A 20-minute experiment that saved us from buying residential proxies, and the escalation ladder we found underneath.
At IntelDif, we crawl competitor pages on a schedule, diff them, and alert our users only when something meaningful changes. That business dies if the crawler can't see the page. So, when one of the domains we monitor started returning Cloudflare's "Attention Required" challenge on every crawl, it immediately went to the top of the queue.
The internet has one answer for this: your IP reputation is bad, buy residential proxies. Every scraping forum, every proxy vendor's blog, every Stack Overflow thread. Residential proxies are also expensive, metered by the gigabyte, and a recurring cost that scales with your crawl volume.
Before paying, we did something embarrassingly simple that we'd recommend to anyone hitting bot walls: we ran a 2×2 experiment.
The experiment
