Ask ten scraping teams what the best proxy provider is, and you'll get ten confident answers.
They can't all be right. It turns out none of them are.
"What's the best proxy provider?" is the most common question in web scraping. It's also the wrong one.
There is no universal winner. The best provider depends on which sites you scrape and how many pages you pull, and the moment either of those changes, the answer changes with it.
We found that out by benchmarking the major Proxy APIs and residential providers against live performance data, then pricing every plan at 10k, 100k and 1M pages a month. We expected the usual pattern: pay more, get more. The data said something else.
The clearest finding in the whole dataset is that price and performance barely relate. Paying more does not reliably buy you a faster or more reliable scrape. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn't. And you can't tell in advance which situation you're in.
There is no best proxy provider. There is only the best provider for your sites, at your volume, and the only way to find it is to measure it.
The rest of this piece is the evidence, in three steps. Price doesn't predict performance. The best provider changes with the site you're scraping. And it changes again with how much you're scraping. By the end, the case for testing your own workload makes itself.
