
Ten years ago, proxycheck.io opened its doors with a single purpose: give developers and website operators a fast, reliable way to detect proxy and VPN traffic. A lot has changed since then, but our purpose hasn't.
We started as a simple API, just a single page service and completely free. Today, proxycheck.io is a globally distributed, multi-region detection platform fielding billions of queries every month for customers ranging from solo developers running hobby game servers to enterprise businesses protecting their platforms at scale. This birthday post is a chance to look back at how we got here, celebrate what we've built, and share a little about where we're headed next.
The world we launched into
When proxycheck.io launched, the proxy landscape looked very different. The overwhelming majority of proxied traffic ran through free, open proxy servers — poorly maintained machines with forwarded ports, scraped from lists updated every few hours. Detection was a relatively straightforward cat-and-mouse game: collect the IPs, publish a list, update it regularly.
Ten years on, that world is gone. The rise of residential proxy networks - services that route traffic through millions of ordinary consumer devices using mobile broadband and home broadband connections - has fundamentally changed what detection means. You can't just block a datacenter range anymore. You're contending with addresses that look, to every other system, exactly like a real home user in a real city. Keeping up with that shift is perhaps the defining technical challenge of our second decade.
A timeline of the last ten years
2016 - Service launches with the v1 API
2017 - Inference engine added and honeypots
2018 - v2 API ships; bulk IP checking is added with a new API format
2019 - Risk scores, attack history & custom rules introduced
2020 - CORS support & North American infrastructure goes live
2021 - VPN operator cards; dark mode dashboard; Asian infrastructure goes live
2022 - Postcodes added to the API; HA improvements; Unified Changelog;
2023 - timezones & currency data added to the API
2025 - v3 API beta begins; confidence scores are added;
2026 - 100 times improvement in residential proxy coverage; detection history added; 10th birthday
And alongside those major features we redesigned many things, the dashboard saw lots of love, the web interface, the lookup pages, our API documentation and the site in general with our light/dark glass themes and navigation bar.
Milestones we're proud of
2019: Custom Rules We gave customers the ability to write their own logic on top of our API. Whether whitelisting cloud gaming services, blocking specific VPN operators or entire nations this feature lets you do it all. This feature that started with just 3 rules allowed per account has grown to become one of the most popular features we offer, in-fact thouands of accounts have created or imported at-least one rule each. This was such a monumental feature for us as it was extremely complicated to implement and took a massive amount of engineering effort.
2020: First servers outside Europe For the first three years, every request routed through our European infrastructure. The launch of our North American cluster was a milestone: suddenly customers in the Americas saw dramatically lower latency, and we had real geographic redundancy for the first time. This was a big monetary commitment to invest in our potential growth and acquire more customers in North America, it did pay off and we've since expanded our infrastructure there twice aswell as adding servers in Asia.
2021: VPN Operator Cards Rather than just returning "VPN: yes", we began telling customers which VPN operator controlled an address, with rich metadata they could build real logic around. The operator intelligence in our new 2026 v3 API - including cross-operator detection and specific service classification - is a direct evolution of this original idea.
The thing we've never changed
Across every API version, every server upgrade, and every pricing revision, one thing has stayed constant: our free plan. One thousand queries per day, with full access to the exact same data and detection accuracy as every paid plan. No degraded results, no watermarked data, no bait-and-switch.
We've also kept something else consistent: our pricing philosophy. When we raise prices - as we did for the first time in six years this past January - existing subscribers kept their existing rate. Loyalty is rewarded here, not penalised. The price you initially subscribed at is the price you pay until that subscription is changed or cancelled.
Thank you, truly.
None of this exists without the people who trusted proxycheck.io early - the platform operators who integrated us into their first Minecraft servers, their early WordPress blogs, their website authentication systems. The developers who wrote libraries, plugins and applications that integrated our API. The customers who sent us bug reports and feature requests. You all made this service what it is and we won't ever forget that.
Ten years. Here's to the next ten, thanks for reading and have a wonderful week.







