Free anti-detect browser: what the zero-cost plan actually leaves out

"Free" is not one thing

Every figure in this article was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-08-12. Nothing here is a benchmark or a lab result — it is what each company publishes about its own zero-cost tier, transcribed without smoothing. Where a page does not state something, this article says so rather than guessing, and you should be suspicious of any comparison that does otherwise.

The first thing the numbers show is that "free plan" describes at least three different commercial ideas. Some vendors use it as a permanent small allowance. One uses it as a decaying trial dressed as a plan. One does not count profiles at all and meters concurrency and usage minutes instead. Reading them as if they were the same product is how people end up disappointed in week two.

It helps to be explicit about why a free tier exists at all, because the answer shapes what you get. A free plan in this category is an acquisition instrument: it costs the vendor real money in support and, when traffic is bundled, in bandwidth, and it is priced to be just large enough that a serious operator outgrows it quickly. That is not cynicism, it is how the model works, and it tells you something useful — the free allowance is calibrated to the size at which the vendor believes you should start paying. When a vendor gives you two profiles and a competitor gives you five, you are reading two different bets about who their customer is, not two different levels of generosity.

Does the free plan cover TLS, or only the JavaScript fingerprint?

This is the question the category is built around, and the honest answer is uncomfortable: none of the six pages says. Not on the free tier, not on the paid tiers. We read every plan comparison table on all six sites the same day and found no mention of TLS, of the handshake, of JA3 or of JA4 anywhere in them.

That is not evidence that free plans ignore the layer. It is evidence that you cannot learn the answer by shopping. Which makes it, conveniently, the only property in this entire comparison that you can settle yourself in a minute — because a server that receives your handshake can tell you exactly what it looks like, while no amount of marketing copy can.

What six free plans actually publish

Collected on 2026-08-12from each vendor's pricing page. Read the notes column before comparing the profile numbers — it carries most of the meaning.

Three observations that the table makes obvious and the marketing does not. First, the spread on the headline number is small — two to five profiles for everyone with a permanent allowance. Second, Incogniton's ten is a two-month figure that becomes three, which is a materially different offer from a permanent ten. Third, Kameleo is not comparable on this axis at all: it meters concurrent browsers and usage minutes, so a free user there has effectively unlimited local profiles and a hard ceiling on how long and how many at once.

Where the zero-cost plan usually stops

Not at the profile count. The profile count is the limit everyone reads and the one that rarely bites first, because most people evaluating a tool are running three or four accounts anyway. These are the limits that actually end the free ride:

• Team seats. Four of the six free tiers publish zero or one seat. The moment a second person needs access, the free plan is over — and sharing one login is not a workaround, it is a security incident with a delay fuse.
• Automation access. Multilogin lists API access on its free tier; most do not mention it at all. If your workflow involves any scripted launch, this is usually the first paid wall you hit.
• Synchronisation and backup. A free tier almost always means one machine. That is fine until the machine dies, at which point the value of your profiles turns out to have been the sessions inside them.
• Time, on the plans that decay. A tier that shrinks after sixty days is a trial. Nothing wrong with trials — but plan the migration before day sixty, not on day sixty-one.

There is a fifth limit that no page lists because it is not a limit the vendor imposes: your own machine. Every profile is a browser instance with its own storage and its own process tree. Three or four open at once is unremarkable; a dozen on a laptop with eight gigabytes of memory turns into swapping, and a browser that is starved of memory behaves in ways that look nothing like a normal user session. If a free tier ever feels generous enough to open ten profiles simultaneously, check the hardware before you celebrate.

The traffic allowance is the limit nobody reads

Only one of the six free tiers publishes a bundled traffic figure, and it is a one-time allowance: 200 MB on Multilogin's free plan, alongside 30 one-time mobile minutes. Everyone else either does not mention traffic or, in Dolphin Anty's case, lists proxy protocol support (HTTP, SOCKS5, SOCKS4, SSH) which is not the same thing as a quota — it means the browser can connect through a proxy you supply.

Two hundred megabytes sounds like a lot to anyone who last thought about bandwidth in the era of text pages. Inside a modern advertising dashboard, with its charts, media previews and constant polling, it is an afternoon. After that you are buying residential traffic from a proxy vendor, and that bill is usually larger than the software subscription you were trying to avoid.

The AlterAntiX free tier: what is in it

Three profiles on one device, running Chromium, each with its own generated fingerprint, its own proxy assignment and the same TLS impersonation layer the paid profiles use. We do not gate the concealment behind the price, because gating it would make the free tier a demonstration of something other than the product.

What is excluded: cloud sync, the scheduler, bulk profile generation, the local automation API and multi-browser support beyond Chromium. Those are the features that scale an operation, and they are the ones we intend to charge for.

When free is enough, and when it quietly costs more

Free is enough when the number of accounts you hold fits the allowance with room to spare, when you run one machine, and when you already have a proxy source you trust. That describes a large share of affiliates testing a single offer and freelancers managing two clients, and there is no reason for those people to pay anybody.

Free starts costing you at one specific moment: when the allowance runs out and you decide to put two accounts in the same profile rather than upgrade. That is the decision that raises risk, and it raises it for a concrete, mechanical reason — cookies, local storage and session tokens from both accounts now live in the same container, and the platform can see the overlap without any fingerprinting at all. You did not save money; you moved the cost from your invoice to your accounts.

The arithmetic on that trade is brutal and rarely written down. Take the cheapest paid entry in this market as collected the same day — US$9 a month for ten profiles — and put it against a single restricted advertising account with campaigns running, a warmed-up audience and a client waiting for a report. The subscription is the price of a lunch; the restriction costs days of revenue and a conversation nobody wants to have. Even at generous odds the upgrade wins, and the only reason the decision feels close is that the subscription is visible on a statement while the risk is not.

And to keep the ceiling visible: upgrading does not buy immunity either. Most account losses trace back to behaviour, documentation and policy rather than to a device signal, which is the whole argument of why accounts get banned. A paid plan that lets you keep one account per profile removes one category of risk. It does not remove the category that ends most accounts.

How to test whether your free plan is actually protecting you

Do not take this article's word for any of it, including the parts about us. The whole comparison above is transcription of what vendors publish; the part that matters is what your specific setup emits, and that is measurable.

• Open your everyday browser, run the fingerprint checkerand save the report. This is your baseline — the "no protection" reading.
• Open a profile in whatever free plan you are evaluating, run the same check, and put the two side by side. Every value that did not change is a value the tool is not handling.
• Reload three times inside the profile and watch the canvas hash. Stable is correct; changing on every read is noise without a seed, which is its own signature.
• Compare the reported handshake against the browser version the profile claims. If the two describe different browsers, the JavaScript layer is doing work the transport layer is undoing.

The full sequence, step by step and with the expected values for each block, is in how to test if your browser is leaking. If you want a third data point for the comparison, the AlterAntiX desktop build is free and takes a couple of minutes to install — download it here, point one profile at the same proxy you are using now, and run the identical check. Three reports on one screen settle more arguments than any table.