SOAX alternative: prepaid residential and mobile proxies, no monthly cycle

What SOAX offers beyond proxies

SOAX is a UK-incorporated company that started around 2019 and has steadily widened its product line since. It sells residential, mobile, US ISP and datacenter proxies, and on top of those it has built scraper APIs, a Web Data API and an unblocking layer — all drawing on a single account balance. That bundling is the point: a team can start with raw proxies, move to a managed scraper for the sites that fight back, and never leave the same dashboard or invoice.

The other thing SOAX is genuinely known for is governance. Identity verification is a condition of access to the paid platform, handled through a third-party KYC provider, and the company publishes ethical guidelines and a defined set of permitted use cases. Their pool is described as consent-based, with contributors knowingly sharing bandwidth. If your legal or procurement team asks who you buy traffic from and how it was sourced, SOAX has a documented answer, which is a real advantage in regulated industries.

Targeting is the third strength. SOAX has long been cited for granular filtering — country, region and city, plus ASN and carrier — and reviewers consistently rate its support responsiveness well. None of this is marketing gloss; it is why SOAX sits where it does in the market.

• Residential, mobile, US ISP and datacenter proxies under one account
• Scraper APIs, Web Data API and unblocking built on the same balance
• Formal KYC before paid access, with published ethics and use-case policy
• Granular geo and ASN targeting with a good support reputation

Where SOAX and Nefo overlap

If you strip away the scraping tooling and compare the proxy layer alone, the technical gap is narrower than the positioning implies. Both cover 195 or more countries. Both let you pin traffic to a specific ASN or ISP inside a country rather than accepting whatever the pool hands you. Both support rotating and sticky behaviour, and both authenticate credentials with a username and password rather than requiring an allowlist of your own IPs.

Nefo adds SOCKS5 alongside HTTP and HTTPS on every credential, so a client that speaks SOCKS5 natively does not need an intermediate layer. Sticky sessions are configurable from one minute up to roughly 24 hours per credential, which covers login flows, multi-step checkouts and anything that breaks when the exit IP moves mid-session. Rotating credentials take a new IP per request for wide, distributed collection.

The practical consequence is that a SOAX user evaluating Nefo is usually not evaluating a capability downgrade on the proxy side. They are evaluating a different commercial shape, and a much smaller product surface around it.

• 227 countries and territories on both sides
• US targeting down to state and city; region and city in selected other countries
• ASN / ISP targeting paired with a country
• Rotating per request, or sticky from 1 minute to about 24 hours
• HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 with username and password authentication

SOAX monthly plans vs prepaid bandwidth

SOAX is subscription-oriented. You pick a plan tier, the allowance is attached to a billing cycle, and better unit rates arrive by moving up tiers. A pay-as-you-go route exists, but the centre of gravity is the monthly plan, and the entry point is set for teams with steady, predictable consumption. That works well when your burn rate is stable and you can size a tier against it. It works badly when usage is spiky, seasonal, or still being discovered.

Nefo inverts that. Bandwidth is prepaid in packages starting at 5GB, and flexible plans are non-expiring — the balance sits in the account until traffic actually consumes it. There is no monthly cycle to size against and nothing to forfeit in a quiet month. Generating credentials is free, so you can create as many separate credentials as you have projects, regions or clients without any of them costing anything until traffic flows.

This is the whole trade in a sentence: SOAX asks for a commitment and gives you a platform in return. Nefo asks for no commitment and gives you a proxy network. Which one is correct depends entirely on whether you need the platform.

• Prepaid from 5GB, topped up whenever you want
• Flexible plans are non-expiring — unused balance is not lost to a renewal date
• Per-GB rate falls with package size, without a subscription tier
• Credential generation is free; only traffic through a credential draws down bandwidth
• Usage visible in the dashboard, exportable to CSV

Mobile proxies: per GB vs per port

SOAX sells mobile traffic the same way it sells residential traffic — metered by gigabyte out of your account balance. That suits scraping and verification work where you care about the mobile ASN but not about which specific handset you exit through.

Nefo sells mobile as a port on a real carrier modem, rented by duration, from hours up to 30 days, rather than by gigabyte. One live rotating 4G or 5G IP sits on that port; you keep it or change it on demand, and you can target by US state and by carrier. Tiers differ by bandwidth ceiling and country coverage rather than by data allowance.

If your mobile workload is bandwidth-heavy but occasional, per-GB metering is usually cheaper. If it is long-running and needs a stable, controllable carrier IP held for as long as you need, a port priced by time is easier to reason about and does not get more expensive the more you use it.

When to stay with SOAX

Do not switch if the scraping layer is what you are actually paying for. Nefo sells raw proxy access across residential, mobile, datacenter and static IP products, but it is still not a managed scraping platform. There is no scraper API and no managed unblocker. If your pipeline calls SOAX's Web Data API or leans on their unblocking to reach protected targets, replacing SOAX with a proxy provider means rebuilding that logic yourself.

Stay too if procurement or compliance has already cleared SOAX. Re-running a vendor review, re-verifying sourcing documentation and re-signing paperwork is real work that rarely pays for itself against a per-GB saving. The same applies if you have an enterprise agreement with negotiated volume rates and account support attached — that is not something a self-serve provider replicates.

And stay if your consumption is genuinely steady at scale. Subscription tiers are designed for exactly that case, and a predictable monthly burn is the situation in which they price well.

How to migrate from SOAX, and which suits you

A migration on the proxy side is a configuration change rather than a rewrite. Both services take a host, a port and username and password credentials, so the swap is normally one connection string per worker. Map your targeting first: country stays country, city stays city, and an ASN filter stays an ASN filter paired with a country. Then map session behaviour — anything that was sticky needs a sticky credential with an equivalent hold time, and anything rotating stays rotating.

The sensible way to test is in parallel. Buy the smallest package, generate a separate credential for each workload you want to compare, and run a real job — not a synthetic latency test — against your actual target sites for a few days. Because credentials are free and the balance does not expire, an inconclusive trial costs you nothing beyond the traffic you used, and you can leave the SOAX plan running until you have an answer.

Broadly: keep SOAX if you buy the platform. Move to Nefo if you only ever used the proxies.

• Choose Nefo if usage is spiky, seasonal or hard to forecast
• Choose Nefo if a monthly minimum is larger than what you actually consume
• Choose Nefo if you need per-client or per-project credentials at no fixed cost
• Stay with SOAX if you use its scraper APIs, unblocker or classic ISP tier
• Stay with SOAX if you have an enterprise agreement or completed vendor review
• Stay with SOAX if steady high-volume consumption makes a tier price well

Related proxy guides

• Rotating Residential Proxy
• Rotating proxies
• Pricing
• Use cases

Frequently asked questions