Which ISP Proxy Free Trial Actually Gives You Test Time?
Only two providers let you start an ISP proxy free trial without a sales call: Decodo, at 3 days and 100 MB plus 10 IPs on per-IP plans, and Bright Data, at a $2 credit that reaches $7 after payment verification. Oxylabs runs longer trials — 3 days for individuals, 7 for verified companies — but only by request. Everything else sold as “free” is a money-back window, a paid starter or a datacenter free tier.
📌 TL;DR Executive Summary
- Core Takeaway: Decodo is the only instant free trial (3 days, 100 MB, plus 10 IPs on per-IP plans). Bright Data runs a credit-based trial ($2, plus $5 after payment verification). Oxylabs offers 3 or 7 days by request only.
- Key Risk/Challenge: A card-gated trial charges the plan you selected when the clock runs out, and activating it cancels the money-back window that would otherwise cover you.
- Recommended Solution: Log IP stability, session length and bandwidth burn in the first hour, run each test in its own browser profile, and cancel two days before conversion.
What Counts as an ISP Proxy Free Trial
ISP proxies, often sold as static residential, sit in data centres but are registered to an internet service provider. The target server sees an address that resolves to a residential network, while uptime and speed behave like a datacenter IP. Oxylabs sells them from $1.50 per IP across 25 locations with unlimited-duration sessions and HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5 support. Webshare starts at $0.30 per IP on a 20-IP plan.
“Free” describes four different products in this market, and only one behaves like a trial in the ordinary sense.
The four offers behind the phrase
- Card-gated trial. Short but real test time with a payment method attached. Decodo gives 3 days and 100 MB, then charges the plan you picked unless you cancel first.
- Credit-based trial. Bright Data gives $2 on signup plus $5 after payment verification, inside a 30-day limited trial. The extra credit expires when that window closes.
- Money-back window. Not a trial. Webshare allows 48 hours on paid plans subject to usage limits, with a 0.1 GB cap on the rotating residential refund. Decodo’s 14-day guarantee stops applying once a trial is activated, so the two cannot be stacked.
- Free tier or paid starter. Webshare’s permanent free plan gives 10 datacenter proxies and 1 GB per month with no card — shared datacenter IPs, not ISP ones. NodeMaven sells 750 MB for $3.50 and runs no trial at all.
If you are still weighing static ISP addresses against ordinary datacenter ones, the ISP proxy vs datacenter proxy breakdown explains what each looks like from the server you connect to.
The Six ISP Proxy Trial Options, Ranked
Ordered by how fast you can start testing and how cleanly you can walk away, not by pool size. Every figure below comes from the providers’ current published terms.
1. Decodo (formerly SmartProxy) — instant, but the card stays on file
Decodo runs a 3-day trial with 100 MB on pay-per-GB plans, or 100 MB plus 10 IPs on pay-per-IP plans. Card, PayPal and Google Pay are the only accepted methods; crypto and wallet upgrades are blocked while the trial is active. A $1.00 pre-authorisation may appear on your statement and drops off. Trials are limited to one per product per account, and only for products you have never tried or subscribed to.
- Pros: instant activation, no sales call, and the per-IP variant hands you 10 real addresses instead of one endpoint.
- Cons: automatic charge at the end, 100 MB is thin, money-back forfeited.
Best for: a 30-minute check that a specific ISP pool reaches the targets you care about.
2. Bright Data — credits instead of calendar days
Bright Data’s trial is credit-based: $2 on signup, then $5 more once you verify a payment method, all inside a 30-day limited trial. The added $5 expires at the end of that window, so test early rather than sitting on the balance. The amounts are small against ISP pricing, which keeps the test honest — you will measure two or three specific IPs rather than run a soak test.
- Pros: no plan commitment, credit works across products, 30 days to spend it.
- Cons: verification needed for the larger portion, expiry on the extra credit, low total value.
Best for: checking a handful of addresses against one or two targets before requesting a quote.
3. Infatica — seven days for $4
Infatica’s trial runs 7 days for $4.00 with no verification step. It is not free, but $4 buys a working week without a card hold or a sales conversation, which often beats 72 hours and 100 MB. Confirm the terms on the vendor’s own page before paying, because trial structures in this market change quietly.
- Pros: a full week, cheap, no verification friction.
- Cons: not free, and the published terms are worth re-reading at checkout.
Best for: a week-long evaluation you can run alongside real client work.
4. Oxylabs — the longest window, but you have to ask
Oxylabs handles trials through a contact form, support email, live chat or a customer success representative; there is no self-service switch. Individuals get 3 days, company-verified registrations get 7, once per customer. Registration brings a one-time $5 welcome credit instead of a refund, and self-service purchases are non-refundable. ISP proxies start at $1.50 per IP, dropping toward $1.10 at enterprise scale, across 25 locations with unlimited-duration sessions. Some targets are restricted on ISP addresses and open after a short KYC check through support. Details sit on the Oxylabs ISP proxies page.
- Pros: longest window here if you can verify a company, plus unlimited-duration sessions.
- Cons: not instant, KYC gate on some targets, nothing refundable once you buy.
Best for: registered businesses that need a full week and can wait a day for onboarding.
5. Shifter — a trial that rolls into a paid plan
Shifter sells ISP proxies from $42 per month for 25 IPs with unlimited traffic, and new customers can start a trial that converts to a paid plan when it ends. Unmetered traffic removes the bandwidth arithmetic entirely: you test as hard as you like and never watch a 100 MB counter. The trade-offs are the entry price and the automatic conversion.
- Pros: unmetered traffic, no per-GB maths, workable pool size for the price.
- Cons: converts to paid, higher minimum spend, poor fit if you need two or three IPs.
Best for: teams that already know they will push steady volume.
6. Webshare — no paid trial, but a free plan that costs nothing
Webshare does not offer a free trial on paid plans. It does run a permanent free plan: 10 datacenter proxies and 1 GB per month, no credit card. Those are shared datacenter addresses, so some targets will return a block page where a real ISP address would not. Static residential starts at $0.30 per IP — 20 IPs for $6 per month, 100 for $30, down to $0.27 at 1,000 — and annual billing takes 33–50% off. Refunds run 48 hours on paid plans, subject to usage limits.
- Pros: zero-risk free plan, cheapest per-IP entry here, meaningful annual discount.
- Cons: the free tier is not ISP-grade, 48 hours is a tight refund window, usage limits apply.
Best for: budget-first buyers who want a no-card sanity check, then a $6 starter instead of a trial.
Trial Terms Side by Side
The headline duration is not the deciding detail. How you start, what happens at the end and the per-IP price afterwards matter more.
| Provider | What you get | How you start | What happens at the end | ISP price after |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decodo | 3 days, 100 MB; +10 IPs on per-IP plans | Self-serve; card, PayPal or Google Pay | Auto-charges the selected plan unless cancelled | Per-GB and per-IP plans |
| Bright Data | $2 credit, +$5 after payment verification, 30-day window | Self-serve; verification for the full credit | Extra credit expires after 30 days | Quote-based |
| Infatica | 7 days for $4.00 | Self-serve, $4 payment | Trial ends; no auto-conversion published | Quote-based |
| Oxylabs | 3 days individual, 7 days company-verified | Contact form, chat or account rep | Sales follow-up; $5 welcome credit, no refunds | From $1.50 per IP |
| Shifter | Trial that converts to a paid plan | Self-serve | Rolls into a paid plan | From $42/mo for 25 IPs, unlimited traffic |
| Webshare | No paid trial; permanent 10-proxy, 1 GB/mo free tier | Self-serve, no card | Free tier continues; 48-hour refund on paid plans | From $0.30 per IP |
Two providers stay off the table because they publish no trial terms: Proxy-Seller, listed in 2026 round-ups for flexible static ISP terms, and IPRoyal, listed for unlimited bandwidth. Ask support before you plan a test around either. If price decides it for you, the ISP proxy options ranked by price puts the per-IP costs in order.
How to Test an ISP Proxy in Three Days
A three-day window is enough if you spend the first hour measuring instead of browsing. Six checks cover almost every buying decision.
- Confirm the IP type. Run the exit address through an ASN lookup. You want an ISP or residential network name, not a cloud provider.
- Watch the address hold. Reload a target page across a few hours. If the IP changes, you have a rotating pool, not static ISP addresses.
- Test session length. Log in to a test account, wait an hour, restart the browser. Oxylabs advertises unlimited-duration sessions; verify the same behaviour on whichever pool you are trialling.
- Check geo alignment. The IP’s city and country should match the timezone, locale and WebRTC settings in the browser. A mismatch is the fastest way to make good IPs useless.
- Hit your real targets. Note whether you get the page or a block page. Include the specific domains you will actually use, not just a generic homepage.
- Extrapolate bandwidth in hour one. Watch the usage counter for your first ten page loads and multiply by your daily volume.
Where to run the test
The proxy is half the setup; the browser that holds the session is the other half. Sendwin Browser is a Chromium-based desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux where each profile keeps its own cookies, storage, sessions, fingerprint settings and proxy. Paste the HTTP or SOCKS5 endpoint from whichever trial you chose into a profile, and timezone, locale, WebRTC and geolocation follow that exit IP automatically. Send.win sells no ISP addresses and has no trial of the desktop app, but it keeps test profiles from contaminating each other, and residential bandwidth is already included on Pro (5 GB per month) and Team (20 GB).
The Bandwidth Trap: Per-IP vs Per-GB Trials
The same 100 MB means two different things depending on the billing model. On a per-GB plan it is a hard ceiling on everything you load — images, fonts, scripts, video. On a per-IP plan, traffic is usually unmetered and the limit is really how many addresses you can pull: Decodo’s per-IP trial adds 10 addresses alongside the same 100 MB, and Shifter’s paid tier is unlimited traffic from the first month.
Measure before you commit. Load your main target page ten times and read the counter. If one pass through your workflow eats a fifth of the trial, you will spend the last two days rationing instead of testing — at which point a $3.50 starter or a $6 per-IP plan is cheaper than a “free” trial you cannot finish. Residential traffic is metered almost everywhere, and that is where the cost curve flips: ISP proxies vs residential proxies breaks down which model suits steady account work and which suits burst traffic.
Matching the Trial to the Work You Actually Do
Managing client or brand accounts
Stability beats speed here. You want the same address across sessions, so a login does not appear to arrive from a new network every hour. Test that one IP holds for a full working day, and keep each account in a separate browser profile so cookies, storage and proxy settings never mix. The ISP proxy per account setup walkthrough covers the order of settings if you are starting from scratch. Use this only with accounts you own or are authorised to manage — Meta’s Business Manager roles and Amazon’s approval process for an additional seller account exist for exactly this situation.
How Send.win Helps With Isp Proxy Free Trial
Send.win is a browser profile manager for professionals and teams: every account gets its own isolated browser profile.
- Isolated profiles – separate cookies, storage and sessions per profile
- Fingerprint protection – each profile keeps its own consistent browser fingerprint, so profiles never share one browser identity
- Desktop app + cloud browser – native app for Windows, macOS and Linux, or run profiles in the cloud with no install
- Residential proxies included – on Pro and Team, with timezone and locale matched to the proxy
- Team sharing – share a signed-in profile with a teammate without sharing the password
Try the free cloud demo — no install — or download the desktop app. Paid plans start at $19/month, and your first card purchase is covered by a 7-day money-back guarantee (see pricing).
Ad verification and localised QA
You need two IPs per market, not twenty. Check that the exit IP’s city matches what the ad targeting expects, and that timezone, locale and geolocation follow the exit IP rather than the machine’s own settings. In Send.win that alignment is automatic per profile, which removes a whole class of “it looked local but reported the wrong region” bugs.
Data collection inside a site’s terms
If you collect data, the site’s terms and robots directives decide what is allowed. An ISP address does not grant permission and a trial will not change that. What the trial does tell you is throughput and whether your target serves the page or a block page — the two facts you need before signing a monthly contract.
🏆 Send.win Verdict
A proxy trial only proves something if each test runs in a clean browser identity. Send.win is not a proxy vendor and has no trial of its desktop app, but it is the layer that makes a 3-day ISP trial readable: one profile per test account, its own cookies, storage, fingerprint settings and proxy, with timezone, locale and WebRTC following the exit IP. Bring your Decodo or Oxylabs endpoint over HTTP/SOCKS5, or use the residential bandwidth included on Pro (5 GB/month) and Team (20 GB/month), then share a live session with a teammate when a client wants to see the result.
See Send.win plans — paid plans start at $19/mo, every first card purchase is covered by a 7-day money-back guarantee, and the free cloud demo runs in your browser with nothing to install.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which ISP proxy providers offer a real free trial?
Decodo runs the only instant free trial: 3 days and 100 MB, with 10 IPs added on per-IP plans. Bright Data’s is credit-based, at $2 plus $5 after payment verification. Oxylabs offers 3 days for individuals and 7 for company-verified registrations, but you have to request it through a form, chat or account representative.
Does Decodo’s ISP proxy trial require a credit card?
Yes. Decodo accepts card, PayPal or Google Pay for the trial, and a $1.00 pre-authorisation may show up and drop off. Crypto and wallet upgrades are blocked while the trial is active, and the trial is limited to one per product per account.
What happens when a proxy free trial ends?
With Decodo, the plan you selected charges automatically unless you cancel before the trial ends. Shifter’s trial converts to a paid plan. Bright Data’s added credit simply expires after 30 days. None of them keeps testing alive for free, so the end date is the most important field in the signup flow.
Is a money-back guarantee the same as a free trial?
No. A money-back window requires you to pay full price first and is usually capped by usage — Webshare’s runs 48 hours on paid plans, with a 0.1 GB cap on the rotating residential refund. Decodo’s 14-day guarantee also stops applying once you activate the trial, so the two offers cannot be stacked.
How much bandwidth do ISP proxy trials include?
Decodo allows 100 MB over 3 days. Bright Data’s combined credit works out to roughly $7 of traffic after verification, valid for 30 days. Infatica charges $4 for a 7-day window. None of these suits video-heavy workflows, so measure your burn rate in the first hour.
Can I get a free trial for static residential proxies?
Static residential is another name for ISP proxies, so the same offers apply. Decodo’s card-gated trial and Oxylabs’ request-based trial are the closest things to free ISP testing here. Webshare’s permanent free plan is genuinely free but delivers shared datacenter IPs, not static residential ones.
How do I test ISP proxies before buying a plan?
Check four things in the first hour: the ASN behind the exit IP, whether the address holds across reloads and browser restarts, whether timezone and locale follow the exit IP, and how much bandwidth ten page loads consume. Then hit your real targets in separate browser profiles so results stay attributable to the proxy.
Which ISP proxy provider has the cheapest paid starter?
Webshare, at $0.30 per IP on a 20-IP plan ($6 per month), falling to $0.27 at 1,000 IPs. Oxylabs starts at $1.50 per IP, and Shifter charges $42 per month for 25 IPs with unlimited traffic. NodeMaven is the cheapest way to test residential-style traffic at 750 MB for $3.50, but it runs no free trial.