If you're serious about privacy, using a proxy service with your favorite devices is a good idea. Proxy services obscure your IP address, keeping your device's real address secret to protect your privacy online. IPRoyal is a feature-rich, fairly standard option, but one that surprised us with the inclusion of its Sneaker Proxy service, which helps you get to the head of the line when the latest hot shoe release drops. Though its per-gigabyte pricing is more expensive than we would like, the company also offers static IP address proxies at more affordable rates.
How Much Does IPRoyal Cost?
IPRoyal follows the standard proxy pricing model, including à la carte, by-the-gigabyte pricing for residential customers on what the company calls its Royal Proxy Network using a desktop or tablet, as well as static residential proxies.
The more expensive Royal Proxy Network of rotating residential proxies is sold on a per-gigabyte basis. The prices for this tier start at $7.00 per gigabyte for just one gigabyte and go down to $2.45 per gigabyte if you buy 5,000GB at a time. These prices are on the high side. It also has plans of up to 10,000GB per month, though you'll need to contact the company for a custom quote if you choose that volume.
Static residential proxies are more reasonable, starting at $1.80 per proxy for a 24-hour license. Longer-term plans go for $2.70 per month for a 30-day plan for a single proxy, down to $2.55 per month for 60-day plans and $2.40 per month for 90-day plans. IPRoyal also offers separate mobile options that run on a per-month cadence, starting at $130 per month for a 30-day plan. The cost goes down to $81 per month for a 90-day plan.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure OnlineIf you do a lot of streaming or want to use your proxy strictly to watch geo-restricted content, the monthly static proxy is your best bet. While the numbers of available countries and proxy blocks are far more limited, trying to stream any amount of content on a per-gigabyte basis (especially at the prices listed above) would put a dent in your pocketbook quickly.
IPRoyal doesn't offer a free trial for its paid services. However, there is a free proxy list of over 6,800 IP addresses on IPRoyal's network to choose from. You can install these manually or use the browser extension to initiate your connection, which is also free. Given the extent of the network and the two million-plus IP addresses offered in the over 195 countries that IPRoyal's residential Royal plan covers, we're pleased with the number of options the service offers here.
The company accepts payment by all major credit cards, PayPal, and over 70 different cryptocurrencies.
How a VPN WorksIPRoyal also caters to data center customers. However, the pricing structure for these proxies varies greatly depending on the number you want, the country you want the IP addresses to originate from, and the features you want attached to your plan. The base-level pricing starts at $1.39 per proxy on a 90-day plan and goes up from there, depending on the aforementioned variables.
What Do You Get for Your Money With IPRoyal?
IPRoyal has a far more extensive collection of features than your standard web proxy, including over 195 countries of coverage, more than two million IP addresses to select from at the highest-tier plan, and additional options like timed auto-rotation of your IP and instant IP changes.
If you set up your proxy on your home router, you can connect an unlimited number of devices to IPRoyal's network, and its Royal plan offers options to connect through the HTTPS protocol or through SOCKS5. For a primer on what each of those means for you and your internet security, head on over to our proxy explainer.
One interesting feature IPRoyal offers that we haven't seen on another proxy service is what the company calls its Sneaker Proxy, which you might be forgiven for thinking has something to do with being sneaky. In fact, it's just what it sounds like: A proxy server and bot specifically built to help you buy sneakers before anyone else.
(Credit: IPRoyal)Never having immersed ourselves in the world of sneakerheads, we know very little about the lifestyle, but we pinged PCMag's resident sneaker expert, Joe Maldonado, about the usefulness of a service like this. According to Maldonado, "This is awesome because I barely have to put any effort into having my bot ready for a drop or release. It should be able to know I want it based on my previous usage."
Your Privacy With IPRoyal
IPRoyal is based in the United Arab Emirates. Those concerned with privacy may be uncomfortable using a service based in that country, given its record of privacy violations. However, since most of its IP addresses are routed through servers in other countries, this is less of an issue than it might be if it were a VPN company capable of logging your traffic in the nation of origin where the company is based.
If you'd like to read IPRoyal's terms of service, you can check them out at the link here. They are a bit tough to read and slightly obtuse, however. You should look to VPNs like ExpressVPN for a more reader-friendly example of what to expect.
Using IPRoyal
We had no trouble configuring the IPRoyal proxy on our test PC and within Firefox, which we used to test the IPRoyal browser extension.
Once we were provided with the proxy address, our username, and password via the IPRoyal dashboard (pictured below), we used that to configure our desktop and web traffic to route through IPRoyal's network manually. We selected an IP address from what IPRoyal calls its High-End Pool and also used an IP from the closest address to our test machine in Denver, Colorado. We used the Firefox browser extension to implement the proxy in our browser, though you can also go through this process manually, which changes depending on your preferred web browser. The Firefox extension allows you to create new proxy profiles for each country you want to connect from and easily copy/paste them from the dashboard into the extension.
(Credit: IPRoyal)From there, you can select which region you want to use from a drop-down menu at the top right of your internet browser. IPRoyal features extensions for either Chrome or Firefox, leaving a decent number of alternative options like Edge, Safari, and Opera users out in the cold.
(Credit: IPRoyal)Streaming media is important for consumers, but streaming services like Netflix sometimes block or limit access when you use a VPN. This is why you may prefer proxy services, as their much larger IP address blocks make it easier to quickly cycle through options until you find one that works freely. We tried region we normally include when testing Netflix on VPNs: US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Japan. All were left completely Open on the IPRoyal residential proxy network. Typically, we find some VPN services marked as Limited. (Check here for our definitions of Open and Limited.)
Whether or not you'll be able to stream your content at a quality level that's worth the investment of a proxy is another issue entirely. That's a function of performance, and, as you'll see below, proxies may not be the best choice.
IPRoyal Speed and Performance
To understand the impact a proxy has on your internet experience, we run a series of tests using Google's speed test tool and find a percent change between test results with and without the proxy running.
In testing, we found that IPRoyal had virtually no effect on upload speeds. Download speeds, however, were an entirely different story.
(Credit: Google)As you can see above, while connected to a local Denver proxy from Boulder, CO, our test system, which is hardwired into a home router, reported a download speed reduction of 94.2%. For transparency, we're just getting started with our proxy coverage here at PCMag, so we don't yet have a sense of just how typical or aberrant this result is. For anyone who wants acceptable speeds while also protecting their originating IP address, a VPN might still be a better bet overall, given that most of our testing on those products shows drastically less speed reduction than what we see here.
Remember that network connections are variable, and your experience may differ from ours. These results are more of a snapshot for comparison than a final verdict on performance. We believe that features and overall value are far more important than speed, and we discourage you from judging a proxy service solely on these results.
A Good Proxy for Sneaker Seekers
While many of the core features of the IPRoyal experience might be familiar to long-term users of proxy services, the company still manages to throw in something fresh with the addition of a sneaker-seeking proxy bot that will keep you ahead of the line on all the latest drops. Though its per-gigabyte pricing may sting if you only want to stream geoblocked content on Netflix, the company offers many tiers of service to suit your personal use case. Whether it's data-scraping, undoing geoblocks, or just getting the latest sneakers on the web, IPRoyal is a serviceable proxy provider.
