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  "path": "/faceless_satine_148164446/we-tested-62541-free-proxies-from-github-only-4-actually-work-404n",
  "publishedAt": "2026-07-03T13:36:55.000Z",
  "site": "https://dev.to",
  "tags": [
    "networking",
    "showdev",
    "testing",
    "webscraping",
    "https://proxmint.com/free-proxies/",
    "Proxmint"
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  "textContent": "If you've ever grabbed a \"free proxy list\" off GitHub, you already know the feeling: you paste 10,000 IPs into your scraper, and approximately none of them connect. I wanted to know exactly _how_ bad it is, so I measured it.\n\nShort version: **of 62,541 free proxies pulled from public lists, only 2,236 (4%) were alive.** And \"alive\" is generous — it just means the TCP handshake completed once.\n\n##  How I measured it\n\nI built a liveness checker that:\n\n  1. Ingests the big public free-proxy lists on GitHub (the monosans/proxy-list-style aggregators — HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, SOCKS5).\n  2. Dedupes and re-checks **every** proxy through a controlled endpoint on a rolling **5-minute** cycle.\n  3. Records success/failure, latency, and protocol over a 7-day window.\n\n\n\nNo sampling — the full set, continuously. A proxy counts as \"alive\" onlest in the most recent check.\n\n##  The results\n\n**4% alive.** 2,236 of 62,541. That's the number at any given moment; ttly.\n\nAlive-rate by protocol:\n\nProtocol | Live now | Alive rate\n---|---|---\nHTTP | 1,474 | 6%\nSOCKS5 | 479 | 2%\nSOCKS4 | 247 | 2%\nHTTPS | 36 | 10%\n\nHTTP dominates the live pool by raw count, but every protocol is brutal. HTTPS has the \"best\" alive-rate (10%) only because so few are listed to begin with.\n\nIt gets worse when you look at stability:\n\n  * **Median latency of live proxies: ~2,900 ms.** Nearly 3 seconds per request — before your target server even responds.\n  * **Uptime across the live set: 44%.** A proxy that answers now has a con the next check. So the _usable_ pool at any instant is a fraction ofeven that 4%.\n\n\n\nPut together: you might scrape a 60k list, find ~2k that ping, and be left with a few hundred that are actually usable for more than one request — each one adding ~3s of\nlatency.\n\n##  Why free proxy lists are like this\n\n  * **They're recycled instantly.** The moment an open proxy is discoverered by everyone until it dies or gets firewalled.\n  * **No ownership = no maintenance.** Most are misconfigured servers or honeypots, not intentional services. Nobody keeps them up.\n  * **Churn is the whole game.** By the time a list is committed to GitHud. Lists that \"update daily\" are mostly re-listing corpses.\n\n\n\n##  The security part nobody mentions\n\nFree proxies aren't just unreliable — some are actively harvesting. An nd your target and sees everything not wrapped in TLS. Treat any traffic through a random free proxy as **public**. Never send credentials or anything sensitive through one.\n\n##  What this is actually good for\n\nFree proxies do have a narrow, legit use: throwaway, low-stakes, high-tolerance-for-failure tasks where you can retry infinitely and don't care about latency or getting a\nclean IP. Building a hobby scraper to learn on? Fine. Anything you depeill eat you alive.\n\n##  Data + methodology\n\nFull breakdown — alive-rate by protocol, geography, latency distributiop — is published here and refreshed continuously:\n\n👉 **[Free Proxy Statistics report](https://proxmint.com/free-proxies/\n\n_Disclosure: I run Proxmint, a paid proxy servibuilding a free proxy-liveness tool, and the numbers were bleak-worthyenough to write up. The report page is free to read and cite — raw figures on request._\n\nWhat's your experience been with free proxy lists? Curious if anyone's seen a source with a meaningfully better hit-rate.\n\n#  webscraping #proxy #opensource #data",
  "title": "We tested 62,541 free proxies from GitHub. Only 4% actually work."
}