Residential Proxy Comparison

Comparing residential proxies on advertised pool size is the fastest way to overpay. The only figures that matter are success rate on your targets, median latency and effective cost per successful request.

Effective cost equals price per GB divided by successful requests per GB. A $3/GB network with a 92% success rate beats a $2/GB network at 68% on almost any workload, because retries consume bandwidth twice.

Run an identical harness through every trial: same 1,000 URLs, same concurrency, same headers, same 30-second timeout. Log status code, bytes transferred and time to first byte, then chart success rate, p50/p95 latency and dollars per 1,000 successful requests side by side.

Benchmark before purchase, again 30 days in, and any time a target's defences change. Pool composition shifts weekly, so a stale comparison is worse than none.