What 9Proxy actually sells, and why people like it
9Proxy arrived in 2023 with a billing model that most residential providers do not offer: you buy IP credits rather than gigabytes. A credit is deducted when you forward an IP to a local port, and from that moment you can push as much traffic through it as you like until the IP naturally drops — typically some hours, sometimes close to a day, because the peer behind it is a real household connection. Unused credits sit in your balance rather than burning down on a clock.
The delivery mechanism is equally distinctive. The IP-based product runs through a desktop application for Windows, macOS and Linux. You browse a list of available IPs, filter by location, forward the ones you want to ports on 127.0.0.1, and point your browser, antidetect profile or tool at localhost. It is a proxy manager and a proxy network in one package, which is why the product has landed so firmly with multi-account operators, antidetect browser users and social media teams who work from one machine.
9Proxy has since added a gigabyte-billed line with a conventional gateway, rotating and sticky sessions, and IP-whitelist or user-pass authentication — so the two models now sit side by side. It is also unusually accessible on payments, with crypto and local rails in markets where card payments are awkward. None of that is a weakness to argue against; it is a coherent product with a real audience.
- Pay-per-IP with unlimited bandwidth on each IP — strong when you push a lot of data through few IPs
- IP credits that decrement on use rather than expiring on a monthly cycle
- A desktop client that doubles as a proxy manager, well suited to antidetect browser workflows
- Low entry cost and payment methods that work outside the card-and-PayPal world
- A gigabyte-billed option added alongside the original per-IP product
Per-IP vs per-GB proxy pricing: the math
This is the decision, and it is a calculation rather than an opinion. Take what you pay for one IP and divide it by the gigabytes you genuinely push through that IP before it dies. That is your effective per-GB rate. Compare it with a straight per-GB rate and you have your answer.
Workloads that consume a lot of data on a small number of long-lived IPs — video, media-heavy sessions, sustained account operation, anything where one identity stays live for hours — come out well under per-IP billing. Workloads that touch many distinct IPs while transferring very little each are the opposite case: a SERP check, a price poll, an ad verification hit or a stock check might move a few hundred kilobytes, and buying a whole IP credit for that is expensive per unit of useful work. Rotating scrapers sit squarely in that second category, which is why 9Proxy itself built a gigabyte-billed line for it.
Nefo only has the second model. Bandwidth is the only meter: credentials are free to generate, you can create as many as you want, and nothing is deducted until bytes move. If your traffic profile is many IPs and small payloads, that removes the per-IP floor entirely.
Nefo needs no client: it is a plain proxy gateway
The practical difference most people notice when they move a workload is the absence of an application. Nefo issues host, port, username and password. That string goes into curl, requests, Scrapy, Playwright, a Docker container, a cron job on a VPS, a router, or an antidetect browser profile — the same way any standard proxy does. There is no desktop process to keep running, no local port map to maintain, and no dependency on the machine you happened to install the client on.
That matters most for headless and distributed work. If your scrapers run on servers rather than a desktop, a client-based proxy manager is an awkward fit: you either keep a machine awake to host it, or you engineer around it. A gateway endpoint scales horizontally without any of that, because concurrency is just more connections to the same host.
Targeting and session control are set in the credential itself rather than by picking IPs from a list. You choose the country, narrow to state or region and city in most countries, or pin an ASN to sit on a specific carrier or ISP network, then decide whether the credential rotates on every request or holds one IP for a fixed period.
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, with username/password or IP allowlist authentication
- 227 countries; state or region and city targeting in most of them
- ASN/ISP targeting to pin traffic to a named network operator inside a country
- Rotating sessions with a new IP per request, or sticky sessions from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Usage visible per credential in the dashboard, with CSV export
Prepaid bandwidth that does not expire
Nefo sells prepaid volume starting at 5GB, and flexible plans are non-expiring — the balance stays in the account until traffic consumes it. There is no monthly subscription to keep alive and no renewal date to plan around, which suits irregular work: a seasonal price-monitoring run, an occasional market check, a one-off research project.
This is worth checking against whatever you hold at 9Proxy before you decide anything. Their IP credits are non-expiring by design; their gigabyte balances carry a validity window that depends on the plan. Read the terms on the specific plan you bought rather than assuming symmetry between the two products.
If part of your work needs carrier mobile IPs rather than residential, Nefo runs that as a separate line: 4G/5G ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration from hours to 30 days, one live rotating mobile IP per port, changed on demand, with US state and carrier targeting. It is billed by time rather than by gigabyte, because the port is rented for a term.
How to switch from 9Proxy to Nefo
The move is mostly a change in how you think about identity. Under the 9Proxy client an identity is an IP you have forwarded to a port; under Nefo an identity is a credential with a sticky session attached. One antidetect profile maps to one sticky credential, and the session length you choose replaces the IP's natural lifetime as the thing that bounds it.
For code, replace localhost:port with the gateway host and port and add the username and password. Anything that already speaks HTTP proxy or SOCKS5 needs no other change. For rotating work, generate a rotating credential and drop the retry-on-dead-IP logic you were carrying — a fresh IP arrives on the next request rather than needing to be re-forwarded.
Start with the 5GB minimum on the sites you actually target and measure two things: success rate on your real endpoints, and gigabytes consumed per completed task. The second number is what tells you whether per-GB billing beats per-IP for your specific traffic, and it is cheap to find out. There is no contract on either side of the comparison, so running both accounts in parallel for a fortnight is a reasonable way to decide.
Who should stay with 9Proxy
Stay if your workflow is built around the desktop client and you value it. Operators running dozens of antidetect profiles on one machine get genuine ergonomic value from picking IPs visually, testing them before use, and forwarding them to fixed local ports. Rebuilding that around a gateway is work, and the payoff is only there if you need it.
Stay if you push heavy data through few IPs. Unlimited bandwidth on a single IP is a real structural advantage, and no per-GB provider can beat it on a workload that transfers many gigabytes through one long-held connection. The maths simply favours them there.
Switch, or add Nefo alongside, if your traffic is many IPs with small payloads, if your jobs run headless on servers rather than a desktop, if you need ASN-level or city-level targeting, if you want a country list in the high hundreds rather than the dozens, or if you want to hold one IP for a defined 24-hour window rather than for however long a residential peer happens to stay online. Those are different problems, and they are the ones a metered gateway is built for.
Frequently asked questions
It is a good fit if your traffic is many IPs with small payloads, runs on servers, or needs ASN or city targeting. Nefo is a gateway billed only by the gigabyte, with 227 countries and sticky sessions up to 24 hours. 9Proxy stays stronger for heavy data through a few long-lived IPs.
It depends on how much data each IP carries. Divide the cost of one IP credit by the gigabytes you move through it before it drops; that is your effective per-GB rate. Many IPs with tiny payloads, such as SERP checks or price polls, usually favor per-GB. Heavy transfers through few IPs favor per-IP.
No. You get a host, port, username and password that work in curl, Python requests, Scrapy, Playwright, a Docker container, a VPS cron job or an antidetect browser profile. There is no desktop client and no local port forwarding, so no machine has to stay running.
Use a sticky credential. Instead of binding an IP to a local port, create one credential per profile or task and set its sticky duration from 1 minute to 24 hours. You choose the session length instead of inheriting the lifetime of a residential peer.
Yes. Nefo is prepaid from 5 GB ($4.50, or $0.90/GB) with no subscription or contract, so you can run real jobs on both for a couple of weeks. Compare success rate and cost per completed task. Unused 9Proxy IP credits do not expire, so nothing is lost while you test.
Yes to both. Pair a country with an ASN to route through a named network operator, and target state and city in most countries. Mobile is a separate product: a 4G/5G port on a real carrier modem rented from hours to 30 days. See residential proxies for details.