Most articles about proxies focus on IP pool size and price per GB.

That's the wrong question.

If you're:

building a price monitoring pipeline for your SaaS,

collecting competitor data without getting blocked,

or feeding an AI agent with live web data at scale,

The proxy you choose determines whether your system works reliably in production — not just in a demo.

The Real Problem With Proxy Comparisons

Here's what typically happens.

A developer finds a proxy provider, signs up, runs a few test requests, sees clean responses. Everything looks fine. Ships it.

Then, two weeks later:

The tool hits a Cloudflare Turnstile that the proxy can't bypass

The JS-rendered page returns empty HTML because the headless browser wasn't configured

The credit burn is 25x higher than the advertised price because of hidden multipliers

Rate limits kick in at the worst possible moment

The proxy worked in testing.…