What happened to GeoSurf
GeoSurf, run by the Israeli company BI Science, ceased selling proxy services on 20 December 2023. The closure was the outcome of a long-running patent dispute with Luminati Networks, now trading as Bright Data; the settlement terms required the proxy business to be wound down, and GeoSurf's customers were directed to Bright Data. New registrations were closed ahead of the shutdown date and existing customers were asked to spend remaining traffic before it.
If you are searching for a GeoSurf alternative, you are almost certainly in one of three situations: you were migrated to Bright Data and want to price that decision against something else, you inherited a script or an SOP that still names GeoSurf endpoints, or you found an old review and did not realise the brand had gone. This page is written for all three, and it deliberately avoids quoting GeoSurf pricing or pool figures — those belong to a service that no longer sells.
What GeoSurf did well
GeoSurf deserves a fair description rather than a competitive caricature. It began as a browser toolbar in 2011 and its defining product stayed close to that origin: a Chrome and Firefox extension that let a non-technical user pick a city, set a rotation interval, clear cookies and cache, and immediately see a page or an advertisement as a local would see it. Very few proxy vendors ever built that, and for ad verification, brand protection and localisation QA it was the right shape of tool. An ad ops analyst could be productive on it without touching a proxy string.
The second thing GeoSurf did well was granularity and account management. It marketed city-level targeting across a very wide list of locations, alongside ASN and ISP selection, and it sold through a sales team with an assigned contact rather than a signup form. Agencies and large brands often prefer that: a named human, an invoice, a contract, and someone to escalate to.
- Browser-extension geo switching for non-technical users
- Ad verification, ad-fraud and brand-protection workflows
- City-level and ISP/ASN targeting for localisation testing
- Sales-led onboarding with a named account contact
- A long operating history and recognisable enterprise customers
GeoSurf vs Nefo: sales-led vs self-serve
GeoSurf was a sales-led, subscription-oriented enterprise vendor. You spoke to someone before you had an account, you committed to a monthly traffic allowance, and unused traffic did not carry forward indefinitely. That is a reasonable model when proxy spend is a line item in an annual media budget and consumption is steady month to month.
Nefo is built on the opposite assumptions. You buy prepaid bandwidth, starting at 5GB, without a call. Flexible plans are non-expiring, so bandwidth sits in the account until traffic actually passes through it — which matters if your work is lumpy, such as a quarterly price study or an ad check that runs for two weeks before a campaign launch. Generating credentials is free; only traffic consumes anything, so you can create separate credentials per project, per country or per developer without a cost per seat.
The trade is honest in both directions. You do not get a dedicated account manager negotiating a bespoke contract, and you do not get an ad verification product wrapped around the network. You get the network, the targeting, and a dashboard.
What Nefo provides: targeting, protocols and sessions
The residential network covers 227 countries. Most countries are targetable down to state or region and city. You can also pin a credential to a specific ASN or ISP within a country, which is the mechanism most people reach for when they need traffic to come from a particular cable, fibre or mobile carrier — the same reason GeoSurf users cared about ISP selection for ad delivery checks.
Credentials can be issued for HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, authenticated by username and password or by IP allowlist. Sessions are either rotating, giving a new IP per request for wide distributed collection, or sticky, holding the same IP anywhere from one minute to twenty-four hours for logins, carts and other multi-step flows.
Separately, Nefo sells 4G and 5G mobile proxies as ports on real carrier modems — one live mobile IP per port, changeable on demand, with US state and carrier targeting. Those are rented by duration rather than by the gigabyte, which suits work where the connection needs to stay open rather than be metered.
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 with username/password or IP allowlist auth
- 227 countries; state, city and ASN/ISP targeting in most countries
- Rotating per-request IPs or sticky sessions from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Prepaid from 5GB, non-expiring on flexible plans, free credential generation
- 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration, with carrier targeting
How to move a GeoSurf workflow to Nefo
If you still have documentation or code written against GeoSurf, the migration work is mostly mechanical. Proxy access is the same primitive everywhere: a host, a port, and credentials. What changes is how geography and session behaviour are expressed, because each vendor encodes those differently.
Two habits are worth revisiting rather than translating literally. First, anything that was toolbar-driven has no direct equivalent here — a human clicking through localised pages will need a proxy-aware browser or an anti-detect browser configured with a Nefo credential, rather than an extension that does it in place. Second, if your GeoSurf usage was sized to a monthly allowance you had to burn, re-measure it. Under a non-expiring prepaid model there is no incentive to spend to the cap, and teams routinely find their real consumption is well below what they were committed to.
- Swap the gateway host, port and credentials in your proxy configuration
- Re-express country, state, city and ASN targeting in Nefo credential settings
- Decide rotating versus sticky per job, and set sticky duration explicitly
- Replace toolbar-based manual checking with a proxy-capable or anti-detect browser
- Buy a small amount first and measure real consumption before sizing up
Who should choose Nefo, Bright Data or an ad verification vendor
If your requirement is a packaged ad verification or brand-protection product — dashboards of creatives, fraud scoring, reporting built for a media team — a proxy network alone will not replace it, and you should be shopping for an ad verification vendor or an enterprise data platform rather than a bandwidth provider. The same applies if you need a managed scraping API, a signed enterprise agreement, procurement paperwork and a named account team. Bright Data, where GeoSurf customers were routed, is a reasonable fit for that profile and is honest to name as such.
Nefo suits the other profile: engineers and analysts who want self-serve proxy access, precise geographic and ASN targeting, SOCKS5 as a first-class option, and billing that does not punish irregular usage. If the part of GeoSurf you actually depended on was the IP layer rather than the software layered on top, that translates cleanly. If it was the software, be clear-eyed about that before you switch.
As with any proxy network, use is limited to lawful data work within the terms of the sites you access — price and availability monitoring, ad verification, localised SEO checks, market research and brand protection are all standard; abuse is not, and accounts that breach the acceptable use policy are suspended.
Frequently asked questions
No. GeoSurf stopped selling proxy services on 20 December 2023 and closed new registrations before that date. Any review, coupon or pricing page for GeoSurf now describes a service you cannot buy. Its customers were directed to Bright Data at the shutdown.
It followed a long-running patent dispute between GeoSurf's parent, BI Science, and Luminati Networks, now Bright Data. The settlement ended the proxy service and moved customers to Bright Data. A later challenge to that arrangement was unsuccessful.
Nefo targets 227 countries. Most countries go down to state or region and city. You can also pin a credential to an ASN or ISP within a country. See residential proxies for the full targeting list.
No, and that is the clearest gap. Nefo issues HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 credentials for a browser, anti-detect browser, scraper or any proxy-capable tool. For manual localized checks, point a proxy-capable browser at a sticky credential, which needs one extra configuration step.
No. GeoSurf required a sales conversation before activation. Nefo is self-serve: buy prepaid bandwidth from 5 GB, generate credentials free, top up when needed. Flexible plans do not expire. Custom volume pricing exists but is optional, not the entry path.
Nefo sells 4G and 5G mobile proxies as ports on real carrier modems: one live mobile IP per port, changeable on demand, with US state and carrier targeting. They are rented by duration, from hours to 30 days, not metered per GB. See mobile proxies.