> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://roundproxies.com/blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The 6 best Storm Proxies alternatives for scraping in 2026 - URL: https://roundproxies.com/blog/best-storm-proxies-alternatives/ - Published: 2026-10-03T10:27:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-03T10:42:45.000Z - Description: Storm Proxies alternatives priced against Storm's ports, with code to test rotation and page weight, plus fixes for SOCKS5, auth, and geo limits. - Author: Emilie Beher - Tags: Best Alternatives, Provider Comparison, #dated-6ac0d70856ce240001268a91 Storm Proxies is still the cheapest way I know to push a lot of bandwidth through residential IPs. Five ports cost $50 a month, bandwidth is unlimited, and access goes live the minute your payment clears. The trouble starts when your scraper grows up. People go hunting for Storm Proxies alternatives the week a job moves to a cloud runner and the single whitelisted IP stops matching. Or a tool demands SOCKS5\. Or a login flow dies every five minutes when the residential IP rotates on schedule. I build and run scrapers for a living. In the last week of September 2026 I went through each provider's live pricing pages and docs and priced them against Storm's current plans. These are the six I'd move to, depending on what broke for you. ## The best Storm Proxies alternatives - **Roundproxies** for replacing every Storm product with one account - **IPRoyal** for bursty scraping schedules - **ProxyRack** for keeping unlimited bandwidth - **Shifter** for cheap, steady residential volume with ASN targeting - **Webshare** for cheap datacenter IPs and a free tier - **SOAX** for mobile IPs with carrier-level targeting ## What is Storm Proxies? Storm Proxies is a budget proxy provider that prices its rotating proxies by ports or threads instead of gigabytes, so bandwidth is unlimited on every plan. It sells three things: rotating residential proxies, rotating datacenter proxies, and private dedicated USA IPs. The residential product is a backconnect gateway. Each port you buy hands your software a new residential IP every 5 minutes, from a pool Storm puts at 20M+ IPs. If the gateway model is new to you, our explainer on [how rotating proxies cycle IPs](https://roundproxies.com/blog/rotating-proxies-explained/) walks through it. Residential plans run from $19 for 1 port to $50 for 5, $300 for 50, and $550 for 100\. You pick USA or EU IPs in the member area. The rotating datacenter product is priced by threads (simultaneous connections): $39 a month for 40 threads, up to $147 for 200. It can give you a new IP on every request or hold one for 3 or 15 minutes, from a pool of 700,000+ IPs that Storm says it replaces every 7 days. Dedicated proxies start at $10 a month for 5 USA IPs. Storm's own FAQ pitches them for browsing and gaming and sends scrapers to the rotating products instead. ## Why look for a Storm Proxies alternative? People leave Storm Proxies over protocol, authentication, and targeting limits. The price is rarely the complaint. ****How We Pick and Test What We Recommend** Every roundup you see on Roundproxies is put together by real people who live and breathe proxies, tools, and software. We don't just skim the surface, we roll up our sleeves and spend serious time digging into each product, putting it through real-world use, and measuring it against clear standards that actually matter for the category. No shortcuts, no guesswork. For more information on how we chose software, apps and tools, feel free to read the full article of [how we pick the tools we recommend on Roundproxies blog](https://roundproxies.com/blog/pick-apps/). - **HTTP(S) only.** Storm's FAQ answers "Do you have SOCKS proxies?" with a flat no. Any tool that only speaks SOCKS5 is out, and so is proxy-side DNS resolution. Our comparison of [HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 proxies](https://roundproxies.com/blog/http-vs-https-vs-socks5-proxies/) covers what you lose. - **One access IP per residential package.** Residential ports use IP authentication with no user:pass option, and each package authorizes a single IP. A scraper on GitHub Actions or Lambda gets a new egress IP per run and gets refused. Our [IP whitelisting vs username:password breakdown](https://roundproxies.com/blog/proxy-ip-whitelist-vs-user-pass/) covers why that bites in the cloud. - **Rotation on Storm's clock.** Residential IPs change every 5 minutes. You can't ask for a fresh IP per request, and you can't hold one through a 20-minute checkout or pagination run. - **Coarse geo.** Residential is USA or EU. Dedicated is USA only. There's no city, state, or ASN targeting. - **Shared-pool success rates.** Storm's rotating proxy FAQ says success on sneaker and ticket sites lands around 70% to 80%, because the IPs are shared across customers. - **A narrow refund window.** The 24-hour money-back guarantee covers only the smallest package of each product. Storm still makes sense in one situation: one machine, lenient targets, and a lot of bandwidth. If that's you, the math section below shows why you might stay. ## What makes the best Storm Proxies alternative? - **SOCKS5 and flexible auth.** Every pick here supports SOCKS5\. Most also take username:password, which is what you want once your scraper runs somewhere with a changing IP. - **Pricing that matches your traffic shape.** Bursty jobs want traffic that doesn't expire. Steady, heavy jobs want unmetered threads or big monthly buckets. The wrong model costs more than the wrong provider. - **Rotation you control.** Per-request rotation plus sticky sessions with a length you choose, ideally set through the proxy username so you can change it per job without touching the dashboard. - **Targeting finer than a continent.** Country at minimum. City and ASN matter for localized SERPs and price checks. - **A cheap way to test.** A trial, a tiny plan, or a refund window long enough to run a real test against your own targets. I left out scraping APIs and "unblocker" products, including the ones some of these providers sell next to their proxies. You're replacing a proxy, and the scraper stays yours. I also skipped free public proxy lists, which die too fast to replace anything. For every provider I read the current pricing page and docs, noted protocols, auth, rotation, and targeting, and priced the same 30 GB workload you'll see in the calculator below. ## Storm Proxies alternatives at a glance | Provider | Best for | Standout feature | Pricing | | ------------------------- | ----------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- | ----------------------------------------------------------- | | Roundproxies | Replacing every Storm product | Residential, ISP, and unmetered datacenter on one account | Residential from $3.50/GB; unmetered plans from $79/month | | IPRoyal | Bursty schedules | Residential traffic never expires | $7.35/GB at 1 GB pay-as-you-go, down to $1.84/GB from 10 TB | | ProxyRack | Unlimited bandwidth | Unlimited residential priced per thread | About $300/month for 100 threads | | Shifter | Steady residential volume | City and ASN targeting on a 205M+ IP pool | $50/month for 50 GB | | Webshare | Cheap datacenter IPs | 10 free proxies, no card | Free; 100 shared proxies for $2.99/month | | SOAX | Mobile IPs | 33M+ mobile IPs, sticky up to 60 minutes | $1.99 for a 3-day, 400 MB trial | | Storm Proxies (reference) | Unmetered use on one machine | Flat per-port price | $50/month for 5 residential ports | ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for replacing every Storm product with one account ### 1\. Roundproxies (residential, datacenter, ISP, mobile) ![Roundproxies](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/Roundproxies-data-2.webp) **Pros** - Residential from $3.50/GB on a 119M+ IP pool, with country, city, and ASN targeting - Unmetered high-bandwidth plans from $79/month, with HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5 - Static ISP proxies from $1.00/IP with unlimited bandwidth, a direct swap for Storm's dedicated IPs **Cons** - We sell these, so treat this ranking as a vendor's opinion and test it against the others - The unmetered plans run on datacenter IPs; unlimited residential bandwidth isn't on the menu - The $3.50/GB residential rate is shown as 50% off a $7/GB list price Roundproxies is us. I work here, so get a second opinion before you take my word for the top spot. I put it first because it's the only pick on this list that maps one-to-one onto all three of Storm's product lines from a single account. When I lined Storm's catalog up against ours, the mapping was clean. Storm's rotating residential ports become per-GB residential traffic with city and ASN targeting instead of "USA or EU". Storm's rotating datacenter threads become the unmetered high-bandwidth plans, which keep the flat monthly price Storm users like. Storm's $10 dedicated pack becomes static ISP proxies at $1.00/IP. The residential pool is listed at 119M+ IPs across 195+ countries, with about 24.5M of them in the United States. You can also target by carrier through the proxy-by-ISP option, which covers 380+ ISPs including Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon. The high-bandwidth plans are the part to look at if Storm's unlimited bandwidth is why you signed up. They advertise unlimited bandwidth, 150+ locations, 10 Gbps connections, and SOCKS5, so the Scrapebox and GSA crowd keeps flat pricing and gains a protocol Storm doesn't offer. That said, those unmetered plans are datacenter IPs. If your target blocks datacenter ranges and you need unlimited residential bandwidth specifically, ProxyRack below is the closer match. Roundproxies is still the right pick if you're replacing more than one Storm product, or if you want residential, ISP, and unmetered datacenter on one bill. **Roundproxies pricing:** Residential from $3.50/GB (1 GB, shown as 50% off $7/GB); datacenter from $0.30/IP; ISP from $1.00/IP; mobile from $80/IP; high-bandwidth unmetered plans from $79/month. ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for bursty scraping schedules ### 2\. IPRoyal (residential, ISP, datacenter, mobile) ![IPRoyal](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/IPRoyal-2.webp) **Pros** - Residential traffic never expires - HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, city-level targeting, sticky sessions up to 7 days **Cons** - Expensive at small volumes: $7.35/GB for a single pay-as-you-go GB With IPRoyal you buy residential gigabytes, they sit in your account until you use them, and the proxies take HTTP(S) or SOCKS5 with whitelisted IPs or credentials. That non-expiring traffic matters most to people who scrape in bursts. A Storm port bills $10 a month whether you hammer it or leave it idle for three weeks. On IPRoyal, a quiet month costs nothing. The pool is listed at 64M+ IPs across 195+ countries, with country, state, and city targeting. You can rotate on every request or hold an IP for up to 7 days, which fixes the five-minute login breakage with one setting. When I priced a 30 GB month at the 10 GB tier's pay-as-you-go rate ($5.51/GB), it came to about $165\. Storm's five ports cost $50 for the same month. IPRoyal wins on flexibility here, and it loses on raw bandwidth cost. That said, if you pull hundreds of gigabytes every month on a steady schedule, a per-GB bill will outrun an unmetered plan fast. IPRoyal is still the right call if your usage swings month to month, or if you need a few GB for targets that Storm's shared pool keeps failing on. **IPRoyal pricing:** Residential pay-as-you-go from $7.35/GB for 1 GB and $5.51/GB for 10 GB, falling to $1.84/GB from 10 TB. The Subscription option takes 5% off ($7.00/GB for 1 GB). ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for keeping unlimited bandwidth ### 3\. ProxyRack (residential, datacenter, ISP, mobile) ![ProxyRack](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/ProxyRack.png) **Pros** - Residential bandwidth with no GB cap, billed per thread - HTTP, SOCKS, and UDP, with whitelisting or user+pass - Choose a random IP per connection or sticky ports that rotate every 3 to 60 minutes **Cons** - High entry price next to Storm's $50 plan - Prices render in JavaScript and are hard to compare without starting checkout ProxyRack is where I'd send a Storm user who won't give up unlimited bandwidth. Its Unlimited Residential product (older pages call it Unmetered Residential) bills by threads, meaning simultaneous connections, and lets you move as much data as those threads can carry. The model maps well onto Storm's. You still pay for concurrency instead of gigabytes, but you get user+pass auth next to whitelisting, SOCKS and UDP, and a choice between per-connection rotation and sticky ports. ProxyRack's help center says country, city, and ISP targeting is on by default. I had to read ProxyRack's help articles twice to pin down the thread rule. On Unlimited Residential, your thread limit equals the threads you bought, so connection 101 on a 100-thread plan waits in line. Size the plan to your scraper's concurrency and ignore its page count. That said, the entry price stings next to Storm. The price trackers I checked in September 2026 list the entry plan at about $300 a month for 100 threads. The signup page advertises 4.4M+ unique monthly IPs, a smaller pool than IPRoyal's or Shifter's. It's still the right pick for scrapers already moving 300+ GB a month that would drown in per-GB bills. The [ProxyRack help article on Unlimited Residential](https://help.proxyrack.com/en/articles/10961190-what-are-unlimited-residential-proxies) spells out the thread and rotation rules. **ProxyRack pricing:** Unlimited Residential from about $300/month for 100 threads (third-party price checks, September 2026), with a 3-day refund window for new subscribers. Confirm the live price at checkout. ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for cheap, steady residential volume ### 4\. Shifter (residential, ISP) ![Shifter](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/Shifter.png) **Pros** - Full Geo plans work out to $0.75 to $1.00 per GB - Country, state, city, and ASN targeting on a 205M+ IP pool - HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, unlimited concurrent connections **Cons** - Monthly buckets: you pay for the included GB whether you use them or not - Current prices are shown as discounts off much higher list prices, which may not last Shifter surprised me. Plenty of Storm Proxies alternatives lists, including some ranking right now, describe it as a port-based unlimited-bandwidth provider, basically Storm's bigger cousin. Its current pricing page shows something else: monthly residential plans with a fixed bandwidth allowance. Those plans are cheap per gigabyte. On the Full Geo pool, $50 buys 50 GB, $149 buys 200 GB, and $299 buys 400 GB, all with SOCKS5, city and ASN targeting, and no cap on concurrent connections. A Non-Geo pool is listed from $0.10/GB for jobs where location doesn't matter. For a Storm user moving somewhere between 30 and 400 GB a month, this is the most direct upgrade on cost. You pay about what Storm charges and trade the fixed five-minute clock for per-request rotation or sticky sessions from 1 to 30 minutes. That said, a monthly bucket is still a bucket. Use 20 GB of a 50 GB plan and you've paid $2.50/GB. Shifter also sells a scraping API next to the proxies; skip it, the raw proxies are what replace Storm. Pick Shifter for steady, predictable volume. **Shifter pricing:** Full Geo residential from $50/month for 50 GB, up to $299/month for 400 GB, shown as discounted from list prices of $175 to $800. ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for cheap datacenter IPs ### 5\. Webshare (datacenter, ISP, residential) ![Webshare](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/Webshare-2.png) **Pros** - 10 free datacenter proxies with up to 1 GB a month, no card, no expiry - 100 shared proxies for $2.99 a month, HTTP and SOCKS5, 50+ countries **Cons** - The cheap plans share IPs with other customers - Datacenter IPs are the first thing protected targets block Webshare replaces the part of Storm people forget they're paying for: the $10 pack of five dedicated USA IPs. Storm's own FAQ steers those IPs toward browsing and gaming, which tells you how far they'll get on a protected target. Webshare's datacenter network covers 50+ countries and speaks HTTP and SOCKS5\. The free plan gives you 10 proxies and up to 1 GB a month with no time limit. The first paid step is 100 shared proxies for $2.99 a month, and the per-proxy price drops to $0.0179 at 60,000 proxies. I start every new scraper on datacenter IPs. If the target serves clean HTML to a datacenter ASN, there's no reason to pay residential rates, and Webshare's free tier is the cheapest way I know to find out. That said, shared datacenter IPs are what Cloudflare-style bot rules flag first, and the $2.99 plan shares its IPs with other customers. Webshare is still the right pick for lenient targets, internal tools, and the "do I even need residential?" test. **Webshare pricing:** Free for 10 proxies (up to 1 GB/month). 100 shared datacenter proxies from $2.99/month. Dedicated and ISP proxies are priced in the plan configurator. ## Best Storm Proxies alternative for mobile IPs ### 6\. SOAX (residential, mobile, ISP, datacenter) ![SOAX](https://roundproxies.com/blog/content/images/2026/10/SOAX-2-2.webp) **Pros** - 33M+ mobile IPs across 195+ locations, with region, city, and ASN targeting - Sticky sessions up to 60 minutes, set in the proxy username - HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS5, UDP, and QUIC **Cons** - Paid trial only, and mobile traffic costs more per GB than residential - No IPs in Texas SOAX covers the gap Storm never tried to fill: mobile carrier IPs. Carriers put many real phones behind one address with carrier-grade NAT, so banning a mobile IP means banning real customers, and targets are slow to do it. The part I like as an engineer is session control. SOAX's own curl example puts the country, a session ID, and a 300-second session length straight into the proxy username. You change rotation behavior by editing a string instead of buying a different product. Rotation runs per request, or you can hold an IP for up to 60 minutes. Protocol support goes past SOCKS5 to UDP and QUIC, which matters if you automate anything that isn't plain HTTP. That said, mobile traffic costs far more per GB than residential at every provider, SOAX included, and there's no free trial; the cheapest way in is $1.99\. SOAX also leaves Texas out of its network entirely. It's the right pick when a target blocks residential ranges and you need a few GB of high-trust traffic, and the wrong one for a bulk crawl. **SOAX pricing:** $1.99 for a 3-day, 400 MB trial. Paid mobile and residential plans are billed per GB, and the rate drops as the monthly tier rises. ## Other Storm Proxies alternatives to consider - **Decodo** (formerly Smartproxy) is G2's top-listed alternative to Storm and suits teams that want per-GB residential proxies with a polished dashboard. - **Bright Data** is for enterprise teams with a compliance checklist and the budget for a sales-led contract. - **Oxylabs** is for large, contract-based residential volumes where you want an account manager. - **NetNut** is for high-concurrency residential scraping on monthly plans. ## Unmetered ports vs per-GB: the break-even math Storm's flat ports beat per-GB pricing whenever five rotating IPs give you enough concurrency and your target accepts them. Per-GB and bucket plans win once you need more parallel IPs, finer control, or a better success rate, because every failed request is a page you paid for and didn't get. None of the competitor lists I read do this math, so the two scripts below let you run it on your own numbers. You need two inputs: how much data a page costs on the wire, and how often requests succeed. ### Step 1: measure what a page weighs on the wire Providers bill the compressed bytes that cross the wire, while `r.content` in requests hands you the decompressed body. This script reads the raw stream instead, so the number matches what shows up on your bill. ```python import os import requests PROXY = os.environ["PROXY_URL"] # http://user:pass@host:port or http://gateway:port URLS = ["https://example.com/", "https://example.com/about"] # use your real targets total = 0 for url in URLS: r = requests.get(url, proxies={"http": PROXY, "https": PROXY}, stream=True, timeout=30) body = r.raw.read(decode_content=False) # compressed bytes, as billed head = sum(len(k) + len(v) + 4 for k, v in r.headers.items()) total += len(body) + head print(f"{r.status_code} {len(body) / 1024:7.1f} KB {url}") print(f"average: {total / len(URLS) / 1024:.1f} KB per page") ``` Run it against 20 or more real pages, not the homepage alone. Your bill also includes request headers and TLS handshakes, so pad the average by around 10% as a rough allowance. If your scraper drives a headless browser, measure with the browser instead, since images and scripts can multiply the weight. ### Step 2: price the month, per successful page Plug the average into this calculator. The success rates are placeholders I picked to show the effect; replace them with rates you measure on your own targets. ```python PAGE_KB = 150 # measured wire size per page (script above) PAGES_PER_MONTH = 200_000 def gb(pages, kb): # decimal GB, the unit providers bill in return pages * kb / 1_000_000 def per_1k_ok(cost, pages, ok_rate): return cost / (pages * ok_rate / 1000) need = gb(PAGES_PER_MONTH, PAGE_KB) plans = { # (monthly cost, success rate YOU measured) "Storm, 5 ports": (50.00, 0.75), "IPRoyal PAYG $5.51/GB": (need * 5.51, 0.95), "Shifter 50 GB plan": (50.00, 0.95), } print(f"Traffic needed: {need:.0f} GB/month") for name, (cost, ok) in plans.items(): print(f"{name:23} ${cost:7.2f} ${per_1k_ok(cost, PAGES_PER_MONTH, ok):.3f} per 1k good pages") ``` With those placeholder rates, the output looks like this: ```text Traffic needed: 30 GB/month Storm, 5 ports $ 50.00 $0.333 per 1k good pages IPRoyal PAYG $5.51/GB $ 165.30 $0.870 per 1k good pages Shifter 50 GB plan $ 50.00 $0.263 per 1k good pages ``` Storm's "unlimited" plan and Shifter's 50 GB bucket cost the same $50, so the winner depends on success rate and whether five exit IPs are enough parallelism. Pay-as-you-go only wins at low volume: against IPRoyal's 10 GB rate, Storm's $50 buys the same money's worth once you pass about 9 GB a month. ## How to switch from Storm Proxies without rewriting your scraper Keep the proxy URL out of your code and in an environment variable, and switching providers becomes a config change. Storm's residential ports are credential-less gateways (`http://GATEWAY_IP:PORT`), while the alternatives here use `user:pass@host:port`, often with session options packed into the username. For SOCKS5, install the extra with `pip install "requests[socks]"` and use the `socks5h://` scheme so DNS resolves on the proxy instead of your machine. The [requests proxy documentation](https://docs.python-requests.org/en/latest/user/advanced/#proxies) covers both schemes. Before you move traffic, confirm the new gateway rotates the way you think it does. This hits an IP echo service 20 times and counts distinct exit IPs. ```python import os from collections import Counter import requests proxy = os.environ["PROXY_URL"] seen = Counter() for _ in range(20): ip = requests.get("https://api.ipify.org", proxies={"http": proxy, "https": proxy}, timeout=20).text seen[ip] += 1 print(f"{len(seen)} unique exit IPs across 20 requests") for ip, hits in seen.most_common(5): print(f"{ip:>15} {hits}") ``` On a Storm residential port you'll see one IP until the five-minute window rolls over. On a per-request gateway you should see close to 20, and on a sticky session exactly one. Anything in between means the session parameters in your username aren't doing what the docs promise. Then run a real test: at least 1,000 requests per target over 24 hours, tracking status codes, CAPTCHA pages, and response times. Our guide on [how to test proxies before you commit](https://roundproxies.com/blog/test-proxies/) has a full harness for that. ## Which Storm Proxies alternative should you use? - **You use more than one Storm product, or want flat-priced bandwidth with SOCKS5:** Roundproxies. Residential, ISP, and unmetered datacenter on one account. - **Your scraping runs in bursts or small volumes:** IPRoyal. Traffic that never expires beats paying for idle ports. - **You move hundreds of GB a month and hate meters:** ProxyRack. It keeps Storm's pricing logic and fixes the auth and protocol gaps. - **You move 30 to 400 GB a month on a steady schedule:** Shifter. Same money as Storm, far more control. - **Your targets accept datacenter IPs:** Webshare. Start on the free tier and only upgrade when blocks show up. - **Residential IPs keep getting blocked on a mobile-first target:** SOAX, for a few GB of carrier traffic. - **One machine, lenient targets, huge bandwidth:** Stay on Storm. It's still cheap at that job. Pick what fits how you scrape today, and re-run the calculator when the job changes. ## FAQ ### Is Storm Proxies still worth using in 2026? Yes, for lenient targets and heavy bandwidth from a single machine. Its flat per-port pricing is hard to beat when five rotating residential IPs are enough. It falls short once you need SOCKS5, username:password auth on residential, or sessions longer than five minutes. ### Does Storm Proxies support SOCKS5? No, Storm Proxies sells HTTP(S) proxies only, according to its own FAQ. All six alternatives in this list support SOCKS5\. If you use Python requests, install requests\[socks\] and use the socks5h scheme so DNS resolves on the proxy. ### Which Storm Proxies alternative has unlimited bandwidth? ProxyRack is the closest match, with Unlimited Residential plans priced by threads instead of gigabytes. Shifter, which older reviews describe as unmetered, now sells monthly residential plans with a fixed bandwidth allowance. Static ISP proxies at several providers also come with unlimited bandwidth per IP. ### Can I use Storm Proxies on more than one computer? Not on one residential package, which authorizes a single access IP. Storm's rotating datacenter packages allow 1 to 5 access IPs depending on size, and dedicated proxies accept user:pass auth. For cloud runners with changing IPs, a provider with username:password auth on rotating residential is the easier fit. ### Does Storm Proxies have a free trial? No, Storm Proxies offers a 24-hour money-back guarantee instead, and it applies only to the smallest package of each product. For residential, that's the 5-port plan. Larger packages aren't refundable, so test on the smallest one first. ## Wrapping up Storm Proxies sells cheap bandwidth; the alternatives above sell control over auth, protocols, rotation, and targeting. Measure your page weight, run the calculator with success rates from your own targets, and let those numbers pick the provider. If Storm still wins on your workload, keep it.