What PIA S5 Proxy is built for
PIA S5 Proxy is unusual among residential providers because its flagship product is not metered in gigabytes. You buy a quantity of individual residential IPs, browse the pool in a desktop proxy manager, filter it down by country, state, city, postcode or ISP, and bind the IPs you like to local ports on your own machine. Traffic through a bound IP is not counted against a data allowance. That design is inherited fairly directly from the 911 S5 lineage, and it is the reason PIA S5 became a default recommendation in the antidetect-browser community rather than the scraping community.
That model suits a specific job very well: running many separate accounts, each of which needs its own stable, plausible consumer IP, in a tool such as AdsPower, Multilogin, Dolphin Anty, GoLogin, Octo Browser or BitBrowser. Those profiles sit idle most of the time and move very little data, so paying per gigabyte would be poor value while paying per identity is not. PIA S5 also offered per-GB residential and static ISP products drawn from the same pool, but the pay-per-IP SOCKS5 product is what the brand is known for.
Independent reviews have generally credited it with a low cost of entry, a familiar and capable client, strong depth in some regions that larger providers cover thinly, and IP balances that did not expire. The recurring criticisms were about raw infrastructure performance sitting behind the top tier, thinner location coverage on the per-GB side than the headline pool size suggests, weak documentation, and support that ran to business hours with slow email turnaround.
- Pay-per-IP SOCKS5 as the flagship, not per-GB metering
- Desktop proxy manager for Windows, macOS and Linux with local port binding
- Filtering down to country, state, city, postcode and ISP
- Native fit with antidetect browsers and multi-account tooling
- Per-GB residential and static ISP products alongside the S5 product
Why people look for a PIA S5 Proxy alternative
The honest reason most readers land on this page is not a feature comparison. In late January 2026, Google's Threat Intelligence Group publicly announced a coordinated disruption of the IPIDEA residential proxy network, carried out with Cloudflare, Spur and Lumen's Black Lotus Labs, including a court order removing infrastructure domains. It was widely reported by security press at the time. PIA S5 has been publicly associated with that wider ecosystem in the coverage of the action.
We are not asserting anything about PIA S5's own conduct, and the announced action named IPIDEA infrastructure rather than making findings about PIA S5 as a company. The practical consequence for buyers is what matters here: the original storefront and client became unreachable, some customers reported being unable to get at balances they had already paid for, and a site has since appeared presenting itself as a continuation of the network run by part of the original team, with checkout narrowed to cryptocurrency. Whether that continuation is the same operation is not something we can verify, and you should not take our word for the current state of the brand — check it yourself before sending money.
The general lesson is worth separating from the specific brand. Any prepaid balance, whether it is denominated in IPs or gigabytes, is a claim on a supplier's continued operation. It is reasonable to ask a provider where its pool comes from, whether the checkout supports a payment method with a chargeback path, and whether the business has a real registered address behind it.
Pay per IP vs pay per gigabyte
This is the whole comparison in one sentence, and it decides whether switching makes sense for you. PIA S5 charges for identities and lets traffic run; Nefo charges for traffic and lets you create identities for free. Neither is a better design in the abstract — they price for different shapes of work.
Under Nefo's model, generating credentials costs nothing. You can create as many distinct proxy users as your workflow needs, each pinned to its own country, region, city or ASN, and each configured as rotating or sticky. Nothing is consumed until bytes move. A workflow with a hundred mostly-idle sessions therefore costs close to nothing until those sessions do something, and a workflow that streams video through a proxy for hours will cost meaningfully more than a flat per-IP fee would.
- Per-IP billing tends to win when: many long-lived identities, unpredictable or heavy traffic per identity, sessions that idle for weeks
- Per-GB billing tends to win when: request-heavy but byte-light work, spiky or seasonal volume, short campaigns, and cases where you want to add identities without adding cost
- Per-GB billing also removes the need to re-buy an IP when a particular exit stops working, since you are not holding inventory
How Nefo residential proxies work
Access is prepaid bandwidth. Plans start at 5GB, and flexible plans are non-expiring — the balance sits in the account until it is consumed rather than resetting monthly. Credentials are generated in the dashboard and each one carries its own protocol, location and session settings, so you configure targeting once per credential rather than per request if you prefer not to use parameters.
Every credential can be issued for HTTP, HTTPS or SOCKS5, all with username and password authentication, which means anything that accepted a PIA S5 SOCKS5 endpoint will accept a Nefo one. Targeting covers 227 countries and territories; the United States is addressable down to state and city; several other countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and France are addressable to region and city; and you can pin a credential to a specific ASN or ISP within a country when the network the traffic appears to come from matters.
Sessions come in two shapes. Rotating gives a new IP on each request, which is what you want for distributed collection. Sticky holds the same IP for a configurable period from one minute up to twenty-four hours, which is a longer ceiling than PIA S5's sticky sessions typically offered and is usually enough for a login, a multi-step flow or a full working session on one account. Separately, Nefo sells 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, rented by duration rather than by gigabyte — one live carrier IP per port, changeable on demand — which is structurally closer to renting an identity by time than anything in the residential product.
- Prepaid from 5GB, non-expiring on flexible plans, top up at any point
- HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5, username/password auth on every credential
- 227 countries and territories; US state and city; ASN/ISP targeting within a country
- Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to 24 hours
- Credential generation is free — only traffic draws down the balance
- 4G/5G mobile ports on real carrier modems, priced per day, not per GB
How to migrate a multi-account setup from PIA S5
The mechanical part is short. There is no client to install, so the PIA S5 proxy manager has no equivalent step — you generate credentials in the Nefo dashboard and paste host, port, username and password into the same proxy field of the same antidetect browser or automation tool. One profile maps to one sticky credential with the location you want and a session length that covers how long you work in that profile.
The part that needs thought is sizing, because you are switching from counting identities to counting bytes and most people have no prior figure for the second. The practical method is to run one representative profile through a single credential for a normal working session and read the consumed bandwidth in the dashboard, then multiply by profiles and sessions per month. Ordinary account-management browsing, with images loading and no video, tends to be modest; anything involving media playback or file transfer is where the arithmetic turns against per-GB pricing. Buying 5GB to measure before committing to a volume tier costs $4.50 and removes the guesswork.
One expectation to reset: you are no longer holding a fixed inventory of IPs that you have inspected and chosen from a list. You specify what an exit should look like — country, city, ASN, session length — and the network supplies one. For most account work that is equivalent or better, because a failed exit is replaced by reconnecting rather than by buying a replacement. If your process genuinely depends on hand-picking and hoarding specific addresses from a browsable pool, that is a real difference and it is worth being clear with yourself about it before you move.
When to stay with PIA S5 Proxy
If the pay-per-IP economics are what make your operation viable — a large number of persistent identities, each carrying real traffic volume, with no data ceiling on any of them — then a per-gigabyte provider is very likely to be more expensive, and no amount of feature comparison changes that. The same applies if your team's process is built around the desktop client itself: the pool browser, the saved favourites, the port bindings mapped into local tooling. Nefo has no equivalent application and does not pretend to.
Two other cases may point away from us. If you need static ISP addresses held for weeks, Nefo sells them in 24 countries, from $1.76 for 7 days to $39.17 for 360 days, dedicated, with a 100 GB per IP per 30 days fair-use limit. IP Vault is the option if you want to keep a residential or mobile IP. And if you specifically need cryptocurrency-only, low-friction purchasing as a requirement rather than a preference, evaluate that against what each provider currently offers.
Nefo is the better fit when your traffic is byte-light relative to the number of identities you need, when you want long sticky sessions with precise geographic or ASN targeting, when volume is uneven enough that a non-expiring balance beats a monthly subscription, or when the supplier's stability and legal footing has become part of the decision rather than an afterthought. Starting at 5GB, testing that against your own workload is a cheaper way to answer the question than any comparison table.
Frequently asked questions
For the proxy connection, yes: Nefo issues standard SOCKS5, HTTP and HTTPS endpoints, so antidetect browsers and scrapers that took a PIA S5 endpoint take a Nefo one. The desktop application itself has no equivalent. There is no manager to browse the pool or bind IPs to local ports; you generate proxies in the dashboard.
Yes. A 24-hour dedicated residential IP costs $0.09 per IP with unlimited bandwidth, 222 countries and a choice of country, state, city or ISP. It cannot be extended, and you get a refund if it does not work in the first 10 minutes.
Measure it. Buy 5 GB, run one representative profile through a normal session, and read the usage in the dashboard. Multiply by profiles and sessions per month. Text and image browsing is light; video, downloads and uploads move the number. Bandwidth never expires, so over-buying is not lost.
Within a limit. Sticky sessions hold one IP from 1 minute up to 24 hours. For longer identities, static residential ISP IPs are dedicated for 7 to 360 days in 24 countries, and IP Vault keeps residential IPs that work.
Yes. Static residential ISP IPs start at $1.76 for 7 days and $3.51 for 30 days, with dedicated HTTP(S) and SOCKS5 and a 100 GB per IP per 30 days fair-use limit. Coverage is 24 countries at the same price everywhere, with 8% off for 10+ IPs.
You specify city, state, country and ISP/ASN in the proxy username rather than pick from a visible list. The network returns a matching exit on connection. The catalogue covers 22,417 cities and 14,252 ISPs/ASNs across 227 countries and territories.