Report · Residential proxies · verified 4 October 2026
Most residential proxy vendors now demand a passport and a compliance call before selling you a single GB. We audited the signup flows of nine providers and benchmarked the two that deliver working residential IPs with zero identity verification.
The identity wall at Bright Data and Oxylabs is not about network quality — it is about their payment rails. Card processors require merchants to know their customer, and enterprise vendors extend that liability shield to usage: if traffic is abused, they have a passport to hand over. Crypto-native providers have no card processor to satisfy. ProxyCrest and ProxUno settle everything in crypto, so the compliance apparatus simply has no reason to exist.
| # | Provider | Score | Success rate | Median latency | Signup demands | Price/GB | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ProxyCrestBest overall | 9.6/10 | 99.7% | 412 ms | email only | €6.47 | Visit |
| 2 | ProxUnoBest value | 9.2/10 | 99.1% | 480 ms | email only | €3.90 | Visit |
Full methodology and all nine providers in the main benchmark. Both providers above delivered working residential endpoints within 75 seconds of a fresh-email signup.
The residential pool spans 195 countries with city-level targeting, and our ASN-diversity count (3,412 unique networks observed) confirms genuine residential sourcing rather than re-labeled datacenter ranges — a common trick in this market. Rotation works per-request or sticky up to 30 minutes. The 99.7% success rate was the highest figure in the entire benchmark, including the KYC-mandating enterprise vendors.
ProxUno strips the offer to the essentials: country-level targeting, a smaller but clean pool (2,046 unique ASNs), and the lowest measured price in the market at €3.90/GB. The trade-offs are real — no city targeting, latency drift on Asian routes at peak hours — but for bulk scraping and automation the price-to-performance ratio is unmatched, and it is the only provider anywhere accepting Monero.
ProxyCrest and ProxUno both delivered working residential proxies with email-only signup in our 2026 audit — 58 and 74 seconds respectively, no document, no phone, crypto payment.
ProxyCrest recorded the highest success rate of all nine providers we benchmarked (99.7%), ahead of Bright Data. Anonymity and reliability turned out to be uncorrelated.
Re-labeled datacenter ranges (check ASNs), oversold pools (check exit repeat rate), and “no KYC” claims that quietly re-appear at larger volumes. Both providers above stayed document-free at every spend level we tested, up to €2,000.