Why is there a general consensus that cheap proxies mean bad quality?

Laura López — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:04:24 +0000

I work in marketing for a new, budget-friendly proxy provider. I am genuinely seeking to learn from your insights because our online conversion rates have been struggling. No brand names will be mentioned here.

I've been browsing through a lot of subreddits lately, and I’ve noticed a strong trend: whenever someone asks for recommendations, people almost always point them toward the expensive, tier-1 brands, often dismissing budget providers with a blanket "low price = low quality."

As someone on the provider side catering to SMBs and indie developers, this got me thinking about how users actually define quality versus value.
For context, without naming our brand, our technical baselines sit at around a 96% success rate for residential IPs, unlimited bandwidth with non-expiring data, and a global average latency of around 1300ms, priced between $0.5 to $3.2/GB depending on volume.

We have stable offline clients, but our online conversion is quite low, which brings me to my questions for this community:

How do you personally define proxy "quality"? Is latency the ultimate dealbreaker for your use cases, or is IP pool purity/rotation the priority?
Where do you draw the line for price-to-performance (ROI)? At what point does a lower price stop being an incentive and start looking like a red flag?
What is a "tolerable" baseline for you? For example, for non-time-sensitive scraping or account management, is a 1300ms latency acceptable if the data never expires and costs a fraction of the market price?

Would love to hear your raw thoughts, experiences, and what metrics actually matter to you when choosing a provider. Thanks!

DEV Community: Laura López

Why is there a general consensus that cheap proxies mean bad quality?