Are mobile proxies worth the cost at scale? Honest breakdown after switching
We've been running large-scale scraping and social media operation for client projects for a while now, and mobile proxies massively improved our success rates, but the cost has become hard to ignore.
Before switching: success rates were sitting in the low 70s%, flagging constantly on datacenter and residential proxies. After switching to 4G/5G mobile proxies, we're consistently hitting the high 90s%. For hard scraping jobs and social media management, nothing else has come close.
The problem is we're now burning through roughly 1 TB/month across multiple mobile proxy providers, and the bill has roughly doubled compared to what we were paying before.
We've tried dropping back to ISP proxies and residential proxies twice to cut costs. Both times our monitoring went haywire with alerts as the success rate dropped. The organic IP reputation that mobile proxies give you is hard to replicate cheaply.
So I'm genuinely curious whether others have found a way out of this:
- Has anyone successfully replaced mobile proxies with residential or ISP proxies at scale without wrecking their success rates?
- Are there specific use cases (e.g. certain platforms or geo-targets) where you've found mobile proxies are overkill?
- Any providers where the mobile proxy pricing actually makes the ROI work for web scraping, price comparison, SMM or affiliate campaigns?
Not looking to cheap out if it tanks performance, but curious if anyone has found a smarter way to balance the cost vs. the quality mobile IPs provide.