Free Proxy Rotation for Web Scraping: When You Need It and How to Set It Up

Most scraping doesn't need proxies. But when it does, here's how to set up rotation without paying for proxy services. When You DON'T Need Proxies Using public APIs (Reddit JSON, GitHub API, etc.) Scraping < 100 pages from one site Using proper delays (3-5 seconds between requests) Site doesn't block by IP When You DO Need Proxies Scraping 1,000+ pages from one site Site uses IP-based rate limiting Need geographic diversity (prices vary by country) Site blocks datacenter IPs Free Proxy Options 1. Apify Proxy (Free Tier) Apify includes proxy with their free plan: const { Actor } = require ( ' apify ' ); Actor . main ( async () => { const proxyConfiguration = await Actor . createProxyConfiguration (); const proxyUrl = await proxyConfiguration . newUrl (); const res = await fetch ( targetUrl , { agent : new HttpsProxyAgent ( proxyUrl ) }); }); 2. Tor Network (Free, Slow) # Install Tor brew install tor tor & # Use in Node.js via SOCKS proxy # Tor runs on socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 3. Rotate U