One CTO (let’s call him Michael) signed another $5,000 bill for proxy services in 2025. Everything in his company already runs on Kubernetes, CI/CD is on autopilot, production is spread across regions, but the price list for proxies looks like someone pulled it out of a dusty box from 2012.
“Why are we still paying $50 for something we can buy for ten?” he muttered, but signed it anyway. Not because he can’t count. But because the market seems to be stuck in a rut: old rules, old fears, old prices. And the strangest thing is that many of us do the same — even though today it’s possible to buy a 4G ecommerce proxy and build the same infrastructure from a phone, not a rack, cutting costs without sacrificing reliability.
Backend/ML engineer’s inner voice
“By the time the scraping service was launched for the client, everything was ready: the code was debugged, the pipeline was working, the models were waiting for data. And then suddenly: 403 Forbidden. The API closed access. We tried again — blocked again. Three hours passed, then another six hours. Then the deadline passed, and the budget predictably burned through. And all because anti-fraud systems ban old proxies faster than we can change the keys. Still the clock is ticking: each new package costs another $50. At some point, I caught myself solving a 21st-century problem with 20th-century tools that turned out to be more expensive than modern technology.”
Any engineer who has ever dealt with scraping could write such a monologue. The irony is that the solution has been obvious for five to ten years: a smartphone instead of a rack, a SIM card instead of an expensive pool, and a bot instead of a panel.
How We Got Here
Demand creates supply. It all started with limited infrastructure: hardware was expensive, IP pools were limited, and providers dictated the terms. $50–80 per month for a single address seemed reasonable — it was a market where demand exceeded supply.
However, what once seemed like a fair deal lost its meaning when conditions changed. The mass transition to 4G, the influx of cheap smartphones, and the growth of SaaS platforms changed the situation. Suddenly, the very logic of “scarcity pricing” collapsed. Ten years ago, a price of fifty dollars per IP could be justified. Today, it sounds absurd — like paying for a bus ride at a limousine fare.
When the Paradigm Cracked
Today, an Android device for $6–10 can easily be turned into a proxy node: scheduled IP auto-rotation, bot control, SOCKS5/HTTP and .OVPN support. All of this is used for parsing and in areas such as e-commerce, advertising, and application testing in different countries. A SIM card and an app — and you’re online with the right GEO. For businesses, it’s no longer a theory: teams can buy a 4G ecommerce proxy on demand and scale tests or scraping projects across regions in hours, not months.
Of course, some people will shrug their shoulders and say, “Too cheap, therefore unreliable.” It’s an old, familiar logic.
But facts are tougher than skepticism. For example, iProxy maintains 99.9% uptime, complies with GDPR, and is on par with cloud services in terms of metrics. For an industry where gray schemes have long reigned supreme, this is perhaps the most important difference.
Why Old Prices Still Rule a New Market
However, there is one problem — the expensive model has already taken root. Combined with the conservative thinking of finance departments, this model has become entrenched in corporate logic: procurement teams have convinced themselves that “reliable proxy servers must necessarily be expensive.” Over time, this has become less a question of price and more of an accounting ritual. As a result, even when the technological deficit disappeared — thanks to cheaper mobile networks, the mass emergence of smartphones, and the availability of cloud services — prices remained the same. Companies continued to pay because they did not understand the value of alternatives and did not know how to use them.
Free VPNs and semi-legal “public” proxies are viable alternatives. But anyone who has tried them knows that they are neither reliable nor stable.
Still the catch is that we still think in terms of “racks,” “servers,” and “contracts with providers.” But reality has changed; just imagine that a single farm of twenty phones can replace an entire data center, which used to take months to build and required ruinous budgets.
Your inner skeptic may ask, “Is this even legal? What if they block it tomorrow?”
It must be acknowledged that this is a valid question. But for now, the facts provide the necessary understanding. For example, companies such as iProxy demonstrate how mobile proxy networks can solve real business problems by combining rotation, geo-flexibility, session management, and resident identification to ensure consistency across thousands of nodes. Here is a partial list of the features we are discussing:
- Scraping & market research — rotating IPs bypass geo-restrictions and CAPTCHAs.
- Ad verification — check campaigns from the user’s perspective in any region.
- E-commerce testing — simulate buyers from different countries without extra infrastructure.
- Fraud prevention — dynamic addresses reduce the risk of fingerprinting and protect campaigns from blocking.
However, we are confronted with an absurd scenario: a cloud-based world, CI/CD without manual steps, AI models testing themselves. And alongside this, IP for $50, which is expensive and has long since lost its practical significance.
Not Just a Comparison, but a Cross-Section of Two Eras
| Old providers (legacy) | Mobile-proxy SaaS (new model) |
| $50+ / month— a price from the era of scarcity, when IP was considered an “elite resource” | $6–10 / month— the cost is closer to the real cost price, and not to the myth of “rarity” |
| Data centers, servers— we need hardware, contracts, support | Smartphones as Nodes— regular Android devices turned into flexible proxy points |
| Limited GEO- access mainly to “popular” regions | Any GEO on Earth— the choice of country is not limited, which is critical for e-commerce and testing |
| IPs are quickly banned- static and predictable addresses | Auto-rotation- dynamic IP change, which reduces the risk of blocking and downtime |
In Conclusion
So this is not really about “$6 versus $50.” It’s about inertia. About how people equate cost with safety simply because they always have — even when the evidence has already flipped. Businesses don’t cling to prices, they cling to the comfort of old beliefs.
“What if it doesn’t work?”
Of course, it might not. But then at least you’ll stop paying for the illusion of scarcity.
“What if the audit crushes us?”
Better to find out now than through fines.
“What if the old way is safer?”
Maybe. But that’s what they said about push-button phones. And yet, while some keep clinging to legacy invoices, others simply choose scalable 4G proxies for e-commerce and move on.
The next time you sign a proxy bill, ask yourself: are you paying for bandwidth or for a business model that should have died with BlackBerry?
