so, i just torched a decent chunk of budget testing what all the 'best residential proxy 2025' lists recommended. feeling nostalgic for like, 2022 when you could actually trust a benchmark. back then it was just speed, success rate, maybe some subnet info. now every review site is just pushing their own affiliate links with these insane claims about anti-detection ai. lmao. my latest campaign got sniffed out in under 48 hours using one of the big names. the numbers looked perfect on their dashboard, 99.9% uptime, low ping. but the actual requests hitting my target site? instant blocks. i pulled the logs and the geo-ip was all over the place despite paying for us-only. its like they're selling you a spreadsheet dream and delivering recycled ipv4 addresses from a pool that every bot farm has already burned through. show me the actual asn diversity, show me the real session consistency. i'm not seeing it anymore. feels like we're just buying polished versions of the same junk