Sneaker proxies for queues, raffles and limited drops
Most drops are now raffles and queues, where a stable identity matters more than milliseconds. Static ISP IPs hold one address from queue to checkout for $2.00 per IP per month, with unlimited traffic.
Static, one customer per address, billed monthly.
Queue pages and monitors burn bandwidth; here it is not metered.
Dedicated bandwidth per address.
Swap an ISP IP once in its first day if it does not fit your target.
How drops work now
The first-come-first-served stampede is mostly gone. Nike moved SNKRS Pass to a draw with extra bot filtering in March 2022. Its own SNKRS pages now put bots at 10–50% of entries depending on the launch and say it stops up to 12 billion bot calls a month; in 2023 its SNKRS lead said nearly half the entries on hyped releases were bots.
Shopify Plus stores can switch on bot protection that puts a CAPTCHA checkpoint in front of checkout for events of up to 60 minutes and up to 500 products. Large retailers sit behind bot-management systems such as Akamai Bot Manager, which scores every request from 0 to 100 on fingerprint and behaviour, or Kasada, which uses changing proof-of-work challenges.
The consequence is simple. In raffles and queues the bottleneck is how many of your entries pass verification, not how fast they arrive. A proxy’s value is a stable, believable identity for the whole session; the IP gets you assessed, it does not get you approved.
The market has cooled too: the share of releases reselling above retail fell from 58% in 2020 to 47% in 2024, with typical margins of 10–25%. Hype has spread to trading cards and collectibles, and the same mechanics apply there.
Which proxy for which kind of release
Retailers change protection between releases, so treat this as a starting point and test before release day.
| Release or site type | Proxy | Session | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raffle entries (SNKRS-style draws) | Residential or ISP | One account per IP, sticky | The account’s country |
| Queue-based sites (Foot Locker group and similar) | ISP | Hold the IP 10–30 min through the queue | The store’s country |
| Shopify Plus stores with bot protection | ISP | Same IP from checkpoint to payment | The store’s country |
| Smaller Shopify boutiques | ISP or Datacenter | One IP per task | Close to the store |
| European retailers | ISP or Residential | Sticky | The store’s country, e.g. Germany for .de shops |
| Creating accounts | Mobile | Sticky, 30–60 min | The account’s country |
| Monitors and CAPTCHA harvesters | Datacenter | Static | Anywhere fast; never your checkout IPs |
Reviewed October 2026. Retailer protections change without notice.
What you get with our ISP proxies
An ISP proxy is a static IP registered to a consumer internet provider and hosted on a server. Retail anti-bot systems see a home-broadband network; your bot gets a server’s uptime and speed.
Every address is sold to one customer while you rent it, and carries unlimited traffic on a 1 Gbps port. Check the network behind each address yourself after purchase (the ASN should be a consumer ISP), and if one does not fit your target, replace it once within 24 hours.
Be sceptical of ping claims, ours included. Northern Virginia, home of AWS us-east-1, is the largest data-center market in the US, and many bot servers and ISP ranges sit there; whether that shortens the path to a given store depends on where the store is served from. For raffles and queues, latency barely matters; consistency does.
Other proxy types on release day
Raffle entries at scale
Real household IPs for draws where each entry is a separate account. $4.80 → $2.70 per GB, sticky up to 60 minutes, traffic never expires.
MobileAccount creation
Carrier IPs for signing up retailer accounts the way people do, on a phone network. Same per-GB tiers as residential.
DatacenterMonitors and harvesters
Dedicated IPs with unlimited traffic and up to 10 Gbps for restock monitors and CAPTCHA harvesters. $1.20 per IP per month.
How many IPs your release calendar needs
Plan one ISP IP per checkout task and a few datacenter IPs for monitors. The same IP can serve the same task on different retailers, but never two tasks on one site.
$50.00 per month at $2.00 per IP
$6.00 per month at $1.20 per IP
Unlimited traffic on both, billed monthly.
Self-serve orders go up to 100 IPs per product. Larger blocks for a release calendar are arranged with sales.
Release-day checklist
- Load and test the full IP list the evening before, not ten minutes before the drop.
- Map one IP to one task and one account, and write the mapping down.
- Never rotate in the middle of a checkout. Hold the session from queue to payment.
- Keep monitors and harvesters on datacenter IPs, away from checkout addresses.
- Check our status page before the drop. Support is live in chat around the clock.
- Replace a flagged ISP IP in its first 24 hours, not on release morning.
- Respect store purchase limits. One pair per person means one pair per person.
- Log what worked on each site. Protection changes from one release to the next.
Is your proxy really ISP?
Not every “sneaker proxy” is what it claims. Castle, an anti-bot company, bought a plan sold as sneaker proxies and analysed 4,287 of its IPs: more than 99% sat in datacenter networks.
Check before you rely on an address. Look up its ASN: a consumer ISP such as Comcast, AT&T or Spectrum is what you paid for; a hosting company is not. It takes one request.
curl -x 198.51.100.24:8080 -U "user_7f2:PASS" https://ipinfo.io/json
# "org": "AS7922 Comcast Cable Communications, LLC" -> consumer ISP
# "org": "AS24940 Hetzner Online GmbH" -> hosting, not ISPWhy monthly, and no day passes
ISP and datacenter IPs are rented by the month, 1 to 100 IPs per order, with unlimited traffic and no volume discount. There are no day or week passes on purpose: an address keeps a clean history across releases only if one customer holds it for longer than a weekend.
Running a bigger calendar? Talk to sales about a custom block above 100 IPs, and plan residential gigabytes for raffle entries separately, since they never expire.
Store rules and the law
- Purchase limits and the terms of the stores you buy from apply with or without a proxy.
- Bot laws so far cover event tickets, not sneakers: the US BOTS Act, point 23a of EU Directive 2019/2161 and the UK’s 2018 secondary-ticketing rules. The Stopping Grinch Bots Act (S.3516), introduced in the US Senate on 17 December 2025, would extend similar rules to retail purchase limits; no further action has been recorded.
- ChronoProxy does not support ticket bots or ticketing use cases.
Sneaker proxy questions
Proxies used by sneaker bots to give each checkout task its own IP address. Today they are mostly static ISP proxies, because queues and checkpoints reward an identity that stays the same for the whole session.
ISP for checkout tasks, residential or ISP for raffle entries, mobile for creating accounts and datacenter only for monitors and CAPTCHA harvesters.
One IP per task. Ten tasks on a release means ten ISP IPs; add a few datacenter IPs if you run monitors.
Yes, the same IP can run the same task on different retailers. Do not run two tasks on one site from one IP.
We do not publish a “works on” list, because retailers change protection between releases and no honest provider can guarantee results. Test on the sites you target and replace an address within 24 hours if needed.
Hold one IP through the whole queue or checkout, typically 10–30 minutes. ISP IPs are static, so that is automatic; residential sticky sessions last up to 60 minutes.
An IP in the store’s country. For US stores, East Coast addresses sit close to many hosting regions; for EU stores, use the store’s country, such as Germany for .de shops.
No. ISP and datacenter IPs carry unlimited traffic under a fair-use policy, which matters on queue pages that refresh constantly.
Consumer providers in each country. Look up each address’s ASN after purchase: it should belong to a consumer ISP, not a hosting company, and you can replace an address once within 24 hours.
Replace it within the first 24 hours of the rental. After that, the address is yours for the month; add a spare or two if a release matters.
No. ISP and datacenter IPs are rented monthly so that each address keeps a clean, single-customer history.
Bot laws in the US, EU and UK so far target event tickets, not retail goods, but store terms and purchase limits still apply, and a US bill to extend the rules to retail was introduced in December 2025. This is not legal advice.
No. Ticketing use cases are not supported on ChronoProxy.