Day 4 of building ScrapeForge 🛠️

I know exactly how you feel I've built a similar product before and had the same issue but it was for internal use for my startup wasn't planning on going commercial or anything. I'm not sure if this would help you or not but I found that getting paid IPs have the best performance if you get them from multiple IP providers. Check out decodo and another one I think was called scraperapi they were the most cost efficient. I hope that helps and best of luck to you on your journey.

Appreciate you sharing the behind-the-scenes. I've gone down the free proxy rabbit hole before and hit the same wall — it takes so long to sift through hundreds just to find a handful that actually work. In the end, paying for a reliable service saved me more time than it cost. Did you try any community-maintained lists or aggregators to cut down on the manual collection, or was it mostly a DIY process? Looking forward to seeing how you balance these decisions as ScrapeForge grows.

Early progress posts like this are helpful to follow. It’s interesting seeing how things evolve once you’re actually building instead of planning.

Curious what you’ve learned so far that you didn’t expect going in.

This is a painful but valuable infra lesson. Free proxies feel “free” until you account for engineering time, reliability, and mental overhead.

From a PM perspective, this kind of choice directly impacts perceived product quality (speed, success rate, trust), especially once real users are involved.

I’m building hands-on PM experience and enjoy collaborating with builders at this stage, happy to help think through trade-offs, priorities, or user impact if useful.

Looking forward to Day 5.