itch.io Proxies for Indie Devs Testing in the US

itch.io is where a lot of indie games live first: jam entries, demos, pay-what-you-want releases and browser games that run straight on the page. Many of the people who click through are on phones, and a large share of them are in the United States. If you are building from somewhere else, you rarely see your page the way those players do. A BetterProxies line is one real US carrier SIM in an American metro, dedicated to you. For an itch.io developer, it is a testing tool: real mobile latency, a US checkout view and the network conditions your HTML5 build will actually meet.

Your HTML5 build on a real carrier connection

Browser games on itch.io load inside an iframe, pulling your engine's files and assets on first play. On your development machine, with a fast wired connection and a warm cache, everything appears instantly. On a phone in a US city on 4G, it can be a very different story: a long blank frame while a large data file downloads, audio that stalls, or a WebGL build that runs out of memory before the title screen. Opening your game page on a laptop or phone through a US carrier line gives you real mobile latency and throughput rather than a browser's simulated slow-network profile.

Test with an empty cache, time how long it takes to become playable, and note what the player sees while waiting. A loading bar and a smaller initial download often matter more than any gameplay change. Try both a 4G line and a 5G line to see the range a real American audience will bring.

The page and checkout as an American visitor sees them

itch.io lets you set a price, a minimum or a pay-what-you-want suggestion, and buyers pay through the payment options you enable. What a US visitor sees at checkout, including the currency, the suggested amount and the payment choices, is worth confirming before you launch or run a sale. Open your page logged out through a US line on a phone. Check that the download buttons are clear, the screenshots load, the description renders the way you intended and the purchase dialog is readable on a small screen.

Do not use the line to buy your own game to inflate numbers, leave ratings from extra accounts or push a jam entry. itch.io treats that as manipulation, and it is not what the line is for.

Multiplayer and web backends

If your game talks to a server, whether it is a WebSocket backend for a browser game or a UDP backend for a downloadable build, carrier-grade NAT will eventually test it. Every US mobile carrier puts subscribers behind shared public addresses with no inbound connections. Route a test client through a line with UDP over SOCKS5 support and join your own server. Check that connections establish without port forwarding, that reconnects work after the carrier changes the public address, and that your rate limiting does not treat many players sharing one IP as an attack. That last one bites small backends often.

Rotate the IP from your dashboard between tests. The new address comes from the carrier's regional pool, which is finite, so you may see an address repeat later in the day, which is normal carrier behaviour.

Uploads, butler and your data allowance

Each plan includes 15 GB of data per day. Browsing your page and playing your build many times fits easily; pushing new builds does not need to. Upload with butler from your normal connection, then switch to the line for testing. That keeps the allowance for the job only the line can do: showing you what a US mobile player experiences.

If your game is a jam entry, test it on the line before the deadline rather than after. Judges and players often open entries on phones during breaks, and a build that takes a minute to show anything on 4G may never get played at all.

Setting up a itch.io proxy on BetterProxies

1. Order a 4G line in a large US metro such as Houston, New York or Los Angeles.
2. Upload your latest build with butler over your normal connection.
3. Set the host, port and credentials in your phone's Wi-Fi proxy settings or your browser.
4. Clear the cache, open your game page and time how long it takes to become playable.
5. Check the page layout and checkout dialog on a small screen.
6. For online games, run a test client with UDP over SOCKS5 and rotate between runs.

itch.io proxy questions