The Most Ridiculous Thing I've Seen: How People in the Tech World Buy Proxies
Having been in the tech scene for over a decade, the most absurd thing I've witnessed is a group of brilliant minds buying proxy IPs the same way a housewife buys cabbage at a wet market.
They'll open countless browser tabs, pull up price lists from every proxy provider on the market, compare the cost per GB one by one, and then gleefully choose the one with the lowest number. They feel like they've hit the jackpot, a hero of cost reduction and efficiency.
Every time I see this, a single thought crosses my mind: this guy, or the business behind him, is about to fail.
To be blunt, in the tumultuous proxy industry, blindly chasing the lowest price is the most expensive mistake a regular person can make. Let’s do some math—a calculation that genuinely affects your performance and livelihood.
Let's say you find a proxy provider, A, that’s three dollars per GB cheaper than the mainstream provider, B. You use 100 GB a month, saving three hundred dollars. Over a year, that’s thirty-six hundred dollars, which sounds great—enough to buy a new phone.
But have you factored in the hidden costs?
In the proxy world, you get what you pay for. Cheap proxies most likely have a pool of polluted and flagged IPs. The result is that your data collection task, which once had a 95% success rate, now drops to 80% with cheap proxy A.
Don't underestimate that 15% difference. To get the same amount of valid data, your request volume needs to increase by almost 20%. Your 100 GB budget instantly becomes 120 GB. The three hundred dollars you thought you saved are now gone, or even worse.
And it doesn't stop there. Does running 20% more requests not take time? Do your programs and servers not incur costs from running idle? Do the sleepless nights you spend debugging whether it's a code or an IP problem not count as a cost?
In the end, you haven't saved money; you've exhausted yourself, and your project is constantly delayed. At the end of the month, your boss looks at your ugly output data and inflated resource consumption and will simply think you’re incompetent.
This is just the financial cost you can calculate. There's another cost that many people only realize after they've lost everything. That’s the risk cost.
I know a friend in cross-border e-commerce. He had a small team of five or six people and a stable Amazon store that had been running for over two years with a steady monthly revenue. To save a few dollars, they switched to a cheap, unknown proxy service.
The result? In less than a month, their store was shut down due to an IP association issue. All their inventory and funds were frozen. Two years of hard work vanished overnight. He later told me that the value of that cold email was at least two million.
Is it worth saving a few thousand dollars in annual proxy fees in exchange for a two-million-dollar loss and the disbanding of the team?
How many followers and how much content have you accumulated in your big social media accounts? How large is the market budget tied to the advertising accounts in your hands? The value of these digital assets is hundreds or thousands of times higher than your annual proxy fees.
A stable and clean IP environment is the foundation of all your online businesses. Saving money on the foundation is like accepting that the entire building could collapse at any time.
If the risk cost determines how long your business can survive, there is an even higher cost that determines whether you can survive in the competition: opportunity cost.
The market waits for no one, especially in an era where change happens faster than planned. What are you doing when your competitors are already using a high-quality proxy network to efficiently capture the latest market trends, product prices, and user reviews, and adjust their strategies accordingly?
You are still fighting with a polluted IP pool, struggling with frequent connection failures and pop-up CAPTCHAs, and pulling all-nighters to debug your scripts that never seem to run. By the time you finally solve all the technical problems, you look up, and the market opportunity has long since passed. Others are feasting, and you can’t even get a sip of the soup.
In a business war, intelligence and speed are everything. A reliable proxy service gives you more than just an IP address; it gives you the valuable time to win the battle. It allows you to focus all your energy on the business itself, instead of being held back by basic tools.
Being one step faster is the difference between life and death.
So, stop buying proxies the way you buy cabbage. This isn’t a purchase; it’s an investment. You need to evaluate its return on investment.
How would a truly smart investor choose?
They would look at the size and purity of the IP pool. For example, a provider like Novada, which has over eighty million real residential IPs, means you can get a new, clean identity for every request that has never appeared on your target website. This fundamentally eliminates the risk of IP pollution and association.
They would look at the IP's coverage and location accuracy. Covering over two hundred countries globally, with free city-level or even ISP-level positioning. This means no matter where your business targets are, you can access them like a local and get the most authentic data.
They would also look at the flexibility and stability of the service. For high-frequency IP switching for data collection, there’s a rotating session. For maintaining an account with a stable IP, there’s a sticky session that can last up to two hours. This dual-mode support allows you to navigate different business scenarios with ease, instead of being limited by a tool’s functions.
When a proxy service can help you stabilize your collection success rate at 99%, reduce the risk of account bans to nearly zero, and allow you to grasp market changes a week faster than your competitors, the value it creates for you far exceeds its price.
This calculation is not complicated at all.
What is your time, your business security, and your leading position in the market worth?
If you figure out this question, you'll know how to choose.