Every proxy benchmark eventually faces the same temptation: roll everything into one impressive-looking number. We went the other way. A provider line on this site first has to clear an eligibility gate — six pass/fail plumbing checks — and only then earns grades on the dimensions buyers actually feel.
The gate: commodity plumbing, pass or fail
Connectivity, exit identity, HTTP reachability, ASN accuracy, country accuracy, and throughput reachability are commoditized across the industry. A provider that fails any of them has an operations problem, not a quality tradeoff — so these checks gate eligibility instead of contributing to a score. Passing the gate is table stakes, and we say so.
The dimensions: where providers actually differ
- Workload success — did real-target requests complete? This is the closest thing to the answer a buyer wants, so the default Proxy Index weights it 3×.
- Speed — P95 latency banded against practical scraping thresholds, averaged with observed throughput when present.
- Pool quality — breadth and churn of observed exits, not the number printed on a pricing page.
- Trust & sourcing — do the exits look like what the provider claims they are?
- Session — do sticky sessions actually hold the same exit across follow-up requests?
- Value — graded only when a normalized pricing snapshot exists. No snapshot, no grade, and we say why.
A dimension with missing evidence renders as "not graded" with the honest reason — never as a zero, and never as an invented number. When you re-weight the dimensions with the scoring lens on the rankings page, you are re-weighting these exact grades on your own device.
What we refuse to do
No provider funding, no retroactive edits, no scores without executable evidence. When our sample is thin, the caveat is printed next to the score, not buried in a footnote. The methodology page carries the full definition of every check and threshold, and every report links the raw check counts it was built from.