Are you looking to purchase proxies from the Live Proxies service, and you want to learn all that you need to know about them before making a purchase decision? Then you are on the right page as the article below provides you an honest review of the Live Proxies, including their pros and cons.
The Live Proxies service is one of the many proxy providers that though you haven’t been seeing their commercials that much, are silently operating in the market, with their customer base in the hundreds to thousands monthly. This provider makes a lot of claims ranging from being a top-notch proxy provider to offering private IPs that are never duplicated, among others. But what about the other sides and features that make a proxy ‘lively’? Does it tick all of them or most of them or fall short? You will find answers to these questions as you read deep into the review. For now, let's get started with an overview of the service.
An Overview of Live Proxies
The Live Proxies service is basically a residential proxy network with different residential proxy offerings. The currently supported proxy types include a rotating residential proxy network, a static residential proxy network, and a mobile proxy network. The service claims to offer you private IPs — meant for only you, even if it is for their rotating residential proxies. Because of the way their proxies have been engineered, you can use their proxies for a good number of tasks. According to the information on their website, you can use their proxies for web automation, otherwise known as botting and social media management. If you are an enterprise user, there is a free trial plan available.
Parameter | Feature |
IP Type (s) | Residential and Mobile IPs |
Price Charged | Per IP and bandwidth |
Price Sample | $65 for 50 IPs and 4GB for residential IPs |
Proxy Protocols | HTTP(S) |
IP Rotation | Supported |
Filtering/Targeting | Country-Level |
Authentication | Username/password and IP authentication |
Speed | Fast |
Free Trial | Not available |
Refund Policy | Not available |
Support | Discord |
Jurisdiction Location | United States |
Live Proxies Pros
The Live Proxies service has got a good number of customers using them. And for many of their users, the experience they have got is all great. This is because they got a lot of things right. Let’s take a look at some of the aspects Live Proxies get it right.
Offer Undetectable IPs
If you want to use proxies to bypass anti-spam systems, the proxies you need are highly anonymous proxies — the kind of proxies that will not only mask your IP address with theirs but will also not identify itself as a proxy. The goal here is it should appear as a regular user. While this is it in theory, some providers do not get it right in practice. For Live Proxies, the proxies it offer a residential proxies — both regular residential proxies and mobile proxies are still residential proxies. The major difference between them is that while residential IPs are assigned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to residential devices, mobile IPs are assigned by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) such as AT&T to mobile devices.
The magic here is that Live Proxies either route your requests via devices of real Internet users or via modems under their control. By doing this, the final sender of your request is a legitimate device, and as such, it becomes difficult for websites or anti-spam systems to differentiate them from regular requests. This is why you can get away with using them on even the most sophisticated websites without getting detected. However, there is no foolproof method, as some systems can use other techniques. But for most websites, this provider’s IP addresses are immune from detection.
High Performance
One of the features you will want to look out for when choosing a proxy to use is how it performs. Unfortunately, most providers are not really telling the truth about the performance of their proxies. They give you high hopes and later flop —showing great disparity between what they claim and what they offer. The Live Proxies service is one of those services that can be said to be fast. I tested the speed of their proxies. Without using proxies, my download speed is 64.83 Mbps with a ping rate of 40 ms. But with their residential proxies, I recorded a speed of 21.41 Mbps with a ping rate of 243 ms.
While you might want to see this as a great reduction, it is not. In fact, the average speed of residential proxies in the market is 20+ Mbps, and the ping rate is usually over 200 ms. One of the things you will come to like about their proxy network is that there is no limit to the number of concurrent requests you can send. However, I will advise keeping the number of concurrent requests as low as possible to preserve performance.
Easy to Use
The Live Proxies service has a user dashboard. Using this user dashboard, you can purchase proxies from it, get your IP addresses from it, and renew your proxies from the dashboard. The user dashboard is easy to use and contains only a few UI elements. This is because there are no advanced features provided by this service. As such, the user interface is not complicated. For most people, they wouldn’t need any guide to use the user dashboard.
However, if you are a complete novice who needs some kind of help, then the service offers a help center where they guide you on how to make use of their proxies. Their proxies are private proxies, and as such, you need to authenticate them to use them. The service has support for both username/password authentication and IP authentication.
Live Proxies Cons
The Live Proxies service is not all rosy. As with other providers, it does have its cons that you need to be aware of before purchasing proxies from them. Only go ahead with the purchase if you can deal with the cons.
Pricing is Expensive
The pricing for their proxies is expensive and is the basis for why many small marketers will run away from them. The minimum you can spend on their residential proxies is $45 for rotating and $65 for static. For their mobile proxies, you need $55 to get started. This is just for their metered connections. If you want to use their unmetered plan, where you can enjoy unlimited bandwidth, then you will need to pay a minimum of $80 for their rotating residential proxies and $135 for their static residential proxy. This amount is expensive, considering many small marketers are not ready to spend this amount.
It is even this reason that has led many of the top providers, such as Bright Data and Smartproxy, to start providing a pay-as-you-go plan for their proxies and other services. Take, for instance, you can get a starter using Bright Data residential proxies for just $10.5, while it is even cheaper for Smartproxy as you can get a starter with $8.5 per GB. And these providers offer better performance in terms of speed and response time, a larger IP pool, and extensive location support. If you look at these, you can see reasons why Live Proxies is overpriced and should reduce its minimum entry requirement for small marketers.
No Free Trial and Friendly Refund Policy
Are you paranoid about the service and want to get a free trial to make sure their proxies will work for you before opting in as a paid user of the network? Then I am sorry to break the news to you, but you aren’t getting any free trial from this service. The service caters more to users in the sneaker-copping community, and as such, free trials are not offered. If you want to make use of their proxies, you will need to pay for them. Considering the high cost of their proxies, this can be a turn-off for most marketers. Only enterprise users are offered a free trial, but that will be after doing KYC.
Even if a service does not offer a free trial, the good thing to do here is to provide a friendly refund policy so that users know that when the proxies are not useful to them, they can return the proxies and get their money back — some sort of a money-back guarantee system. This is one of the other areas the Live Proxies service flopped. It claims all sales of its products are final, and as such, there is no refund provided if the proxies have already been delivered to you. This lack of a free trial plan and a friendly refund policy is too tight and not friendly to the customers but only useful for their business.
Small Proxy Pool and Location Support
If you are a heavy user that needs IPs in their hundreds of thousands, then the Live Proxies service is not the provider for you. This is because the pool is small. The service didn’t mention the number of IP addresses it has in all of the proxy packages except for their plan for enterprise users, which is over 10 million. But for regular users, this is not the case. In fact, it is common for you to visit their website and see that the specific package you want to purchase is sold out. This is one thing I hate to see — a provider not big enough that I will feel special for purchasing their proxies.
But the size of their IP pool is not just the problem here, there is also a problem with the locations supported. Currently, you can only get IPs from 3 countries with no support for specifying the cities you need the IPs from. The supported countries include the United States, Canada, and the UK. If you need IPs for some other countries, you will have to take a look at another provider, as Live Proxies does not provide support for it. As at the time of writing this review, I discovered even the UK and Canada proxy plans are sold out — the issues you will have to deal with because of their small proxy pools.
Customer Support Issues
Customer support is an important aspect of any business — proxy business inclusive and users of a proxy network will either have queries, complaints, or both. In this case, there needs to be a system to meet this need. And the Live Proxies service provides this. However, it is not provided in the best way it should. First, there are only two major systems of communication with the team, and that is via email address and their Discord server. The email communication, when registered, is turned into something like a support ticket, but my problem, regardless of whether it is a plain email or support ticket, is that support is terribly slow.
When you make an inquiry, you will need to wait for hours to get a response. The alternative here is to go for their Discord server. Except you already use it, discord is not an easy-to-use platform, and you need to learn your way around it. This makes getting customer support a time-consuming process. Other providers over live chat support right on their website from anywhere on their page.
Do I Recommend Live Proxies?
The Live Proxies service, as you can see, has both its pros, otherwise known as its strengths, and then its weaknesses, known as cons, and this is completely the norm in the market. However, unlike I take a stand on whether I want to recommend a particular provider or not, I will leave you to make the choice here. While its proxies are undetectable and high performers, they have a small proxy pool with limited location support. There is also no guarantee whatsoever on the money you pay, regardless of whether the proxies work for you or not. So you will have to take a look at both the pros and cons of Live Proxies and make the decision based on what is most important to you.
Our Expert's Review
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Price - 9.5/10
9.5/10
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Speed - 9.3/10
9.3/10
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Functions - 9.1/10
9.1/10
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Customer support - 8.7/10
8.7/10
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