SOAX Review 2026: Honest Pros, Cons and Pricing

SOAX has been selling IP access since 2019, out of a UK-registered entity, and by 2026 it’s grown into one of the mid-tier general-purpose proxy shops that show up in nearly every “best proxy provider” list next to Bright Data, Oxylabs and Decodo. I run residential and mobile proxy operations out of Singapore, so when I test a provider like SOAX I care less about the marketing copy and more about whether the pool holds up at 2am Singapore time when I’m hammering a target that rate-limits by ASN.

SOAX targets two overlapping buyers: scraping teams who need rotating residential or mobile IPs to get past bot detection, and growth or ops people running SERP tracking, ad verification, or multi-account work who need static ISP IPs that don’t rotate out from under a logged-in session. It is not aimed at someone who wants a single proxy for a Friday night, and it is not the cheapest way to move a few gigabytes on a hobby budget.

Headline verdict: SOAX is a genuinely functional, well-documented service with real rotation control and four proxy types under one login, but it prices itself for buyers who already know they need volume. If you’re testing the proxy market for the first time, expect to pay more per GB here than at Decodo for the same job.

what SOAX actually does

SOAX sells four proxy products from one dashboard: rotating residential, rotating mobile (carrier IPs), static ISP proxies (a residential-owned IP assigned to you the way a datacenter IP would be), and plain datacenter proxies. All four sit behind the same authentication system, so switching a scraper from residential to mobile is a config change, not a new account signup.

Access is over HTTP(S) or SOCKS5, the same SOCKS5 protocol IETF standardized in RFC 1928, and targeting (country, region, city, sometimes carrier or ISP) is set through sticky username and password parameters or a query string appended to the gateway endpoint. Session length is adjustable per request, from rotate-on-every-call down to sticky sessions held for up to 60 minutes, which matters if you’re running a multi-step login or checkout flow through a proxy tunnel using the CONNECT method defined in the HTTP semantics spec, RFC 9110, and need the exit IP to stay fixed until the flow finishes.

SOAX doesn’t publish a pool count I’d stake a claim on without an independent audit, but in practice the residential pool held up across the markets I hit hardest, US and UK traffic especially. Concurrent connections scale with plan tier: entry packages cap out lower, and heavier plans unlock more simultaneous threads, so a single low-tier account won’t run a wide multi-threaded scrape without hitting a wall. Connection success against straightforward targets (search engines, most retail sites, general SERP scraping) stayed solid in my testing; it dropped off against stricter anti-bot stacks (large marketplaces, some social platforms), where retries became routine rather than exceptional. Speed is workable for scraping and monitoring work, but the extra hop through a residential or mobile exit adds noticeable latency versus a datacenter IP, so it’s not the proxy type to reach for on anything latency-sensitive like real-time bidding.

Beyond raw proxies, SOAX also runs a Web Unblocker and Scraper API tier that handles JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving, and header rotation server-side, aimed at teams that don’t want to maintain their own scraping stack on top of the proxy layer.

pricing

SOAX lists current plan pricing directly on its site, and runs two billing models: package subscriptions and pay-as-you-go metering. The residential entry package runs around $99/month for roughly 8GB, which works out to something like $12/GB, the premium you pay for not committing to volume. Move up to the higher tiers and the per-GB rate drops toward the $6-8 range; heavy users buying hundreds of GB a month can push it lower still through the metered plan.

Mobile proxies price above residential, generally landing in the $9-14/GB band, which tracks with what carriers charge for that data before SOAX resells it. Static ISP proxies are billed per IP per month rather than per GB, usually somewhere between $3.50 and $8 depending on how many you buy and which country you want them in. Datacenter proxies are the cheapest of the four, priced per IP with effectively unlimited bandwidth, usually under $2 per IP at any real volume.

SOAX also sells a small trial package for under $2, worth buying before a subscription. It’s not enough data to load-test anything, but enough to confirm the gateway authenticates, the geo-targeting resolves to the country you asked for, and the latency from wherever you sit is workable before committing to a monthly plan.

One pricing quirk worth flagging: unused bandwidth on subscription packages doesn’t reliably carry into the next billing cycle, so oversizing a plan “just in case” is a way to quietly overpay.

what works

Rotation control is genuinely granular. You can set session length per request rather than being stuck with whatever the provider defaults to, which matters for anything that needs the same IP held across a multi-step flow, like a login-then-scrape sequence.
One account, four proxy types. Residential, mobile, ISP and datacenter proxies all sit behind the same dashboard and billing relationship, so testing which proxy type actually clears a target’s bot detection doesn’t mean opening four separate vendor accounts.
City and ISP-level targeting works in the markets I’ve tested. For the US, UK and most of Western Europe, SOAX resolves down to city and sometimes carrier or ISP, not just country, which is the difference between “looks like a US visitor” and “looks like a real Chicago Comcast subscriber.”
Pay-as-you-go avoids the buy-a-package-waste-half-of-it problem. Not every buyer wants a fixed monthly GB commitment, and the metered option means a slow month doesn’t mean overpaying for bandwidth that went unused.
The trial package is cheap enough to actually use. A lot of providers gate testing behind a full subscription; SOAX’s under-$2 test package means you can validate the gateway against your real target before paying for a month you might end up cancelling.

what doesn’t

Per-GB pricing isn’t competitive at low volume. If you’re moving under 20-30GB a month, providers like IPRoyal or Decodo generally land cheaper than SOAX’s entry tier, and the gap is real enough to matter when margins are thin.
Support is uneven outside live chat hours. Ticket responses can stretch past a day when live chat isn’t staffed, which is a real problem if a gateway goes down mid-job and you’re paying for compute sitting idle.
Mobile proxy congestion shows up on smaller carriers. The residential pool holds up under load, but mobile sessions have slowed or dropped on less common carrier or country combinations during peak local hours, presumably because the underlying device pool for that carrier is thinner.
No first-party SDKs. Integration is raw HTTP/SOCKS5 endpoints plus dashboard documentation, so teams that want a maintained Python or Node client end up writing their own thin wrapper instead of importing one.
Unused subscription bandwidth doesn’t reliably carry over. Package sizing needs to match actual usage, not optimistic usage, or you’re paying for GB you’ll never touch.

who should buy

SOAX makes sense for a scraping or growth team already moving meaningful volume, say 50GB a month or more, that wants residential, mobile and static ISP options without juggling three vendor relationships. It also fits multi-account operators who need a static IP per account rather than a rotating one, since account management workflows generally break the moment an IP shifts mid-session. If you’re running SERP rank tracking, ad verification, or e-commerce price monitoring where city-level geo accuracy matters more than the rock-bottom price, SOAX’s targeting granularity earns its premium.

who should skip

Skip SOAX if you’re testing the proxy market for the first time on a budget under $50 a month, since the per-GB math favors cheaper entry-level providers until you actually know what you need. It’s also not the right fit if you specifically need mobile carrier IPs out of Southeast Asia for a Singapore- or region-specific job; a dedicated regional mobile proxy operation, like Singapore Mobile Proxy, will generally have deeper local carrier coverage than a global generalist. And if uptime SLAs and guaranteed support response times are a contractual requirement for your business, SOAX’s self-serve support model may not clear that bar.

alternatives to consider

Decodo (formerly Smartproxy) for buyers who want a comparable four-in-one proxy lineup at a generally lower residential per-GB entry price; see our head-to-head comparison for the specific numbers.

IPRoyal for smaller budgets, since its pay-as-you-go residential pricing and smaller minimum packages suit teams under 20GB a month better than SOAX’s tiering.

Bright Data for enterprise buyers who need contractual SLAs, dedicated account management, and a larger published IP pool, at a materially higher price point than SOAX.

verdict

SOAX is a solid, well-built proxy service with real session control and four proxy types that actually share one account, which is more than most providers in its price bracket manage. It’s not the cheapest way to move data, and support won’t win any awards, but for a team that already knows it needs rotation control and geo-targeting over the lowest possible per-GB rate, it holds up. For more on how it compares against competitors, browse the rest of our proxy reviews.

Written by Xavier Fok

disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-07-21.