How to pick a provider for your task: 5 steps

A structured framework for choosing proxies — from defining the task to the final test. How to avoid common mistakes: overpaying, undersizing, KYC blocks.

Step 1. Define the task and its specifics

Not "I need proxies", but specifically: "scraping 10K SKUs from Amazon US daily" or "running 50 Facebook Ads accounts across different geos". The more precise the task, the more precise the choice.

Questions to answer:

• Which site/service are you scraping or working with?
• Does it have anti-bot (Cloudflare, Akamai, PerimeterX)?
• Roughly how many requests per day?
• How many geos do you need?
• Are there authenticated sessions?

Step 2. Pick a proxy type

Based on the answers from step 1:

• Site without anti-bot, backend API → datacenter. Cheapest
• Scraping public sites with rate-limit → residential rotating
• Authenticated sessions, e-commerce carts → residential sticky 30+ min
• Multi-account, Facebook Ads, Instagram → mobile dedicated
• Sneaker drop bots → ISP static

Step 3. Estimate traffic volume

The basic formula for scraping: pages_per_day × page_size × safety_factor

Average optimised page size (no images/CSS) is 100-300 KB. With aggressive optimisation — 30-80 KB. Safety factor: 1.5-2× (retries, failures, paginating).

Example: 10K SKUs from Amazon, each SKU = 2 pages (card + reviews), optimised page ~150 KB:

10000 × 2 × 0.15 MB × 1.7 = 5.1 GB / day = 153 GB / month

At $2/GB residential that's $306 / month. By this point you already know whether the budget is realistic.

Step 4. Verify KYC and tolerance

If your use-case is iGaming, affiliate, or scraping private social — steer clear of providers with strict KYC: Bright Data, Oxylabs, NetNut. They block these use-cases at verification.

Tolerant options: SOAX, Decodo, IPRoyal, ProxyEmpire, AstroProxy + RU/UA-friendly services (iProxy.online, MobileProxy.Space, Proxy-Seller).

Step 5. Test on a free trial or pay-as-you-go

Don't pay for a subscription before testing. Two strategies:

• Free trial: 14 days at Decodo, 7 at Bright Data, 100 MB at SOAX, $1.99 at DataImpulse
• Pay-as-you-go: top up with $5-10, run your real requests, watch the success rate

At this stage check:

• Is the success rate really what they advertise?
• Does it cover the geos you need (especially the rare ones — SI, NZ)?
• Is your specific target site not blocked?
• Is the API and documentation clear?

Sign up for the subscription only after a full test cycle. Don't treat refund policies as insurance — in practice it's harder to get a refund than the marketing suggests.