Honeygain is the Source ecosystem’s cornerstone of infrastructure supply. Its network with powerful web access capabilities is built on a simple exchange. People agree to share the unused bandwidth of their internet connection and get paid in return. The shared bandwidth becomes a reliable, scalable, and globally distributed web data access infrastructure needed by businesses and organizations around the world.
Over 60 million members across more than 190 countries participate, running Honeygain’s app quietly in the background. A consent-based network more populous than Italy and spread across the world. Since its launch, Honeygain has paid out around $27 million to its members worldwide. Honeygain’s reliable payouts at this scale have even earned it Tipalti’s 2025 Mass Payment Award, which recognizes payout efficiency.
What makes Honeygain work is the clear relationship between both sides of the network. Members knowingly opt in, they can see exactly what they earn, and have full control over when to stop sharing or start again. Meanwhile, businesses that use their bandwidth are thoroughly vetted before gaining access.
When you build a product for millions of people, transparency cannot be a legal disclaimer buried in terms of service. It has to guide how you design every single screen, from how people opt in to how clearly they see what they earn. We look at users as respected community members who freely choose and control their participation. Trust and mutual respect are what keep the entire network running.
Sandra Krikštaponytė, Product Director at Honeygain.
Since its launch in 2019 as the first app to turn unused bandwidth into income for ordinary internet users, Honeygain’s core design has remained unchanged.
A new approach to answering infrastructure demand
Honeygain entered the scene in 2019 when residential traffic was already in high demand. The efforts to source it ethically, however, were scattered and complicated. Honeygain changed everything by offering users a simple way to agree to share their bandwidth. Through Honeygain’s first-of-its-kind app, users give consent, control their bandwidth sharing, and get rewarded.
With a simplified way to inform internet users and obtain consent, a path was opened to building much larger ethically sourced residential proxy pools. For providers like Oxylabs, always prioritizing responsible and ethical practices, this model immediately became fundamental.
Honeygain entered the then-forming Source ecosystem in 2021 as the main residential proxy sourcing partner for Oxylabs. Now, its consent-first model is one of the crucial foundations of the ecosystem’s responsible infrastructure-building practices underlying reliable web access.
The network that benefits all stakeholders
Honeygain’s model is especially influential in creating a new way for different participants in the web economy to answer each other’s needs and expand the pie. For the average internet user, leaving over 70-80% of their paid-for monthly bandwidth unused is an opportunity to get something for it.
Honeygain openly publishes what members earn, offering payouts starting at $20 via PayPal or JumpTask, and allows members to use up to 10 devices.
For businesses, it is an enormous pool of latent capacity that can help with tasks ranging from market intelligence gathering to online threat monitoring, SEO, GEO optimization, and more.
For app developers, the same consent-first model powers the Honeygain SDK, a privacy-first monetization tool. It lets developers offer their app users the opportunity to share their bandwidth for in-app benefits and rewards. Because it is fully opt-in, accesses no personal data, and maintains a minimal battery and CPU footprint, developers can add it without compromising user trust or app performance.
By connecting businesses, people using the internet, and app developers into a network that benefits all in a new way, Honeygain creates a new way to fulfill the original vision of the internet as an opportunity for various types of participants to benefit from cooperation.
Building access infrastructure responsibly
Honeygain is the market’s best solution to sourcing residential proxies – a crucial piece of web access infrastructure. As responsible access to public web data is foundational to how companies build and compete, the need for residential proxies continues to grow. But such proxy pools are only sustainable if their origin is clear, accounted for, and based on respect for the internet users.
Source is an ecosystem built on shared values. It believes in responsible, reliable access to web data that offers multiple opportunities for users and businesses. These two aspects – responsibility and reliability – support each other rather than clashing. Honeygain shows how. Its transparent practices and opt-in network that benefits all repeat the same architecture of Source and the web itself. A web of participants, a network of participants, an ecosystem of participants. Access, in every case, is what cooperation makes possible.
Honeygain, part of the Source ecosystem.
