Massive Review
Massive covers the basics well, has many residential IPs in the US and Europe, and a robust infrastructure to keep things running.
Massive isn’t a new company by any means, but it only seriously entered the proxy server market in 2024. US-based, well financed, and ambitious, the provider tries to prove that these are the residential proxies you should choose for your project.
Is the service any good? And more importantly – is it better than what you can get for a comparable price, considering that the plans here start from >$200? Let’s find out!
General Information
- Country: US
- Founded: 2018
- Proxy networks: ISP, residential
- Supporting tools: ❌
- Price range: Mid-market
- Starting price: $225
- Payment methods: Credit card, US bank account, Cash App (Stripe)
- Trial: Available
Massive is a US company founded in 2018 by Jason Grad and Brian Kennish. Its main aim was – and still is – to build a computer resource sharing platform. To that end, Massive has raised over $12M in venture capital, mostly in late 2021.
The platform’s uses have changed over the years: it was primarily used for crypto mining during the hype, and now the focus is on downloading small amounts of data from the web – in other words, proxying traffic.
The vehicle for this is Massive’s SDK, which developers can add to their software as a monetization method. It’s a standard way to source residential IPs, but Massive stands out by being very upfront about what it does. There’s even a (bit dated) article on TechCrunch covering the business model.
In other words, Massive could be considered one of the more transparent residential proxy providers, at least as far as IP sourcing SDKs go. That said, the FAQ page still lacks any example apps despite promising them over a year ago. There’s always room for improvement, we suppose.
Massive started truly productizing its proxy network in mid-2024. In that sense, the provider is still new to the market. This is evident when looking at the website, which mashes together the proxy service, SDK, and even crypto mining, leading to an experience that’s not always coherent.
For the time being, it seems like Massive will focus on establishing itself as a web data infrastructure provider. Besides the main product – residential proxy network – the company is also testing the waters with ISP proxies, and there are traces of a search engine API in the documentation.
Currently, Massive’s weakest side is probably marketing. But if it perseveres, the company has the building blocks to become a force in the industry.
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Massive Residential Proxies
Below is a summary of Massive’s residential proxy network. The other tabs provide detailed information about various aspects of the service.
- Massive’s residential proxy network is average in size, covers most countries around the world (focusing on the US & Europe), and offers precise targeting options: up to the city, ZIP code, and even device level, but no ASN.
- There are few limitations other than traffic, and the provider supports flexible rotation settings. On the other hand, you won’t get UDP access or IP whitelisting functionality.
- The rates are in line with other mid-market alternatives, but Massive’s plans lack flexibility and start from hundreds of dollars.
- The infrastructure works very well, with a success rate of over 99.8% and a response time of less than 1 second.
- Advertised pool size: 1 million
- Locations: 195+ countries
- Targeting options: Random, country, state, city, ZIP code, device
Massive is modest in advertising its proxy network, which may lead to misleading conclusions if you take marketing claims at face value. For example, SOAX boasts 155 million residential proxies, or 155 times more.
If you dig through Massive’s documentation, you’ll find much more useful numbers: 600k daily active and 300k concurrent IPs. This translates to way more than a million proxies per month.
The network covers most countries around the world. You get precise filtering options, with only ASN targeting missing. To compensate, the provider allows targeting specific devices: computers and laptops, phones, and even TVs. This feature isn’t something we encounter often.
Massive’s pool size & composition (January 2025)
* IP2Location database, Usage type data point (ISP, ISP/MOB, MOB IPs)
Comparison with other providers
Our benchmarks reveal that Massive stands somewhere in the middle of the pack. The network included many IPs in desirable locations like the US and Europe, and relatively few in India.
We found it interesting that the global pool had few to no proxies in Japan, China, or Korea, but we didn’t check the individual endpoints to verify if the same applied to them.
The pool was indeed residential, with very few IPs belonging to other usage types (such as commercial, educational institutions, or data centers).
- Rotation: Every request, 1-60 mins
- Traffic: Plan based
- Concurrency: Unlimited threads & ports
- Connection method: Gateway address
- Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5
- Authentication: Credentials
- Format: USERNAME-country-US-subdivision-CA-city-San%20Francisco-device-common-session-350260-sessionttl-60:[email protected]:65534
You access Massive’s residential proxies through a backconnect gateway server. It’s possible to filter the pool and establish sessions by modifying the username. Whitelisted IP authentication isn’t supported.
The proxies rotate with every connection request by default. A sticky session maintains the same IP for up to 15 minutes, or you can specify any interval between 1 and 60 minutes. An IP changes once a request fails (or if you reach the request limit for that node), but Massive has a parameter to override this behavior.
You can connect to Massive using HTTP, HTTPS if your company imposes strict security requirements, and there’s SOCKS5. The latter option only accepts TCP traffic for now. As such, all ports other than 80 and 443 are blocked.
It’s also interesting that Massive blocks any content it deems “not family friendly”. There’s no list or even examples given. We tried opening Pornhub (for science, of course) and, lo and behold – the provider’s custom Disallowed Content error appeared.
- Model: Subscription
- Format: Traffic
- Modifiers: –
- Starting price: $225 for 30 GB ($7.5/GB)
- Trial: 100 MB or 2 GB for 3 days, 3-day refund
Massive uses a subscription-based pricing model for its residential proxies. A plan lasts for a month, with an option to renew it automatically. We didn’t find how to top up traffic without resubscribing to the full plan.
Compared to practically all competitors, even premium services like Bright Data and Oxylabs, Massive has a very steep entry price. In addition, there’s no possibility to pay as you go. To compensate, the provider offers two trial options; the better one requires talking to a partnership manager (or a data nerd in Massive’s parlance).
How do the rates fare against other providers? Pound for pound, Massive comes out cheaper than most premium proxy vendors and rather compares with mid-market options like Smartproxy or IPRoyal.
Massive’s infrastructure performance (January 2025)
- Target: Nearest server of a global CDN (<10 KB page size)
- Our server locations: DE for Global & European pools, US for American & Brazil pools, Singapore for Indian & Australian pools
Comparison with other providers
We’d be hard pressed to say anything negative about Massive’s residential proxy infrastructure. We were able to establish a connection the majority of the time, and the proxies responded fast. We experienced some issues with the US proxies the first few days; but even accounting for them, the average success rate remained over 99%.
How to Use Massive
Registration
The registration procedure is simple but also deceptively intimidating. Why? The first step involves choosing a subscription plan. This may put off some users, even if they notice the colorful heading stating that a trial is available with no upfront cost.
But once you get past this step, all you’ll need to do is enter a full name, email address, and password. After an email confirmation, Massive will let you into the dashboard and automatically activate the 100 MB trial.
As far as we know, no KYC process is required. However, the provider maintains a large list of restricted domains that’s not available publicly. Enabling any of the targets in the list will require identity verification.
What’s strange is that Massive doesn’t insist on entering payment details or even locking you into the chosen plan during the trial period. Sure, the dashboard will show a box asking to complete the purchase. But once you click on it, you’ll be able to choose from any of Massive’s plans. Why bother, then?
Dashboard
Massive has a dashboard for managing subscriptions, interacting with its products, tracking usage, and getting help.
The dashboard is simple and easy to understand. In early 2025, it focused completely on the residential proxy network, with no traces of Massive’s ISP proxy product.
The simplicity is great, but it also misses some important features. For one, the only available display language is English. In addition, there’s no two-factor authentication, which has become an industry standard by now, and no way to share access with other users. Finally, the dashboard is missing settings for managing usage alerts.
The subscription management tools here are spread throughout several pages. The dashboard’s main page shows how much time the plan has remaining. The Profile page lets you add billing details. And the Invoices page does exactly what its name suggests.
Massive’s dashboard lacks wallet functionality, so any update to the subscription will require a separate transaction.
The provider offers a proxy setup widget that lies in a tab called Quickstart. It lets you choose the connection protocol, rotation type, location filters, and proxy device. It then generates a cURL code snippet.
Massive creates the proxy username and password automatically. You can generate (not enter) a new password in the Profile page, while the username can’t be modified. We’re also not sure how sub-users work in the current dashboard setup.
There’s more room for improvement. We’d love to see code examples for more languages, and the widget is sorely missing a proxy list generator for use with sticky sessions. Right now, you have to add session parameters by hand.
Massive’s dashboard provides detailed usage statistics powered by Metabase. You get a number of data points to work with, such as requests made, success rate, traffic spent, and associated costs.
The Detailed Analysis tab allows segmenting the data by location and/or domain and adds further data points, namely error codes. The third view, Account Stats, shows all of the above segmented by sub-user.
You can freely choose a time frame, whether it’s last minute, week, or quarter. The caveat is that the current day is always taken as the point of reference (previous week, 30 days, etc.) All the views can be exported in multiple formats, including CSV & JSON.
The country data takes forever to load, but overall, Massive has done a great job with usage tracking. If there’s anything missing, that would be the network status.
API Access
Massive offers a management API for resellers. To get a token, you’ll need to contact support. The API’s functionality includes creating and updating accounts, allocating traffic, and receiving usage information.
In addition, Massive has a reporting API available to all users. It’s somewhat convoluted, as you basically have to interact wit a third party (Metabase), with its own credentials and conventions. Still, this is much better than no API access at all.
Documentation
Massive has a documentation hub that covers the ins and outs of the residential proxy network: geo-targeting, sessions, and so on. It also includes a quickstart guide and several integration instructions with popular web scraping libraries.
In addition, the documentation links to a knowledge base, which is supposed to answer billing-related and other general queries. In reality, it was probably made for Massive’s AI chatbot (which we’ll cover in a sec).
Hands-On Support
So, how is Massive’s support? There are three ways to get help: through a chatbot, email, or the ticketing system.
The chatbot is mostly what you’d expect it to be. Maria is able to answer a range of questions, so long as the data is available in its knowledge base. So for example, we were able to learn about the size of the proxy pool or how to contact human support.
However, Maria wasn’t able to tell us the support’s working hours, how to integrate the proxies with Multilogin, or what the pool size in Morocco is. On the bright side, the knowledge base can always be expanded, and Maria didn’t try to hallucinate its way through topics it wasn’t trained on.
The ticketing system was designed for bug reports and getting access to blocked domains. It asks what went wrong and which software you used. When we tried this avenue, a response came in around an hour during daytime in Europe. The answer was curt but helpful.
Email, then, is for everything else. Or maybe nothing: after a day of waiting for a reply, we just shrugged and moved on. Massive told us there had been a bug in their email configuration and that they usually reply (significantly faster).
Conclusion
Massive has a lot to work with: a decently large – and self-sourced – residential proxy pool, strong infrastructure performance, and competent management tools.
At the same time, some aspects of the service are still underdeveloped, and the provider loses out in terms of variety compared to the market leaders.
Overall, Massive is a good choice for residential proxies with the potential to become great.
Massive Alternatives
SOAX offers similar features and rates. You lose out on device targeting but get to filter by ASN, and there are more proxy types to choose from.
Smartproxy is the provider to beat in the mid-market segment where Massive currently stands. It has a significantly bigger pool and more flexible prices.
Dataimpulse can be a good option if you find Massive too expensive – the provider also sources proxies in-house and offers similar functionality.
Recommended for:
Businesses looking for a competent residential proxy network.
