Please help me find a perpetually free way to forcibly connect one (or a few) specific app(s) through a SOCKS5 proxy, without setting said proxy as system-wide, on Windows 10.
Context:
I have AdGuard VPN running in SOCKS5 proxy mode in tandem with AntiZapret browser extension to get around censorship and geoblocking. However, I now have 2 apps (possibly more in the future) that I would like to also route though it (by connecting them to the virtual proxy) to avoid the new restrictions my ISP is now enforcing that break the aforementioned apps.
Problem is, both apps do not have their own proxy settings, and I do not want to set up AdGuard as system-wide proxy because
- AdGuard provides limited monthly traffic which I want to conserve;
- My ISP may statistically detect that I am using a VPN to get around blocks and block it, so I’d like to avoid routing all traffic through a single address so that doesn’t happen.
I could try to find a different VPN service for this, but it may be hard as free, trustworthy and working anti-censorship tools are in short supply. I could also move away from using Adguard in proxy mode and use its own split tunneling logic (which supports per-app split tunneling), but then I’d lose the automated blocked site list that Antizapret works on along the free proxies it provides for sites in said list. Also, I cannot (easily) make international purchases from where I live, so paid options won’t work. And so far my research has only turned up paid software (Proxifier and ProxyCap) which doesn’t provide any perpetually free usage plan.
