Some slightly more advanced sites act as a proxy: they run your encoded file on a real server with a valid loader, then capture the of the script (not the source). This is useless for recovering source code—it only shows what the script prints to the browser, not the underlying logic.

After trying four different online decoders (each returning only error messages or empty output), they nearly paid $500 to a site claiming "100% decoding guarantee." I advised them instead to: