Seven criteria that separate a reliable French mobile proxy from a cheap one

1. Who owns the line and the phone?

This is the founding question. Three models coexist: the operator that owns its lines, the reseller that buys traffic from an operator, and the marketplace that aggregates several suppliers. The first controls its quality and its price, the second adds a margin, the third controls nothing.

How can you tell? Simply ask where the phones are and who pays the mobile plans. An operator answers precisely: location, number of lines, carriers used. A reseller stays vague or points to partners. On our site the status page publishes the number of lines online in real time: information a reseller cannot provide.

2. Is throughput really unthrottled?

Many cheap offers cap throughput at 5 or 10 Mbit/s. On paper you do not see it; in practice it turns a two-hour collection into a ten-hour one. Throttling is the first hidden saving for resellers, because bandwidth is their main cost.

Our position is different: we do not sell megabits per second, we sell gigabytes. Our real variable cost is the mobile plan, not the bandwidth, so we have no interest in slowing you down. Before buying, test it: download a 100 MB file and time it. At 10 Mbit/s it takes 80 seconds; at 50 Mbit/s, 16 seconds.

3. What exactly does the advertised volume contain?

An unlimited plan that becomes unreadable after 5 GB is not unlimited. Look at three things: the volume included per period, the price of an extra gigabyte, and what happens when you go over. The worst case is automatic billing with no ceiling; the best is suspension until renewal, with the option to buy volume per unit.

The price per gigabyte is the most honest unit of comparison. French mobile carriers charge between five and fifteen euros per out-of-bundle gigabyte. If a provider asks more than five euros for an extra gigabyte, you are paying an intermediary margin.

4. Does the rotation match your use case?

Automatic rotation every 5 minutes is perfect for scraping public pages and catastrophic for multi-account work, where the same address must be kept for a session. Conversely, manual-only rotation becomes painful for a long collection.

The right provider offers both modes and lets you choose. With us: automatic rotation on shared plans (5, 10 or 15 minutes depending on the plan) and on-demand rotation on dedicated plans. To go deeper, read our article on IP rotation and what it is for.

5. Is billing in euros?

Many providers bill in dollars. For a European client that means conversion fees applied by the bank, an exchange rate that moves from month to month and VAT that is sometimes awkward to recover. An invoice in euros, issued by a French company with an intra-EU VAT number, simplifies your bookkeeping.

6. Does support speak your language?

A production block at 9 a.m. is not solved by an offshore support desk and a 48-hour queue. Test before buying: ask a technical question by email and time the answer. The more precise your message, the more revealing the reply.

With us, support is based in France and answers in English and French, with a two-hour target on business days. It is a real cost, and a deliberate one.

7. Is there a commitment or a hidden renewal?

Read the terms before paying. Some providers impose a three-month commitment, others an automatic renewal with thirty days notice. A good sign is a short, cheap trial with no auto-renewal that lets you judge on the evidence.

Our trial lasts 24 hours, is not renewed and comes with a 14-day refund for consumers. Deliberately short: it is enough to validate a configuration and measure a real success rate.

The checklist before you pay

Seven points and half a day of testing: the best investment before you hand production to a supplier. If you want to run that test with us, the trial is built for exactly that.

1. Test the egress IP and its geolocation.
2. Measure real throughput on a large file.
3. Check the price of an extra gigabyte and the overage policy.
4. Confirm which rotation modes are available and how to set them.
5. Check the billing currency and whether French VAT applies.
6. Time how long support takes to answer a technical question.
7. Read the cancellation and refund terms.

Going further

• How our French mobile network works.
• Mobile IP or datacenter IP: what really changes.
• Comparison of French mobile proxy providers.