... Over the last four years, we've used, tested, and benchmarked close to 100 web scraping APIs and residential proxy providers across different websites and request volumes. One thing has become clear to us: there is no single best proxy provider. A provider that performs brilliantly and cost-effectively on Amazon might offer poor value on Etsy or struggle to maintain the same performance on Booking.com. Request volume

... different skin tones(Dodge&burn, remove blemishes & wrinkles, body reshape, remove glasses glare, add makeups, teeth whitening, tattoo removal etc.) AI auto-grading for fast first-passes Tethered shooting (shoot + review live) Batch editing for high-volume studio work Background clean-up Most of the standard retouching toolkit, but built to be faster than the usual workflow It's on PC and iPad now. We built this mainly for pro photographers/studios doing high-volume

... maker, when you launch a product, you often notice it doesn't always appear directly on the main featured feed for every visitor or on every device/browser. This got me curious about how the platform balances fairness vs. algorithmic curation: 1. Personalization & Device Caching: Does Product Hunt serve customized feeds/leaderboards based on user activity, region, or device session cache? 2. Featured vs

... paid conversion. 25%+ with PQL. Webinars (live): 22-33% CTA conversion. High-engagement webinars hit up to 69%. AI search (GEO/AEO): 4-5x higher conversion than traditional organic. One B2B study found AI-referred traffic converted at 7.12% vs 1.37% for organic. Another found 14.2% for AI traffic. Quora: 2-5% conversion. 35% of B2B decision-makers answer questions on Quora. Reddit: 0.3-1.5% post-to-customer conversion in fit subreddits. CPC of $0.50-$2.00 vs

... years by people who cared about how it feels to use. Dark, considered interfaces. Whitespace that isn't accidental. Content that is the product, not decoration bolted onto a spreadsheet. The short answer to "what's the best LinkedIn alternative in 2026" is this: builders aren't looking for another feed. They're looking for a professional network that was actually designed, not just maintained. That's the gap forg.to is built to close. Here's why the gap exists ... ... started punishing it. Coverage of the same study found AI-generated LinkedIn posts pulling in roughly 45% less engagement than human-written ones. Readers can tell, even when they can't articulate why. And LinkedIn's own reported content volume

... Overviews or Perplexity find they still matter. The shift in 2026: Backlinks are a gate, not a dial. A Semrush study of 1,000 domains found that authority score correlated with AI mentions at Pearson 0.65. Raw backlink volume correlated much more weakly. The relationship is threshold-shaped. Low-authority domains collect a handful of citations; top-tier domains collect dozens. Brand mentions now rival raw links. Brand search volume

... year. But the game has changed. What's Different in 2026 1. Backlinks are a gate, not a dial. A Semrush study of 1,000 domains found that authority score correlated with AI mentions at Pearson 0.65. Raw backlink volume correlated much more weakly. Low-authority domains collect a handful of citations; top-tier domains collect dozens. The relationship is threshold-shaped. 2. The split between SEO and GEO is real. Backlinks influence AI visibility almost entirely through the retrieval ... ... Google now evaluates links in real time. Low-quality links are ignored instead of penalized. For competitive eCommerce queries, backlinks remain one of the clearest ways to separate two pages with similar content. What Still Works Quality over volume

... Scaling a data pipeline from 100 requests a day to 10,000 an hour is a completely different game. The proxy setup that worked fine at low volume will break spectacularly at scale. Here's what we learned the hard way. 1. Distribution is everything Blasting thousands of concurrent requests from the same subnet is a fast track to a ban. At scale, you need to distribute traffic across IPs, regions, and ASNs. The goal is to look like thousands ... ... across geographic regions. 5. Test at scale before you need it Don't discover your proxy setup can't handle the load when your production pipeline is already failing. Run load tests at 2 your expected peak volume

... median points needed to break the top 5 and top 10 on each day. Check the full report here: https://app.databox.com/shared/a... The short version: Saturday is the easiest day. Only 266 median points to crack top 5, vs 360 on Wednesday. That's a 35% harder climb on the worst day vs

... thin. I'm not okay with broken. If I ship broken, say so loudly. Code signing, notarization, and auto updates across two platforms is the unglamorous part that will quietly eat me alive. Anyone who has done this at volume, I'm listening. Lifetime pricing on hosted software is the honest hard problem here. A lifetime plan is a promise you have to survive long enough to keep. My answer is to keep hosting costs boring and small ... ... math works at low volume

... strongest signals Google uses to judge whether a page deserves to rank . But the math changed. Google's December 2024 and October 2025 spam updates devalued link networks, paid placements, and AI-generated guest-post farms . The old volume play is dead. The new play is about quality, relevance, and context. In the age of AI search, backlinks influence visibility differently. They act on the retrieval layer the live search index that grounds AI answers rather than the model ... ... frozen training weights . A domain's Authority Score correlated with AI mentions at Pearson 0.65, according to a Semrush study of 1,000 domains tracked across five AI surfaces . Raw backlink volume

... spent years working on B2B customer acquisition for products moving from early traction to real scale. We tested every channel, built lightweight systems for volume outreach and partnerships, ran hundreds of experiments, and eventually created repeatable processes that a small team could run without constant firefighting. Distribution is the #1 bottleneck you ll hit. Features get copied. Messaging gets borrowed. What actually compounds is a clear system for identifying the right accounts, testing quickly, and turning early signals into consistent ... ... bottom of the market - How to stop chasing logos that look good on paper but never convert - Why heavy briefs and over-engineered processes quietly kill results - The minimal systems that let a small team manage real volume

... YAML and 8 GB of Postgres + custom images. Zipping the repo never felt like a real archive. Docker project hibernation (1.6.1) For projects with a Docker Compose file, hibernation now captures runtime state , not just files: Named volumes are always snapshotted - DBs, Redis, persistent compose data. Non-negotiable; that's the data you'd lose with a plain zip. Images: Light archive - source + volume

... Been wrestling with deliverability lately. Warmup, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, dedicated IPs vs shared, sending volume

... chef but never having managed a restaurant kitchen during the dinner rush . What I am curious about When did you last look at your database indexes? Do you have automated tests? And where will your system break when user volume increases by 10 times? Imed Radhouani Founder & CTO Rankfender Data first. (*) : those 100 codebases were analyzed by me, Imed Radhouani, as the CTO of Rankfender. The data comes from a longitudinal study I conducted by reviewing the codebases ... ... indexes. You can add tests. You cannot make a slow API faster. That is the constraint you have to design around, not fix. What is your plan for when those APIs throttle you at 2x current volume

... thought we knew We assumed enterprise customers wanted the same things as our small business users, just more of it. More security. More control. More features. We never talked to them. We read blog posts. We looked at competitor pricing pages. We guessed. Here's what we missed: Procurement cycles. Enterprise deals take 6-12 months. We had 30-day sales cycles. We weren't built for that. Security reviews. We needed SOC2. We didn't have it. Customers asked ... ... customer research. You didn't need ten enterprise deals. You needed one honest conversation with someone who actually had to get a vendor approved. Comment from Umadhav Salapu(@umadhav): Classic build trap optimizing for the customer you want vs

... months ago, we ran an experiment with our own data. At Rankfender, we tracked 5 of our own competitors across 8 AI systems. We log their share of voice, citation velocity, content gaps, platform variance. Months of raw numbers sitting in a dashboard. I pulled 6 months of data and fed it into Claude. One question: "Based on this, who is most likely to overtake us in the next 6 months? Show your work. Use the data. Don't summarize ... ... Give me the numbers." The answer changed how I think about competition. The dataset: 5 competitors

... Rankfender. 1,247 active users. 27 distinct features across 8 modules. We looked at three metrics for each feature: Adoption rate % of users who tried it at least once Retention rate % who used it again after 30 days Request volume how many users asked for it The gap between what people asked for and what they actually used was massive. What the data said Feature Adoption Retention (30d) User requests What we decided Workflow Engine (automation) 78% 64% 3 requests ... ... every day? We tracked the top 10% of accounts by engagement. Their most-used feature was the Workflow Engine. Not because they requested it. Because it saved them time. They built automation for content publishing, citation alerts, and competitor

... more data, ask for it." The results were not symmetrical. Failure point #1: The unvalidated feature. The roadmap had a feature labeled "Priority 1." Estimated build: six weeks. Claude flagged it immediately. "No user research cited. No support ticket volume. No search volume

... spaced repetition apps are designed by power users for power users. They've lost sight of the actual goal: remembering things. MemoRep is different. It was built on one insight: simplicity beats complexity every time. The Problem: Feature Creep vs. Memory Retention Take a step back. Why do you want to use spaced repetition? To remember languages To retain programming concepts To master music theory To ace exams To keep professional skills sharp What's common to all these goals ... ... becomes possible. Quick Start Guide Ready to simplify your learning? Here's your 30-day plan: Week 1: The 30-Second Habit [ ] Create 5 cards/day (30 seconds each) [ ] Never spend more than 1 minute on card creation [ ] Focus on volume

... Last month, I did something that felt slightly insane. I took our product description, fed it into ChatGPT, and asked it to build a competitor. Not a parody. A real competitor

... know this until it happens. New domains need a warm-up period and almost nobody does it! When you register a fresh sending domain it has zero sending history. Inbox providers are suspicious of new domains sending volume immediately because that's exactly what spammers do. The right approach is to start with tiny send volumes

... been measuring what was easy to count, not what actually mattered. And I kept thinking: reputation management is still stuck in 2015 doing the exact same thing. The parallel is uncomfortable Most companies monitor brand reputation by tracking mention volume. Spikes up? Something's happening. Stays flat? You're fine. It feels rigorous. It produces charts. It goes in the quarterly deck. But mention volume

... just exposure, but the degree to which AI treats your brand as a credible source . Share of Voice (SOV): Represents your brand s voice share within AI narratives the probability that AI mentions your brand rather than a competitor when answering a topic-related question. Sentiment: Captures the emotional tone of AI mentions positive, neutral, or negative showing how AI portrays your brand. Together, these four metrics answer the two most fundamental GEO questions: How frequently does AI mention ... ... brand? and In what tone and context is the brand represented? 1.2 Trends and Competitor

... marketing problem. They think: "Let the SEO team handle it." Here's why that's wrong: Your product is being evaluated by AI every single day. When potential users ask: "What's the best tool for [your category]?" "Alternatives to [competitor