Ill Robyn

I'm curious: how do you evaluate and compare proxy providers?

Inside the ScrapeOps Proxy Aggregator, we've integrated around 50 proxy providers into a single tool. We continuously test and benchmark them to determine which providers offer the best performance at the lowest cost for different target websites.

The main performance metric we've settled on is average success latency:

How quickly does a provider return a successful response?

The gap most auto-fix tools have

They tell you the bug is fixed. They don't show you. Our rule has always been: make the bug happen on real code, apply the fix, show it stops happening. The gap was we could only do that for bugs we'd scripted in advance. Anything unusual and the honest answer was "found it, fixed it, can't prove this one."

What we built

We taught FetchSandbox to write the reproduction itself, no pre-scripted test required.

I launched a product today, and one of the biggest lessons came before the launch:

Building individual features was relatively straightforward. Explaining why they all belonged in the same product was much harder.

The moment the product became easier to explain, a lot of other decisions became easier too: what to remove, what to emphasize, and who it was really for.

Have you ever built something that worked well, but was surprisingly difficult to explain clearly?