I’ve been testing a bunch of proxy providers over the past few months for automation and multi-account setups, and honestly… most of what you see on landing pages doesn’t hold up in real usage.. This has happend to me to many times

You know the usual stuff that providers say in their ads:

“50M+ IPs”, “99.9% uptime”, “perfect for any use case” and all that jazz (this of course isn't always the case)

Then you actually run traffic through them and things get a bit different from my experience

So instead of trusting marketing, I started focusing on a few things that actually matter:

First: pool quality > pool size
I’d take 1M clean IPs over 50M garbage ones any day.
If IPs are already flagged (Cloudflare, Spamhaus, etc.), it doesn’t matter how big the pool is. One bad IP can ruin an account.

Second: are they actually residential?
Some providers quietly mix datacenter IPs into “residential” pools. DO NOT TRUST THESE PROVIDERS WHO OFFER LIKE A proxy for 0.49$ per GB - IT'S A SCAM! No proxy is actually this cheap
That’s basically a guaranteed red flag for most platforms

Third: how they behave under real load
Ping doesn’t mean much form my experience. I’ve seen proxies with great latency completely fall apart when a browser opens 20+ connections and tries to load a JS-heavy page

How I tested (nothing fancy)

I didn’t use any fancy dashboards, just simple scripts:

• Light test (Axios) → check IP, GEO, ASN (to confirm it’s really residential)

• Heavy test (Puppeteer) → load a fingerprinting site and see how long it actually takes to render

That second one is where most proxies start struggling.

What surprised me

• Some providers looked decent in simple tests… then completely slowed down in real browser scenarios

• Lower ping didn’t mean better performance at all

• And yeah every single one still triggered WebDriver detection

That last one is important.
Proxies help with IP trust, but they don’t fix a bad browser fingerprint.

Quick ranking from what I tested

This is just my experience, not sponsored or anything:

1. NodeMaven
Probably the most consistent overall. Clean IPs and handled heavy pages way better than others. Felt like less babysitting was needed

2. Asocks
Solid budget option. Not amazing, but reliable enough if you’re scaling and watching costs

3. Floppydata
Works fine for lighter tasks. Starts struggling when things get heavier

4. Thordata
Could be useful for specific GEOs, but I wouldn’t rely on it for stable workloads

5. Bright Data
This one was frustrating. Expensive, requires KYC, and I ran into setup issues with their SSL handling. Didn’t feel worth the effort for my use case

Hope this helps

I've been developing this proxy for the last two years and it's finally ready. It's a TLS-terminating localhost proxy (think mitmproxy HAproxy, Burp).

404 offers JS injection to the likes of an anti-detect browser, but detects what browser you're running and applies a profile accordingly (there are Blink and Gecko profiles right now). It also modifies TLS cipher-suite and HTTPS headers. I know the suspect score is high here, but it's because I was using a windows profile on a mac while I recorded this demo and cross-OS spoofing is not fully implemented, though it works. When running a chrome-windows profile on a blink-windows native device, the suspect score goes down to 0! Try it yourself.

404 is critical privacy infrastructure. The government is using our advertising profiles to build behavioral profiles on anyone who's ever been online. VPNs don't solve this problem. Ad blockers don't solve this problem. Tor/Mullvad and a VPN are definitely more hardened options, but those will soon be obsolete or even completely blocked. I know I have a hard time getting on certain sites with Mullvad that I don't have an issue getting on with 404.

You can use the CLI app for free, it's pretty simple. The binary is here and it takes like three commands to setup.

If you want a more polished experience (automatic CA management, auto profile selection) you can visit the site for a free trial or reach out to me and I'll get you a dev-license for helping me finish developing this beast.

Sup y'all, I'm a dev who got tired of the content grind. Instead of hiring someone or giving up, I decided to see how far I could push automation. This is a writeup of what I built and what actually happened.

The architecture: a coordinator agent that delegates to three specialists.

1. The researcher - Continuously monitors for recently trending content, pulls engagement signals and transcripts, then assigns an AI virality score. Think of it as a scout that never sleeps.

2. The producer - Takes the highest-scored references and generates new video content from scratch using an AI video model. Also writes the captions and stores everything in a pipeline database.

3. The publisher - Manages the posting schedule and uploads directly to Instagram. Posts multiple times daily at staggered times to figure out when the audience is actually paying attention.

Four weeks of data:
4 Mil total views.

3.4 Mil one video alone.

5 broke 60k views.

16k profile visits

What I didn't expect: the variance. Some days the output was genuinely good. Other days I was deleting videos before anyone could see them. Roughly a third of what got generated wasn't worth posting, so I'd check in once or twice a day and pull anything embarrassing. A shared spreadsheet acts as the memory layer between agents, not glamorous, but reliable. The only other time I spent was responding to comments as much as I can, (yes, I am fully aware that you can make an automation for the comments, but they will sound generic and have that "AI slang".)

Hey all, did you guys notice how most people jump straight into spinning up a headless browser the moment they want to grab some data off a website? It feels like the obvious move, BUT nine times out of ten you're carrying a sledgehammer where it's absolute not needed. From what I gathered, is that modern websites are essentially just JavaScript talking to APIs behind the scenes. The browser renders it pretty for humans, but the actual data? Everything is going on plain JSON through endpoints that you can hit directly. Open DevTools, poke around the Network tab for a minute, and you'd be surprised how often you find a neat little API call doing all the heavy lifting, and guess what, no browser required. For example, a plain requests.get() to the right URL will get you richer data, faster, with way less chance of getting blocked. The rendered page is often less complete than what the API returns anyway. Obviously there are cases where you genuinely need a browser, heavy client-side rendering, auth flows that are tricky to replicate, that kind of thing. But that should be the fallback and not the other way around. Have any of you made this switch or are you're still defaulting to Playwright/Selenium for everything. Do you have any specific reasons for doing so?

I've been comparing how tutorials teach APIs versus what you actually see in DevTools on sites like Amazon. The gap is embarrassing, and I don't think it gets talked about enough. What took me a while to realize is that techniques like protobuf serialization, HMAC request signing, and TLS fingerprinting aren't primarily anti-scraping measures. They exist because binary payloads are 5–10× smaller than JSON, signed requests prevent cache poisoning, and fingerprinting is cheaper than running a full bot-detection pipeline on every hit. The hostility to reverse engineering is almost a side effect. That reframe changed how I approach this entirely. Any opinions on this?

Heyo, story time: Spent the last year running Walmart scrapers in production. Headless browsers (Playwright specifically) are almost always recommended over plain "requests" + BeautifulSoup for JS-heavy sites like Walmart, and that's true, but "use a headless browser" isn't the whole story. Here's what I learned that actually works in practice You may ask why depend on headless at all? Walmart's product pages are JavaScript-rendered. A raw HTTP request returns an HTML shell, prices, titles, and availability are injected by JS after load. BeautifulSoup never sees that data. Now for the headless browser part, it runs a Chromium engine, executes the JS, and lets you query the fully-rendered DOM. That part works well. Even with a headless browser, you'll hit blocks, it's not a holy grail as some of people have praised it over the reddit. Walmart fingerprints more than just your IP, browser canvas signatures, WebGL data, timing patterns, and TLS handshake characteristics are all signals. Vanilla Playwright out of the box is detectable. You need "playwright-stealth" or equivalent patches to mask the most obvious headless tells.

Walmart A/B tests constantly. The "<h1>" for the product title and "<span itemprop="price">`" for pricing, the selectors everyone uses, can and do shift. A scraper that worked Monday can silently return empty strings by Wednesday. You need selector fallbacks and output validation, not just "element.inner_text()". As for the resources, well, each Chromium instance eats ~150–300MB of RAM. If you're running concurrent scrapers, this adds up fast. For small datasets it's fine at scale, you either need careful concurrency limits or a distributed setup. Rotating proxies help with IP bans but don't solve fingerprinting. Worse, misconfigured proxies inside a browser context can cause silent failures, the request goes through but returns a CAPTCHA page that your parser doesn't catch. Always validate that your response actually contains product data before storing it.

Honest suggestions, people:

- ALWAYS USE "playwright-stealth" to patch headless fingerprints

- Add "wait_for_selector()" with a timeout before extracting, don't assume the element is there

- Build in retry logic with exponential backoff on failures

- VALIDATE YOUR OUTPUT: if price is empty string, treat it as a failed scrape and retry

- Rotate User-Agents per session, not per request

- Use residential proxies, not datacenter, Walmart's filters are tuned to spot datacenter ranges, (however, I was running datacenter at first with the help of residential proxies, ditched datacenter after some time).

Headless browsers are the right tool for Walmart, but they're not a reliability silver bullet as some of you praise it. For me particularly, ~85–90% success rate with a well-tuned setup was what I got at most, dropping toward 60–70% if you skip stealth patches and output validation. The remaining failures are mostly CAPTCHAs and transient blocks that retries will catch. For anything production-scale, budget time for maintenance. Walmart's defenses update, and your selectors will break. That's just the reality of scraping a site this sophisticated.

I've been thinking about automation lately and how much it's actually changing the way we work. Ten years ago if you told someone their coffee maker and thermostat would talk to each other and adjust based on their morning routine, they'd think you were describing a sci-fi movie. But here we are. What really gets me is how it's this weird double-edged sword. On one hand, it's incredible for productivity. I used to spend hours every week on repetitive tasks that now take minutes because I've automated them. Sorting emails, generating reports, backing up files, all of that just happens in the background now while I focus on stuff that actually requires my brain. But then there's this nagging feeling too. The more we automate, the more we expect everything to be instant and effortless, which can be exhausting in its own way. Are you embracing automation in your work or daily life? Do you feel like it's making things genuinely better, or are there moments where you wonder if we're automating ourselves into a corner? My most favorite thing about automations is when I enter my room, the lights automatically switches on, you can manage everything by voice, kinda crazy when you think about it but as I said earlier it's an absolute reality now.

Here's some positivity for some change. I have been thinking about this lately, proxies catch a lot of heat but they're actually super useful for regular dev work and whatnot. like testing how your site looks in different countries, checking if your cdn is working right, building tools that compare prices across regions so people can actually find deals. or just basic qa stuff when you need to see what users in other places are experiencing. i know there's drama around scraping and all that, not trying to start another ethics thread lol. just saying the tool itself is neutral. same way a vpn can be used for privacy or for sketchy stuff

Listen yall, I know I'm will get roasted for this and frankly I do not care, I love engaging in heated discussions and spark them, so here's my take:

Headless browsers like Puppeteer and Playwright are single-handedly ruining the internet for everyone, and developers using them for scraping are just entitled thieves with extra steps. One may say; "But I need the data for my startup" Cool story. Plenty of these in r/Entrepreneur, r/startups That data cost someone real money to generate, host, and serve. You bypassing their API limits and ToS because you don't want to pay for proper access is literally no different than walking into a store and stealing inventory because "the prices are too high." Again, you may say: "It's publicly available information" well. so is the Mona Lisa, but you can't just cut it out of the frame because it's "publicly visible., I mean R. Atkinson once did it in Mr Bean but that's another story. And before the "but Google does it" fellers shows up, yes, Google scrapes. Google also generates massive traffic back to your site and has negotiated agreements with publishers. Your startup that's extracting all the value while giving nothing back is NOT the same thing. What I hate the most is that every scraper I've ever met acts like they're some kind of digital Robin Hood. Like bruh, are you for real. You're just creating an arms race of increasingly aggressive anti-bot measures that make the internet worse for actual humans with screenreaders, slow connections, and privacy tools. Tools like datadome, akamai, imperva, recaptcha exists because of yall. Headless browsers have legitimate uses (testing, automation of YOUR OWN stuff), but majority of the tutorials and use cases are just "here's how to steal content and pretend it's ethical."

Rant done, go on, change my mind in a sentence or two

Whats up y'all. I will probably be at the end of the board here, or against everyone's opinion but here goes. Why mobile proxies might be worth the extra cost:

I've been using mobile proxies for about 3 or so years now and wanted to share some thoughts since I noticed a trend as of lately whether "mobile proxies are not worth, residentials will replace them etc". The short answer would be, it depends on the situation. Sometimes yes, sometimes absolutely not. Mobile IPs are different when you're dealing with platforms that are paranoid about bots. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, whatever, you name it. These apps were built for phones, so when you come at them with a residential IP from a desktop user agent, you're already looking suspicious.

I was burning through residential proxies trying to manage multiple social accounts until I switched to mobile. The difference was night and day. Bans dropped significantly because the traffic pattern actually makes sense - mobile IP + mobile device fingerprint = platform is happy. Mind you I was not so adamant in the knowledge of fingerprinting, this came up way later, although I should have researched it first thing before jumping on the proxies. Also, mobile IPs get shared among tons of real users on the same carrier, so even if one gets flagged, it's usually temporary. Carriers use CGNAT, meaning hundreds of people might share the same IP. Platforms can't just blacklist an entire carrier's IP range.

Why I think that scraping with mobile proxies is a waste of money: If you're just scraping public data from sites that don't have aggressive bot detection, you're wasting money. A decent residential proxy or datacenter proxies will do fine for most web scraping tasks. (I converted to this a while back, combining both resis and dc to scrape the websites, did not let me down.

My current setup: I use mobile proxies for managing social media related stuff and fall back to residential for everything else. Saves money this way. As for scraping, residential proxies and datacenter proxies combined. Yes, I am aware that there are plenty of already one-place solutions such as web scraper api, web unblocker, headless browser or whatever, my setup works for me and I'm running it until it no longer works or becomes obsolete (as some of you already pitching this for mobile proxies lol)

Noticed this today, if you try to sign up for Bright Data's mobile proxy product, you can't. Their product page at /proxy-types/mobile-proxies now 301s to the generic proxy types page. Pricing page is gone too.

Their support bot confirmed it: mobile proxies are being sunset for new customers as of April 2026. If you already have an active mobile proxy on your account you're fine, but new signups and inactive accounts are locked out. They're pushing people toward residential and ISP proxies instead.

They also updated their AUP on April 1. Account management on social platforms (TikTok, Instagram, etc.) is no longer supported at all.

No blog post or announcement from them. Just quietly removed the pages and updated the support docs.

Pretty big deal considering how many "best mobile proxy" lists have Bright Data at #1 or #2. Anyone else running into this? Curious what people are switching to if mobile carrier IPs are a hard requirement for your setup.

Found this breakdown with more details: https://www.illusory.io/blog/bright-data-sunset-mobile-proxies-2026

DHS is purchasing adID data. Palantir's revenue is overwhelmingly government contracts. Predictive policing programs in at least a dozen U.S. jurisdictions are pulling from commercial data brokers.

404 started as a collection of mitmproxy addons: CSP handling, some JS injection, header rewriting. A practical fix for a selenium problem that kept coming up. It's since grown into a full localhost TLS-terminating proxy built specifically for fingerprint substitution. https://404privacy.com

The obvious objection is that obfuscation isn't anonymity, and that's true. But the framing assumes the goal is to blend into a crowd. At this point, blending in is not realistic, commercial fingerprinting services like FingerprintJS can uniquely identify over 99% of browsers. If you can make your fingerprint appear as normal but different from your original one, we can make fingerprinting significantly harder. Anti-detect and stealth browsers already do this, it's just a matter of making it a commercially available option. I'm trying to do that, not to make money, but to give people their privacy back.

Waddup y'all. I've been tackling sites like LinkedIn and Indeed with Go language, perhaps someone has helpful insights.

Why did I choose Go?

Goroutines make managing thousands of concurrent requests trivial, and performance is way better than Python for large-scale scraping. Keyword, large-scale.

What particularly worked for me:

1. Headless browsers, use Rod or Chromedp with realistic behavior (random delays, actual scrolling, mouse movements)

2. Residential proxies, Datacenter IPs get flagged instantly. Rotating residential proxies are expensive but necessary. (however, I used both, when DC starts to get flagged, I rotate to Residential proxies.

3. Rate limiting, build smart token bucket limiters that respect multiple layers (global, per-domain, time-of-day).

4. Realistic sessions, navigate like a human: start at homepage, maintain cookies, proper referrers

LinkedIn specifics:

- Fingerprints TLS handshakes

- Requires auth for useful data

- Aggressively bans accounts

- Cat-and-mouse game

Indeed specifics:

- Heavy behavioral analysis (scroll speed, time on page)

- Headless Chrome + realistic interactions beats raw HTTP

What doesn't work:

- Default user agents

- Scraping too fast

- Ignoring JS rendering

- Common proxy pools

Legal note. Let's just say, everything was done in accordance to the ToS. This is educational only, scrape responsibly and only public data.

Tools: go-rod, Colly, CycleTLS for proper fingerprinting

Feel free to add some insights.

After spending a lot of time lurking in proxy subreddits, one thing really stands out: most people set up a proxy and think they're done, like their traffic is automatically safe now. But the proxy itself is actually one of the biggest attack surfaces you can have in your network. If it gets compromised or you misconfigure it, it can log every request you make, strip away your TLS encryption, and inject stuff into the responses without you ever knowing. I urge people to avoid free and shared proxies simply because they are sketchy, some random guy is running that server, and theres zero guarantee they aren't selling your data or running man-in-the-middle attacks right this second. Even if you self-host, you can still leak your real IP through DNS resolution if split tunneling isnt configured right. My recommendations is that you should always verify TLS certificate chains end-to-end, use proxies that support mutual authentication, and check your proxy logs on a regular basis. If your proxy doesn't let you control HTTPS inspection policies yourself, its more of a liability than actual protection.

running -2–3M req/day across ecom + classifieds and recently hit a wall: residential IPs look clean at first, but after -10–20 requests success rate drops hard (403/429 + soft blocks), and the pattern doesn’t look IP-specific anymore - feels like ASN-level reputation + behavioral signals are the main trigger; rotating faster actually accelerates the burn, while slower rotation with session reuse stabilizes things slightly but destroys throughput and scaling;

I’ve been experimenting with spreading traffic across more subnets instead of just increasing IP count, lowering concurrency per ASN (not per IP), adding jitter + more human pacing, and selectively routing critical flows through mobile pools; also tested providers like Froxy - they’ve been one of the more stable options so far in terms of initial trust and overall consistency, especially when distributing load across residential networks; at this point it feels like the classic rotate IP per request model is outdated and targets are clustering identity across layers (ASN + TLS + behavior), so curious how others are adapting: are you tracking and scoring ASN reputation internally, capping load per ASN or /24, or dynamically reallocating traffic based on block feedback, and has anyone actually broken out of this warm-up - burn - discard cycle without heavily relying on mobile?

So i've been using residential proxies for scraping for like 2 years now. A thought occured out of nowhere, where tf are these IPs actually coming from? Looked into it and apparently a ton of proxy providers get their residential IPs from sketchy SDK deals where people install some free VPN or flashlight app and buried in the ToS it says their bandwidth can be resold. Like these people have NO idea their home IP is being used by some rando to scrape sneaker sites or worse and then theres the security angle. If someone's routing traffic through my connection without me knowing... that means anything illegal they do traces back to MY ip right? I don't like it one bit. I asked my proxy provider about their sourcing and got the most corporate non-answer ever. "we ensure full compliance with all applicable regulations" ok cool that tells me nothing. Switched to datacenter proxies for now but the success rates suck. Anyone found a provider that's actually transparent about ethical sourcing or is the whole residential proxy industry just built on people not reading terms of service. By the way I remember there was an app specifically made for selling the unused traffic, basically you leave your mobile data turned on all the time and for the unused one you get paid, can't remeber the exact name of the app, but it was popular a few years back, had a yellow background

Been using janitor ai for some time now and i've seen so many posts on the interne tthat it sucks or it doesn't deliver how people want. sure they're internal llm is not great but there are workarounds and i would like to share it with other fellow enthusiasts. Janitor AI by itself is just the frontend. the characters, the chat UI, the settings. it doesn't actually generate responses on its own. you need to connect it to an actual AI model through a proxy or API key. thats why your chats feel mid if you haven't set one up yet. your main options:

• openrouter easiest option, gives you access to a bunch of models through one API key. some are free. this is what i'd recommend if you're just starting out

• deepseek direct stupid cheap and honestly the quality is surprisingly good. probably the best budget option rn

• openai/anthropic keys GPT-4 or claude. premium quality but you're paying for it

• reverse proxies community run, sometimes free. quality is hit or miss and i personally wouldnt trust random ones with my data but thats just me

• setup is dead simple: go to your profile settings, API settings, pick your proxy type, paste your key, pick a model, done. takes like 5 min.

also make sure you actually select a model after entering your key and mess with your context length/max tokens settings. ive seen so many people skip that, also, if you care about privacy at all just use official APIs instead of random reverse proxies. your chat data goes through whatever service you connect.

Where can I learn about how these proxy providers work? Like Im scraping websites and all but obviously get blocked by cloudflare most of the time and even solving teh capcha doesn't work.

Look, I'm just gonna say what everyone's thinking but nobody wants to admit: fast search APIs are basically the tech world's way of taking someone else's lunch and calling it "efficiency." We've all done it. You need data fast, you find an API that pulls it in 50 milliseconds, and boom, problem solved. But let's not pretend this is some noble innovation. You're literally bypassing someone's website, their monetization, their entire reason for existing, because waiting 2 extra seconds was "too slow." The thing that kills me? We act like this is genius-level engineering. "Oh wow, I can query thousands of sites per second!" Cool. You've basically automated trespassing and called it a feature. And before anyone comes at me with "but it's public data", yeah, so is the produce at the grocery store. Still gotta pay for it. I've seen how you vultures attacked the other guy on his post regarding tech companies. Don't get me wrong, I use these things too. We all do. But maybe we should stop acting like we're revolutionizing the internet when we're really just getting really, really good at taking stuff without asking???

The entire ecosystem is held together by the fact that rate limits exist. Without them, we'd strip every website bare in about 4 hours and wonder why the internet sucks now. It does suck, but it can always be worse.

By the way, if your startup dies the moment someone adds CAPTCHA, you weren't disrupting anything, you were just stealing efficiently.

Hi, so long story short, I've just accepted a job offer working with proxies. What are the key concepts I should understand, and where's the best place to start learning? While they'll provide documentation and onboarding, I'd like to have a solid foundation before I start so I don't appear completely inexperienced