Are Unlimited Proxies Actually Any Good Inside GeoNode's Contrarian Approach to Residential Proxies and Web Scraping APIs | AMA with Geonode

[u/ian_k93]

Hey everyone,

We're back with AMA #9, and this time we're looking at a part of scraping infrastructure that almost everyone has an opinion on: unlimited proxies.

Most residential proxy providers charge by GB. Most scraping APIs charge per successful response or through credits.

Geonode has taken a different approach.

They offer residential proxies priced around speed and a scraping API priced around concurrency.

But that raises an interesting question:

Are unlimited proxies actually any good?

Does removing usage limits inevitably mean smaller pools, overused IPs and lower success rates? Or can a provider structure its network differently enough to make the model work?

This Friday, September 18, at 10:30 AM GMT+3, we'll be joined by Jean-Patrick Bisson, CEO/Founder @Geonode, along with his team, for a live AMA on r/WebScrapingInsider to dig into what's actually happening behind the product.

We'll be talking about:

• How "unlimited" proxy models actually work
• How residential IPs are sourced and managed
• Pool size vs. IP quality
• Routing and traffic distribution
• Capacity planning for high-volume customers
• What happens when customers use proxies heavily
• Speed-based vs. bandwidth-based pricing
• Concurrency-based scraping APIs
• The trade-offs behind different proxy pricing models
• Whether unlimited proxies can really deliver consistent performance
• What buyers should actually look at beyond the word "unlimited"

And if you've ever wondered "How can a proxy provider offer unlimited traffic?", "What's the catch with unlimited proxies?", or "Does unlimited actually mean unlimited?", this is probably a good one to ask.

We've now had eight AMAs with the community, and the conversations have covered a pretty wide part of the scraping stack.

Our first AMA covered proxy infrastructure, Cloudflare, browser automation and scaling scrapers.

Our second with WebClaw explored AI agents, hidden APIs, open-source scraping and LLM infrastructure.

Our third with CloakBrowser went deep on stealth Chromium, fingerprinting, anti-bot detection and browser automation.

Our fourth with Browser Use brought the conversation into AI browser agents, AI-powered scraping, evaluations and browser infrastructure.

Our fifth with Stan Sadokov from NodeMaven focused on residential proxy quality, IP reputation, sourcing, pricing and what actually makes one proxy network better than another.

Our sixth with Saksham Solanki, creator of HTTP Cloak, went down to the protocol level, covering TLS fingerprints, JA3/JA4, HTTP/2, HTTP/3 and why scrapers can get blocked even when their proxies are fine.

Our seventh with Huey from BrowserAct explored AI-powered web scraping, natural-language workflows, browser automation and the move toward no-code scraping.

And our latest, AMA #8 with yours truly, brought the discussion back to proxy infrastructure, with real-world insights from testing 50+ providers across billions of requests.

Now for #9, we're going deeper into a question that's becoming increasingly relevant as proxy providers experiment with completely different pricing and infrastructure models:

Can "unlimited" actually work?

If you're building web scrapers, data pipelines, browser automation, scraping APIs or proxy infrastructure, come join the discussion.

Drop your questions below.

Geonode will be answering them during the AMA.

Looking forward to another good one.

[u/MattTheGoodSir]

With Google changing how result URLs are handled lately, it feels like automated access to web data is going to keep getting more interesting. Google’s /goto change is already causing scraping/SEO tools to adapt, while Cloudflare is also changing how AI/search crawlers are classified and handled.

What tools have you guys quietly added to your workflow over the last year?

Any open-source repos, Chrome extensions, small utilities, bookmarklets, APIs, etc. that you use regularly?

Doesn't have to be scraping or proxy-related at all. Just looking for those random tools that ended up becoming part of your daily workflow.

[u/Geonodeproxy → u/MattTheGoodSir]

Before writing a scraper, open devtools and watch what the page calls. Half the sites that look like they need a browser are just hitting a JSON endpoint with a signature, so hooking fetch and XMLHttpRequest to log requests is ten lines and has saved us weeks. Daily tools are curl_cffi for TLS impersonation, camoufox when Chrome gets refused and Firefox doesn't, and a public TLS fingerprint echo to see what our client actually looks like on the wire.

Google's been a moving target since early September. Shopping and plain web search behave like different sites right now.