Zirakin/airport-recommendation: A Chinese-Language Comparison Repo for Proxy Subscription Services

What this repository actually is, and who it is written for

Despite the name, this is not a directory of airports. The repository is a Chinese-language buying guide for paid proxy subscription services, the kind sold as monthly plans with traffic quotas and described in the README as jichang. It gathers plan tables, route descriptions, device limits and client setup notes into one place so a reader can compare before paying. The README states plainly that the content is for technical exchange and pre-purchase reference, that prices, routes and service status may change, and that the provider's public page governs. It also states that the project provides no VPN client, no nodes and no network service. That last sentence matters more than the rest: the repository is documentation, not software. The intended reader is someone in the Chinese-speaking market who already understands what a subscription link is, has a client installed, and wants a shortlist rather than an explanation of the underlying protocols. There is no English translation in the repository, and the top-level entries are limited to CONTRIBUTING.md, README.md and configuration-guide.md, so the entire product is prose and tables.

How the comparison is organised: ranked table, per-provider blocks, anchor links

The mechanism is a single ranked table near the top of the README, with columns for rank, service, a recommendation score, a starting price in yuan and a one-line summary of what makes the service distinctive. Each row links by anchor to a longer block further down. Those blocks follow a repeating shape: a bullet list of claims, a screenshot, a registration link with an embedded referral code, a paragraph of assessment, a representative plan list with prices and quotas, and a short statement of who the plan suits. Twelve services appear in the table, from a 15 yuan monthly plan at the top of the ranking down to a 14 yuan plan in twelfth place. The scores are given to two decimal places, which implies a precision the methodology does not support; nowhere does the README explain how a 9.20 differs from a 9.12. The plan blocks are the useful part, because they list concrete quotas, device limits and speed caps, and several blocks add caveats that the ranking table omits. One block notes that entry plans restrict speed and node access and that unused traffic expires with the plan. Another notes that a service shares an operator with several sibling brands, so it should not be treated as a backup route for those siblings.

Installing nothing: reading the repo and configuring a client

There is nothing to install. The repository contains no package, no binary and no build step, and the README does not give a clone command. The practical first use is reading the comparison file and then following the separate configuration guide. Clone the repository if you want the text locally:

git clone https://github.com/Zirakin/airport-recommendation.git

After cloning, the two files worth opening are README.md for the plan tables and configuration-guide.md for client setup. The README recommends browsing the project online rather than through GitHub, on the stated grounds that GitHub does not allow opening external links, and it points to noderadar.online for the configuration tutorial. The workflow the README describes is: choose a plan according to your needs, purchase it, then download a client and complete configuration. The configuration guide is where the client-specific detail lives, and it covers Clash, Shadowrocket, v2rayN and sing-box among others. Because the README does not reproduce the guide's contents, you cannot judge from the README alone whether your particular client and platform are covered; that check requires opening configuration-guide.md. The repository also advises recording your account and password after registering and bookmarking either the site or the repository in case the domain or entry point changes, which is a reasonable warning given that the registration links in the README point to third-party domains rather than to the repository owner.

Where the guide is weak: self-reported metrics, missing methodology, no licence

The most conspicuous limitation is the use of availability and latency figures without any description of how they were produced. One entry is described as having a 30-day reference record of 100 percent availability, roughly 35.4 ms average latency and zero packet loss. Another carries a similar record with roughly 25.5 ms. The README does not say which vantage point, which hours, which protocol or which measurement tool produced these numbers, and it does not say whether the figures come from the operator or from the repository author. The README itself concedes that real experience depends on region, carrier, device and time of day, which undercuts the point of publishing a single average. A second weakness is that the ranking scores have no stated basis. A third is the referral links: every provider block carries a registration URL with an embedded code, and one block states that a discount code is built into the link. That does not make the comparisons false, but it does mean the ordering has a commercial dimension the README never discusses. Finally, there is no licence file among the top-level entries, so the terms on which the text can be reused are undefined, and the repository is not archived, with the most recent push on 2026-09-15.

Alternatives to reading a curated list

The obvious alternative is not another ranking repository but a different category of tool entirely. If you want to route traffic yourself, a self-hosted proxy server on a virtual private server gives you the node, the protocol choice and the traffic accounting, at the cost of running and securing the machine and accepting that a single IP is easy to block. That is a fundamentally different approach: this repository helps you buy someone else's infrastructure, while self-hosting means you own the endpoint and the failure modes. A second alternative is a commercial VPN with a published privacy policy and a jurisdiction you can look up, which trades the flexible per-app routing that Clash and sing-box offer for a single client and a single operator. A third is simply reading each provider's own public plan page, which is more work but removes the intermediary and the referral code. The repository's value over that third option is aggregation and the client setup guide, not verification. Nothing in the README suggests the author has purchased or measured every plan listed.

Maintenance, update cadence and what the licence silence means

The repository is not archived, and the most recent push was on 2026-09-15, two days after the version 1.0.4 release and the same day as version 1.0.5. Releases are frequent and closely spaced: version 1.0.2 on 2026-09-08, version 1.0.4 on 2026-09-13, version 1.0.5 on 2026-09-15. The release notes themselves are not reproduced in the repository, so what changed between them is not documented. For a price-comparison document, a fast release cadence is the right shape, because stale prices are worse than no prices, but it also means any copy you keep will drift. There is no licence file among the top-level entries, which leaves the reuse terms of the text undefined; if you intend to republish or translate the tables, that is a question to resolve with the repository owner rather than an assumption you can make. This is a description of the repository state, not legal advice. One further maintenance cost is structural: the README contains a commented-out block for a service that has been taken offline, with a note that the images and data are retained so the recommendation can be restored by uncommenting. That pattern keeps history but means the raw README contains entries that no longer render.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository only as a starting checklist if you already know which client you run and you treat the tables as a dated snapshot rather than a live price list. Do not adopt it if you need an English-language source, an audited vendor list, or anything resembling a guarantee of uptime. Before you buy anything, open configuration-guide.md and confirm it covers your exact client, then verify the current price and refund terms on the provider's own public page, because the repository states that prices, routes and service status may change and that the provider page is authoritative. The licence file is absent, so the reuse terms of the text itself are undefined.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. Project website
3. README
4. Releases
5. Zirakin/airport-recommendation on GitHub