Free GitHub Proxy Lists vs Apify Residential Proxy: Which One Survives a Scheduled Scraper?
In one line: GitHub proxy-list repos like proxifly/free-proxy-list look impressive — thousands of stars, frequent re-validation — but they’re public lists. A comparable open-source project’s own numbers put real-world working rates well under 1%, and IP-reputation databases already track this exact category of IP. Fine for practice runs; usually not enough to carry a scraper you actually schedule.
Why free proxy lists look like a free lunch
The pitch is intuitive: scrapers need to rotate IPs to avoid getting blocked, paid proxy can run several dollars per GB, and GitHub has dozens of repos handing out proxy lists for nothing. proxifly/free-proxy-list is one of the more polished ones — 6.7k GitHub stars, 782 forks, a README claiming re-validation every 5 minutes, coverage across HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4 and SOCKS5 from over 115 countries. On paper, it reads like a well-maintained free resource.
The issue isn’t whether this particular repo is well-built. It’s two structural limits baked into the entire category of free, public proxy lists: how long any given IP stays usable, and how fast it gets flagged by the systems anti-bot vendors sell.
Limit one: nobody guarantees how long these IPs survive
Free proxy lists are mostly scraped from public sources, not leased to you by a vendor. A comparable project, dinoz0rg/proxy-list, states the gap plainly in its own stats: at the time of writing it had scraped 369,932 candidate proxies, but only 2,553 passed verification — a working rate of roughly 0.7%. Its README is explicit about why: “Public proxy sources are noisy by nature; some entries are invalid, stale, duplicated, or rate-limited at the source.”
proxifly re-validates every 5 minutes, which does cut down on stale entries compared to a list that’s only refreshed occasionally — but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem: it’s still a public list that anyone can pull at the same time you do. Whatever “working” IP you grab for this run might already be hammered by a few hundred other simultaneous downloaders before your next request goes out — and because refresh snapshots change every few minutes, any specific count you’d quote from the live list is stale within minutes of writing it down.
Limit two: these IPs are already in the anti-bot blocklists
The more fundamental problem: a free list’s IPs are public, and so is the visibility anti-bot systems have into it. IP-reputation vendors treat “known public proxies” as core input data — IPQualityScore’s proxy detection database says it covers “all proxy types, including anonymous proxy servers, web proxies, Tor exit nodes, residential proxies, VPN anonymizers, data centers, and hosting providers,” and claims more than 10,000 new proxies get blacklisted every second (a vendor-supplied figure meant to illustrate the pace of this arms race, not an independently audited statistic).
In other words, a list with thousands of GitHub stars and thousands of simultaneous users is close to a moving target for anti-bot vendors — the more popular it gets, the faster its IPs land in reputation databases. That’s why free proxies tend to fail faster than expected against any site with a real anti-bot layer.
The comparison: free list vs Apify’s two built-in proxy types
| Free GitHub proxy list (e.g. proxifly) | Apify Datacenter Proxy | Apify Residential Proxy | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | $0 (open source) | Fixed IP count included per plan; extra IPs billed individually — Starter $1/IP (30 included), Scale $0.8/IP (200 included), Business $0.6/IP (500 included) (official pricing) | Billed by bandwidth — Free/Starter $8/GB, Scale $7.5/GB, Business $7/GB (official pricing) |
| IP survival rate | Unstable — a comparable project, dinoz0rg/proxy-list, shows roughly 0.7% of scraped candidates pass verification at time of writing | Maintained by the Apify platform; stability is the platform’s responsibility | Comes from real residential/business networks; Apify says traffic is “indistinguishable from that of legitimate users” |
| Speed of getting flagged | Fast — it’s a public list, and IP-reputation vendors like IPQualityScore already track this category | Medium — you share egress IPs with other Apify users, so heavy traffic to the same target can get the whole pool rate-limited | Slow — each session is an independent residential IP, not a known public-proxy range |
| Setup work | You build your own health-checking, retry and rotation logic | Actor ships with proxyConfiguration on by default — no setup | Set apifyProxyGroups to RESIDENTIAL inside proxyConfiguration (official docs); same SDK otherwise |
| Best fit | Practice runs, one-off tests, targets with no real anti-bot defenses | Most scheduled forum/e-commerce scraping | Sites with strong anti-bot defenses, or once datacenter IPs start getting blocked |
Why a scraper’s default proxy can still get rate-limited
LIHKG-scraper, which scrapes Hong Kong’s LIHKG forum, makes this concrete. Its proxyConfiguration input field ships with Apify datacenter proxy turned on by default, and its own description is blunt about why: without a proxy, a run shares its egress IP with every other proxy-less run on the platform, and “LIHKG will rate-limit you because of someone else’s traffic (429s, missing replies).”
That single sentence maps out the gap between all three options:
- Free public list: your egress IP is shared with everyone who’s ever downloaded that list — not just other Apify users, but the entire internet.
- Apify datacenter proxy: your egress IP is shared only with other users on the Apify platform — a much smaller pool, but still shared.
- Apify residential proxy: each session gets an independent residential IP, not shared with any other user’s traffic.
lowyat-scraper, which scrapes Malaysia’s Lowyat forum, runs the same default and the same logic. Neither actor’s responses are heavy (forum post text, not images or video), so bandwidth cost for residential proxy is rarely the deciding factor — what actually determines whether it’s worth paying for is how aggressive the target site’s anti-bot defenses are and how reliably you need the schedule to keep running, not the few extra dollars a month.
Pick one and start
From least effort to most freedom
FAQ
Are free GitHub proxy lists like proxifly reliable? Not very. A comparable open-source project, dinoz0rg/proxy-list, shows its own live stats on its README: at the time of writing it had scraped 369,932 candidate proxies, of which only 2,553 passed verification — a working rate of about 0.7%. proxifly advertises re-validation every 5 minutes, but because the list is public, anyone can pull the same batch of IPs at the same time, so there’s no guarantee how long any single one stays usable.
Why do free proxy lists get flagged by anti-bot systems so fast? Because they’re public — the same list anyone can download is also visible to IP-reputation vendors. IPQualityScore’s proxy detection database says it covers anonymous proxy servers, web proxies, Tor exit nodes, residential proxies, VPN anonymizers, data centers and hosting providers, and claims over 10,000 new proxies get blacklisted every second. A list with thousands of GitHub stars and thousands of users is effectively announcing its own IPs to that system.
How much does Apify residential proxy cost? It’s billed by bandwidth: $8/GB on the Free and Starter plans, $7.5/GB on Scale, and $7/GB on Business. Datacenter proxy works differently — a set number of IPs is included per plan, and extra IPs are billed individually (Starter $1/IP with 30 included, Scale $0.8/IP with 200 included, Business $0.6/IP with 500 included), per Apify’s official pricing page. Actual cost depends on how much data you pull, and you can check it in the Apify Console’s proxy usage dashboard.
Do LIHKG-scraper or lowyat-scraper need residential proxy configured manually? Not by default. Both actors ship with Apify datacenter proxy turned on out of the box, which is enough for most schedules. If you’re running large volumes in the same window and getting rate-limited because you share an egress IP with other Apify users, you can set proxyConfiguration’s apifyProxyGroups to RESIDENTIAL to switch to residential proxy instead.
When is a free proxy list actually good enough? For anything with no real stakes — practicing writing a scraper, a one-off pull where a failed run just gets retried, or a target site with no meaningful anti-bot defenses. Once you need a schedule to run reliably, or you’re up against a site with real anti-bot measures, a free list’s survival rate and block speed won’t hold — and at that point the bandwidth cost of Apify’s datacenter or residential proxy is usually cheaper than the engineer-hours spent debugging dead IPs.
Further reading
- Sushiro Apologized Same-Day, a Pop Star Responded Next-Day: Track the Timeline with LIHKG-scraper: if you’re running LIHKG-scraper on a schedule for crisis monitoring, proxy stability is what keeps that schedule from silently dropping runs.
- Build a no-code forum sentiment pipeline with Apify + n8n + GPT: same idea of a scheduled Apify run feeding a pipeline — this one covers what happens after the scrape, not the proxy layer underneath it.
- Is That Hong Kong Listing Actually For Sale?: a concrete case where the default datacenter proxy isn’t enough — Midland’s site returns 403 to datacenter IPs, so that actor needs residential proxy just to load.
Chad runs 40+ published Apify actors, including the LIHKG-scraper and lowyat-scraper used here. Every proxy-survival and blocklist number above links back to its source repo or vendor page; anything that couldn’t be verified independently was left out.