§1 · The gate and the dimensions
We do not roll everything into one number. A provider first clears an eligibility gate — the basic plumbing, pass or fail — and then earns a grade on each of six dimensions built only from measurements that actually separate one provider from the next.
The gate: benchmarkable, or not
Six commodity checks decide whether a line is worth grading at all: can it connect, does traffic leave through the proxy, does HTTP work, is the exit ASN sane, does the country match, and can it move a real response body. These are pass/fail, not scored. Against unprotected targets almost every serious provider clears all six — which is exactly why scoring them told buyers nothing. So we gate on them and move on.
The six dimensions
Each dimension is graded 0–100 from inputs we already collect, and each one carries its inputs in the open so the grade is legible rather than asserted. A dimension we cannot yet grade for a line reports an honest not graded — we never invent a number to fill the slot.
- Workload successworkload_success
FED BY fixture success rates against real target classes, blended with browser-engine success where present.
WHY NOT 100 real and protected targets fail some fraction of the time for everyone; a residential pool medians around the low 90s, datacenter far lower.
- Speedspeed
FED BY p50/p95 latency normalized against banded thresholds, plus throughput MB/s where measured.
WHY NOT 100 latency is bounded by physics and upstream device quality; the tail (p95) is where jobs actually stall, and it never fully flattens.
- Pool qualitypool_quality
FED BY unique exits per attempt, repeat rate, top-exit-IP share, and exit-IP entropy from the observed exits.
WHY NOT 100 advertised pool size is marketing; realized uniqueness and subnet spread are what a target sees, and recycling drags them down.
- Trust & sourcingtrust_sourcing
FED BY source-labelled IP reputation risk share, usage-type honesty (claimed vs observed), and city-level geo precision once enrichment coverage is sufficient.
WHY NOT 100 reputation is vendor-calibrated and can be contaminated by other customers; we grade only when at least five unique exits have 80% coverage from one labelled source.
- Sessionsession
FED BY sticky-session hold rate and duration through the advertised window.
WHY NOT 100 sessions degrade as upstream residential devices go offline; a long hold depends on hardware the provider does not own.
- Value
Say a line runs 432 workload attempts and 192 succeed, and its browser-engine pass rate is 0%. Workload success is the blend of those two measured rates — here roughly a 22, not a 100 — because the grade is built from what actually completed against real targets, not from whether the socket opened.
request success 192/432 · browser-engine success 0% → workload success ≈ 22 / 100
How one dimension grade is actually built. The inputs travel with the grade, so a reader can see why the number landed where it did — and why a clean gate does not buy a clean dimension.
Consistency is part of the grade
We run rolling 30-day windows, so a dimension is scored across daily buckets rather than in one lucky afternoon. A provider that holds steady reads differently from one that spikes and decays, and that stability is a property of the grade — not a footnote to it.