plan, the setup procedure depends on which proxy type you get.
For example, Royal residential proxies give you a widget with multiple options. You can choose a country, rotation type, and sticky session duration which is a text field for whatever time period you want. There are some extra options as well: selecting between several proxy formats, IP or DNS hostname. Once done, you can export up to 1,000 lines of formatted proxy addresses.
IPRoyal’s dashboard for Royal residential proxies. Zoom in, it’s big.
Usage Monitoring
The dashboard has an ability to show your remaining traffic, but only as a number: there are no visualizations whatsoever. This is quite funny knowing that the Affiliate dashboard provides visual stats for earnings and clicks. You can opt to get traffic reminders by email.
Supporting Tools
IPRoyal offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. They function like any other similar tool, letting you use proxy servers without altering your browser or operating system settings.
There’s also a proxy tester that lets you check and filter lists of proxy IPs.
Documentation
Though IPRoyal has improved, it still has issues with providing information. The APIs are reasonably well documented, and the product pages do a decent job answering main concerns. However, you’ll find very few configuration instructions, troubleshooting guides, and other helpful information that providers like Smartproxy and Bright Data have in spades.
Hands-On Support
IPRoyal answers queries 24/7 via live chat, email, and Discord. We tried contacting the support via live chat; an agent responded within a minute and competently answered as many questions as we threw at them. Color me impressed.
Kazys had some answer prompts prepared.
Conclusion
Like many other new proxy providers, IPRoyal is very much an exercise in compromise. You give up some features, encounter rough edges in user experience – and in this case, have to make do with a smaller proxy pool. In return, you pay less, hoping that the product that is there will be able to meet your needs.
Well, will it?
Once again, it depends: the residential Royal pool should be just fine for small-time use, with varying performance and IP numbers for different locations. It can’t hold a candle to the premium providers yet, but the service is still very new. And the upsides make a pretty compelling case: $3/GB, non-expiring traffic, and some of the most flexible IP rotation settings I’ve seen.
I’m afraid to think what an enterprise whale would do to the pool now, but IPRoyal’s growth is promising. So, you can surely try it for tasks of limited scale today – after all, the price is right, – just be aware of the limitations.
