In general, no, free proxies cannot be completely reliable. After all, the performance and security of proxies primarily depends on the number of users, and as you might have already guessed, paid proxies are used by fewer people than free ones, which means they are of higher quality and faster. But the good news is that many providers offer their users to test their proxies for free as a trial period before purchasing. One such provider is Smartproxy https://gologin.com/best-proxy-server-services/smartproxy .