Sometimes it takes a disruptive entry into a segment to create some competition, offering both a better feature set at a better price. This newer entry into the proxy segment, Rampage Retail is a smaller company that has only been around since summer of 2020, based out of Miami, Florida. Its goal is to be fully transparent on its providers, and also the pricing, with proxies available at wholesale cost, in whatever quantity is needed. For those worried about the quality of a lower cost offering, Rampage Retail indicates that it has proxies that it resells for leading services, such as Oxylabs, Geosurf and Smartproxy.
Also of note, this company also offers servers for use on a subscription basis.
Sounds too good to be true? Let’s delve in deeper.
Rampage Retail: Features
Rampage Retail essentially buys the proxies from a number of leading proxy services, and then resells them. They can acquire the proxies at a lower rate, as they are able to buy a higher end plan for the lower rate, and then pass the savings along to its customers. The companies it buys from includes:
- Oxylabs
- Smartproxy
- SubnetWorks
- Packetstream
- Netnut
- Private Residential
- Geosurf
- Brightdata
With such a large pool or providers, Rampage Retail is able to provide worldwide coverage. They actually claim to have proxy coverage of every single country in the world. This gives them a pool of 170+ million proxies, which is more than just about everyone, but they are really leveraging the power of all the other proxies so that they can have more, without the constraints of hosting them on their own.
A concern is that with such a hodgepodge of providers, that the experience will suffer. Thankfully, Rampage Retail also indicates that it passes along to its subscribers the info from each of its proxy providers, Furthermore, it has instituted practices to bypass anti-bot measures that some websites put into place, and work against these proxies.
Rampage Retail: Pricing
Most proxy providers have a confusing array of different plans, based on the type of proxy (rotating, static, mobile, etc), the bandwidth for the month, and the number of proxies. This results in a choice of multiple plans, with payment based on paying monthly or with annual discounts for prepaying.
Not so much with Rampage Retail, that takes more of a generic approach. This kind of goes back to Henry Ford’s famous quote “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.” Here, with Rampage Retail, there seriously is just a single choice of plan. The single choice of plan has a cost of £20.00 (about $25) each month. A Discord account is required for purchase.
We did not find any info for a free trial, or a free tier.
While the monthly price seems really good, realize that is just to join the club. Once you are a member of Rampage Retail via this monthly subscription cost, then there is a cost to use the proxy, by the GB. For example, Oxylabs goes for £6.90/GB, Smartproxy costs £6.9/GB, SubnetWorks comes in at £6.70/GB, and Geosurf a cost effective £3.25/GB. If we look at this pricing, it is a good deal, as we checked, and Smartproxy Pay as You Go plan comes in a $12.50 per gigabyte, and even the lowest volume of enterprise plan from this provider which forces you to purchase 100 GB for the month works out to a cost of $7/GB, so it is quite plausible that Rampage Retail is really passing along the cost savings to its subscribers.
Our annoyance comes that the way that this works could be explained better on the side. Truth be told, we really only started to understand this after joining the Discord server for Rampage Retail that had more detail, as the website just was not particularly clear. We prefer to not have to jump through so many hoops for just some basic pricing of any service.
Rampage Retail: Support
We looked, and found a lack of support options, as might be expected with a start up proxy option. For those that will need more hand holding, they will be better off with a fuller featured provider.
The self help support side is pretty simple to discuss, as there are literally no options. Therefore, there is not a blog, a webinar, an ebook, a forum, or any articles that we could find. Therefore, more novice users are likely to be disappointed with Rampage Retail.
Alternatively, the direct support is only marginally better. There is no phone number, nor fax. Clicking on the “Contact us,” button only opens up your email client to send an email. Reportedly, Rampage Retail can also be reached on its Discord server, or via Twitter. There is also no chat box option, nor is there a support portal for those that prefer that option.
In summary, a few direct support options are there, but they are probably not the ones that you would expect, making this feel a little ‘No frills.’
Rampage Retail: Final verdict
Rampage Retail offers a intriguing approach to accessing a proxy service. Users will like the extremely large database of proxies, the very cost effective approach, and the latest anti-bot measures. Alternatively, our concerns include the total lack of self help content, the limited direct support contact methods, and the lack of a free trial. Still, for users that want a cost effective solution to their proxy needs, while accessing the largest pool of proxies, Rampage Retail offers a service more than worth considering.
