r/ProxyUseCases

Hey folks. We ran a quick benchmark last week across 8 residential proxy providers for a price-tracking use case that we're working on. Sharing the numbers since most "comparisons" out there are clearly affiliate bait. Methodology (disclosing this upfront): 500 requests per provider, same rotating residential tier, tested against Cloudflare-protected targets, Amazon, Walmart included. Measured 200 OK rate and median response time. No free trials, paid out of pocket for each (business budget).

Providers	Success Rate	Median Latency	Additional Comments
Oxylabs	97.8%	0.74s	Good consistent geo coverage, few error codes
Decodo	97.1%	0.79s	Strong value at mid-tier pricing
Bright Data	96.6%	0.83s	Pricing is crazy for smaller scale, but stable IPs
NetNut	95.2%	0.69s	Fast but more blocks on Walmart
SOAX	94.7%	0.95s	Good for geo-targeting, slower in general
NodeMaven	93.8%	1.02s	Surprised us, better than expected, we haven't heard of NodeMaven before, decided to try it out
Rayobyte	91.3%	1.14s	Decent for low-tier targets
Webshare	89.6%	1.31s	Cheap, but comes with downsides, such as latency and success rate

Oxylabs takes the top spot on consistency and geo targeting. Decodo punches above its price. Bright Data's IP quality is still up there but the cost structure doesn't make sense unless you're pushing serious volume, mainly oriented towards Enterprises, which is understandable. If you're running under 50GB/month, skip Bright Data entirely, the per-GB cost at that volume doesn't add up. Unless of course, you'd like to test it out like we did.

Anyone run these against tougher targets like Ticketmaster or Zillow? Would like to understand how the performance shifts on all of these providers once you target something really "heavy".

Any other providers for suggestions to test them out? I know the main ones are the big players in the market, but sometimes "Mid-tier" providers works well too for decent pricing if you're not scaling. I guess it's also possible to just utilize dedicated scraping solutions, might be cheaper, and you don't have to worry about maintaining the IPs, as all of the infra is managed by the provider

Okay, so I've been in the web scraping game for quite some time now. I was browsing the GitHub top-100 stars list yesterday and saw it sitting at #73 globally with over 120k stars. That's ahead of Node.js. That's in the same breath as projects that have been around for a decade. For context, at the end of 2024 they celebrated 20k stars. They raised their Series A in August 2025 at 43k stars. Now it's 120k+. That's roughly 3x growth in under a year, for what is essentially a web scraping API aimed at AI developers. What in the world happened? How did a scraping API beat Node.js in stars? The repo describes itself as "search, scrape, and clean the web for AI agents." Useful, I'd say. But 120k-star useful?? There are open-source alternatives like Crawl4AI with 65k stars doing very similar things for free. Is it just incredible timing with the AI/RAG pipeline wave, or is there genuine technical moat here that the community is rewarding? My main main concern is the star count organic? I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but a jump from ~20k to 120k in roughly 16 months is one of the most aggressive trajectories I've seen outside of projects with massive corporate backing (and I'm thinking of Microsoft's markitdown). FireCrawl got $14.5M Series A from Nexus and YC. Is any of that marketing spend showing up in developer mindshare as stars? I'm genuinely curious how you break into the GitHub top-100 that fast. Additionally, can someone explain the pricing to me without making my head hurt? On the surface it looks simple: 1 credit = 1 page scraped. But the moment you turn on anything useful, AI extraction, JSON output, Enhanced Mode, you're burning 5–9 credits per page. The Hobby plan at $16/month gives you 3,000 credits, which sounds great until you realize that's only ~333 pages with JSON + Enhanced Mode enabled. A 500-page website on the Hobby plan exceeds your entire monthly allowance in a single scrape. Now before someone says "just self-host it", that's an option, yes, it's AGPL-3.0 open source. But the self-hosted version is deliberately crippled: no Fire-Engine (their proprietary anti-bot system), no proxy rotation, no Actions endpoint, no browser sandbox. The stuff that actually makes it worth paying for is cloud-only. AGPL also means commercial self-hosting has licensing implications your legal team needs to look at and that's if you're within a company, if you're a an individual developer, well, that can get quite expensive. To be fair, the product genuinely seems excellent. Zapier, Shopify, Replit, and Apple are customers. The clean markdown output uses 67% fewer tokens than raw HTML. The MCP server integration means you can pipe live web data straight into Cursor or Claude. That's real value, and the community clearly feels it. But I keep coming back to the same question: is this one of the best-marketed developer tools of the AI era, or is it genuinely the best technical solution? Someone kindly explain what is going on with firecrawl

Please help a nubie 🙏

Edit:

Which of the three options is riskier?

1. Go through with sms and passport verification on this bad proxy setup
2. Switch to Mobile proxy on a mobile device for the verification step
3. Delete existing unverified account, create a new one on mobile proxy but if they store the information about the user with bad proxy, I have a problem. My First name is plastered all over the existing account (username, profile name and it's even in the email adress). I will have to use it during verification with passport picture on the new account. This might link the account with bad proxy with account that I want to create

Old post:

What do you think would be less suspicious: to finish account creation on the same setup that I started or switch to mobile proxy? They are still gonna ask for sms verification (my friend in the country of IP will help me with that). Maybe somewhere around that sms verification they will also be checking my proxy more vigorously…

The account is for Fiverr and it likes to ban its users’ account for the smallest things sometimes.The IP is Poland, right now I have ISP proxy from Brightdata that draws many suspiciouns, bans and Captchas on many websites.Suspitiously, the Internet Service Provider is Ukranian even though the IP is in Poland. Decodo and Oxylab don’t even have Polish IPs

Please help 🙏. I'm new to this but I read Reddit for couple of days 😅.

I need antidetect browsers and proxy to create Fiver account for Poland (I'm in. And I don't want it to get banned later on.

Is it normal that different antidetect browsers with ISP proxy (from Bright Data) cannot access Google search, Facebook, Scamalytics among other websites? And I'm often getting checkbox captcha and sometimes I cannot go through it.

I tried Dolphin{anti}, Gologin and Multilogin. Only Gologin doesn't not get detected on Iphey. But on all of them Iphey detects the use of proxy.

Is it a problem with proxy, antidetect browsers, fingerprint? Should I create cookies before going on Fiver or don't bother?

About fingerprint:

-Only thing that seems weird about fingerprint is the screen size that gologin profile creates (1536*842). When I try to increase it they put a warning sign, like it's not recommended to do so.

-The language doesn't seem to matter for proxy getting detected

About proxy:

-I chose dedicated ISP proxy on Bright Data. I don't wanna risk getting residential and have IP change in the middle of the session. I read that you cannot always trust sticky sessions. Also they are too short on Bright Data (up to 30 min). Don't wanna use less trustworthy proxy provider.

-For some reason the proxy belongs to Ukrainian Internet Service Provider even though the Proxy is for Warsaw (Poland). Kinda suspicious 🤔. But people are saying that Bright Data proxies are the best...

-Other things about this proxy might be suspicious according to IP2Location:

Usage Type (DCH) Data Center/Web Hosting/Transit

Address Type (U) Unicast

Category (IAB19-11) Data Centers

Fraud Score 99

Is Proxy Yes

Proxy Type (VPN) VPN Server

Domain ukrtelecom ua

Hi there I set up some mobile proxies for my own scraping using 6 Android phones on Jio/Airtel.

They’ve been working surprisingly well, so I thought maybe others here could use them too. I’ve been testing everything myself and now trying to see if this can become a small business.

What it is:

• 6 real 5G Android phones on Indian carriers
• SOCKS5 rotating proxies
• Sticky sessions available
• Unlimited bandwidth (with some fair-use nuances)

Format:
socks5://API_KEY:x@DOMAIN/IP_ADDRESS:PORT

What works well:

• Anti-bot systems like Cloudflare/Akamai trust real mobile ASN more than datacenter IPs
• For sites where residential proxies get flagged fast, mobile IPs usually last longer
• Real Indian mobile IPs, not resi resellers

What’s lacking right now:

• Only 6 phones currently, so the pool is still small
• India-only for now (US latency around 80–150ms can be hire as well)
• Not magic, not the fastest just real mobile IPs from actual devices

If people actually want this, I can scale it pretty fast:

• 10 more proxies in 1 day
• Around 50 proxies in 5–7 business days

Pricing:
Still figuring this out honestly.
Right now I’m just doing $20/month flat while testing.

If anyone wants to try it, DM me and I’ll send a trial key.
No card needed.

Works with:
Python requests, Scrapy, Playwright, curl, etc.

I’m the one running everything myself, so support is direct too.

I've been following the OpenAI lawsuits and the one detail I can't stop thinking about: a 19-year-old asked ChatGPT about mixing sedatives, it acknowledged the combo "could be risky", then gave him dosages anyway, added Benadryl to the recommendation, and told him to go lie in a dark room instead of seeking help. He died. Source. The Canadian case is somehow worse. OpenAI's own safety team flagged the shooter's account for "gun violence activity and planning" months before the attack and pushed to notify authorities. Management said no. Source. At some point "we're just a general-purpose tool" stops being a defense. Where that point is, that's what these trials are actually going to decide. Guardrails are coming whether the industry wants them or not. Every lawsuit forces a paper trail. And when harmful outputs become liability, the instinct is aggressive filtering, mandatory escalation triggers, activity logging with retention policies. Fine for consumer chat, however, for more tech enthusiasts its going to be brutal. Now the real risk for scraping and agentic workflows is over-correction. If "how do I access this data at scale" gets flagged the same way "how do I build a weapon" does, open-weights models win by default. It would make me want to just run it locally and skip the compliance layer entirely. The smarter play would be tiered access, stricter defaults for consumer products, more permissive behavior for verified API users with actual business context, but that requires product nuance, and right now OpenAI is in legal defense mode.

My bet is that we should expect more API friction over the next 12-18 months. Local models are about to get a lot more interesting.

Every proxy type gets hyped for different reasons.

Residential proxies get sold as the “safe” option.
Mobile proxies get treated like the premium answer to everything.
ISP proxies are often pitched as the best middle ground.
Datacenter proxies are either called useless or underrated, depending on who you ask.

Personally, I think the answer depends a lot on the use case, but I’m curious what people here think.

Which proxy type do you think is the most overrated, and why?

Aight, listen up, Imma keep it real with you. I know this is going to rub some people the wrong way, but I've been doing this long enough to feel confident saying it, most of you don't have a proxy problem, you have a fingerprint problem, and you're spending $200+/month on residential bandwidth to brute-force your way around it. I get it. Residential proxies feel like the safe default. The IP looks clean (for those who are checking by these fraud scores), it passes basic geo checks, and every provider markets them like they're the golden ticket. if your TLS fingerprint screams "Python requests library" or your browser automation is leaking navigator properties that no real Chrome session would ever have, it genuinely does not matter how pristine your IP is. Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, they all fingerprint the client now, not just the address. A burnt datacenter IP with a properly spoofed JA3 hash and realistic header order will outperform a fresh residential IP attached to a naked requests.get() call nine times out of ten. I ran a test a few weeks ago, across about 15 mid-sized e-commerce sites protected by Cloudflare. Datacenter proxies with curl-impersonate had a ~91% success rate. Residential proxies with default Python requests headers? Around 60%. The residential IPs were objectively "better" IPs, they just didn't matter because the request itself was the red flag. I think the proxy industry benefits from people not understanding this. The less you know about TLS fingerprinting and HTTP/2 header frames, the more bandwidth you burn through rotating IPs trying to find one that "works." That churn is literally their revenue model. Before you upgrade your proxy plan, spend an afternoon with curl-impersonate or look into how got-scraping handles fingerprint randomization. Learn what JA3 and JA4 fingerprints actually are and how to check yours against real browser signatures. You might find that the $30/month datacenter plan you dismissed does the job just fine once your client stops identifying itself as a bot on the first handshake. Now, I'm not saying residential proxies are useless, for account management, social media automation, and anything session-heavy where the IP itself gets scored over time, they're still the right call. But for scraping? Fix your fingerprint first. Then decide if you actually need the expensive IPs

Spent three hours debugging why I was getting flagged even with an "Elite" proxy. Turns out my browser was leaking my real IP through WebRTC the whole time.

If you’re on Chrome, go disable it now or get an extension. Saved me a huge headache once I realized what was happening. Just a heads-up for anyone else struggling with bans.

Has anyone had any luck with them? Particularly scraping? How is the success rate compared to regular http/https or socks5

I use proxies to publish my videos on YouTube. I used to use Ipfoxy, then Decodo. But neither of them suits my needs. So I'd really appreciate your opinions. I'd like some advice on the best proxy providers with a monthly budget of $30.