How to choose the best backconnect proxies for your job

Search for the best backconnect proxies and you get top-ten lists written by the providers in them. Each one ranks itself first, quotes its own success rates, and compares prices in units that don’t line up: dollars per GB next to dollars per IP next to dollars per thread. That makes it hard to answer the only question that matters to you: what will my job cost, and will it work?

A backconnect proxy is a gateway in front of a pool of IPs (the backconnect explainer covers how that works). Almost every provider sells one now, so the gateway itself doesn’t separate them. What does: how you’re billed, how much control you get over rotation and location, how you log in, which protocols you can use, and what happens if it doesn’t work for you.

Below is a checklist you can run against any provider, a comparison table built only from facts on each provider’s own pricing and help pages, and an honest map of where Storm Proxies is a good buy and where another provider is stronger.

Facts from each provider’s own pricing or help pages, checked October 2026. Prices change, so click through before you buy. Our side-by-side pages go deeper on each.

Full comparisons: Storm vs Proxyrack, Storm vs Webshare, Storm vs Decodo, Storm vs IPRoyal, Storm vs Oxylabs, or the full list of Storm Proxies alternatives.

The billing model matters more than any headline price. Three jobs, costed from the published prices above:

• Price monitoring, 40 parallel scrapers, about 300 GB a month of HTML. On per-GB datacenter traffic, every page is metered and the bill rises with each new product you track. On Storm’s 40-thread rotating plan it stays $39 a month whatever the traffic. Proxyrack’s thread model is also unmetered, but its public USA datacenter entry is 100 threads at $150; Storm’s 150-thread plan is $97.
• Residential scraping with a headless browser, around 50 GB a month. Decodo’s 50 GB residential plan is $150 a month and includes options Storm doesn’t have: IPs by city and SOCKS5. Storm’s 10 residential ports cost $90 with no traffic meter, but give 10 IPs at a time, each changing every 5 minutes, USA or EU only. If you need the cities, pay per GB; if you need volume in the USA or EU, ports are cheaper.
• Light research, 1 to 2 GB a month in many countries. Per GB wins. Webshare’s 1 GB residential is $3.50 and IPRoyal’s traffic never expires, so you pay for what you use. A flat plan would sit idle most of the month.

The crossover is simple: if you can’t predict your traffic, or it’s high and growing, flat pricing protects you. If traffic is tiny or you need fine-grained geo, per GB is fairer.

Storm is a good buy when you run multi-threaded tools (scrapers, ScrapeBox, rank trackers, crawlers) from a fixed machine, you need USA or EU IPs, and your traffic is large or unpredictable. Fixed gateways mean you configure a tool once. Plan changes are one click in the member area, with the unused part of the old plan credited. Starter plans can use the 50YEA code for half off the first month (see the discount page).

Another provider is stronger when you need any of these, which Storm doesn’t offer:

• City, state, ZIP or ASN targeting, or countries beyond USA, EU and Worldwide.
• SOCKS5 or UDP (Storm is HTTP(S) only).
• Username:password on a rotating or residential pool, for example from serverless functions or cloud notebooks.
• One rotating IP held for an hour or longer; Storm’s longest hold is 15 minutes, and IPRoyal and Oxylabs list sticky sessions measured in hours or days.
• Mobile IPs, a scraping API, or a manual rotation trigger.
• A longer refund window: Decodo lists 14 days and Proxyrack 3 days, each with their own conditions.

Need static IPs for accounts instead of a pool? That’s not a backconnect job at all; look at private dedicated proxies.

• “Unlimited” with a fair-use cap. Read the help page. Some plans throttle or stop after a set number of TB or GB per IP.
• Pool size as the main selling point. Millions of IPs don’t help if only a slice serves your country, or if you can’t reach them concurrently.
• Success rates without a target. A percentage measured on someone else’s sites tells you little about yours. Test on your own targets.
• Refunds that end at the first megabytes. A refund that’s void after 100 MB is effectively a trial you can’t really use.
• Identity checks you didn’t expect. Some residential networks require a review before access. Check the onboarding steps if you need to start today.

Some providers take cards only, some accept crypto at checkout. Storm accepts BTC, ETH, USDT (TRC20) and BNB (BEP20) manually: contact support with the package you want, send the USD amount to the wallet address we reply with, then send the transaction ID, your username or email and the package. We activate once we confirm the payment. Crypto doesn’t renew automatically, so each month you pay again and send the new transaction ID. Other coins, LTC for example, aren’t accepted.