Five years ago, you could scrape Amazon with a basic Python script and a single datacenter IP address. Today, every major site runs aggressive anti-bot software. You send three requests. Cloudflare demands a CAPTCHA. The defenses adapted. The only way to pull data at scale now is to look exactly like a human browsing from a couch in Ohio.
That means buying residential proxies.
Most industry roundups list the same enterprise giants, compare the marketing copy, and move on. I spent the last three months dismantling my old scraping stack to test the actual 2026 crop. I threw real workloads at the top providers. E-commerce tracking. Flight price aggregation. Search engine results. I measured the latency, tracked the success rates, and scrutinized the invoices.
The market split. You either have a corporate budget to burn, or you need raw infrastructure without the markup. Here is what the landscape actually looks like.
Geonode
