Pool size is the most quoted and least comparable number in the proxy industry. It usually counts every IP the provider has ever observed across its whole network — not what is online now, not what serves your region, and certainly not what your requests will actually exit through.
The funnel between the claim and your traffic
Start with the headline number, then cut it down: how much of the pool is online at any moment? How much serves the geography you are targeting? How much is eligible for your product tier? And of that remainder, how concentrated is your actual traffic? A buyer routing through a "10 million IP" pool can discover that a week of requests exited through a few hundred addresses.
Questions that produce comparable answers
- How many distinct exits will my plan realistically touch in a day of my traffic pattern?
- What is the repeat rate — how often does the same exit serve consecutive requests?
- How fast does the pool churn? Fresh exits matter more than total exits for block-sensitive work.
- Does the observed pool match the labeled type, or does the "residential" pool lean on datacenter ranges?
This gap between claimed and observed is why our pool quality dimension is built only from observation: unique exits seen, repeat rate, churn. When a provider's claimed pool appears on this site at all, it is labeled as their claim — the grade next to it is ours.