1. Making the user too lazy to switch:

When you look at Apple, it’s the perfect example. People switch to Apple because of the minimalism, the luxury, or even the peer pressure. But they stay because of the inter-connected interaction. Once you buy one device, you buy the second, then the third. Eventually, the devices are so interconnected that switching onto another provider like Android, feels inefficient. You’ve made the user too lazy to switch because the cost of leaving your ecosystem is too high

-Adobe doesn't just sell Photoshop; they sell a workflow. Once a creative professional has their assets in the Creative Cloud, their fonts synced, and their Lightroom talking to their Premiere Pro, switching to a competitor like Canva or DaVinci Resolve feels inefficient. Even if another tool is cheaper, the user is lazy to leave the ecosystem they’ve built.

-Making the company too lazy to implement;

-The second part of the scaling equation is what the competition is doing or rather, what they aren't doing. Apple implements features that other companies feel too lazy to implement, or quite frankly, too insecure to implement. They take big swings on unconventional features that become the new standard. By the time the competition stops being lazy and tries to copy it, Apple has already moved the needle again.

-For years, traditional car companies were lazy and insecure about going fully electric. They didn't want to build the charging infrastructure because it was too hard and too unconventional. Tesla didn't just build a car; they built the Supercharger network. Now, other car companies are forced to use Tesla’s tech because they were too slow (or too lazy) to build their own.

-When Netflix started producing original content (House of Cards), the big networks were lazy. They thought they could just keep licensing their shows to Netflix forever. They were insecure about changing their cable-TV model. By the time they realized they needed their own streaming services, Netflix had already scaled into a global studio.

-To win in the mass market and truly break the game, you have to implement unconventional things. You have to offer the deals, the features, and the interactions that make the user feel a genuine necessity for your product. It is the most important thing you can do for your business, but it’s also the most difficult. You have to build a world that is so easy to live in, and so hard to leave, that the competition can’t catch up.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47814662

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47299223

Points: 1

# Comments: 1

This week, an article titled "The shady world of IP leasing" made the rounds on Hacker News and tech Twitter. It argued that IPv4 exhaustion is a myth caused by hoarding, and that the "Residential Proxy" market is largely built on a house of cards—specifically, datacenter blocks that have been scrubbed, subleased, and manipulated to look like home internet connections.

They are absolutely right.

At Proxyon, we see this every single day. Competitors offer "70 Million Residential IPs" that are actually just hoarded datacenter blocks with a fake mustache. Here is the technical breakdown of how the "Leasing Laundromat" works, and why we decided to build our infrastructure differently. The "Geofeed" Loophole (RFC 8805) The article touched on this, but didn't go deep enough into how easy it is to fake a location. The internet relies on trust. When you buy a block of IPs from a broker (like LogicWeb or IPXO), you control the narrative. The "magic trick" used by shady proxy providers is RFC 8805. This allows an IP holder to publish a simple CSV file (a Geofeed) telling the world where those IPs are located. Reality: The server is in a datacenter in Kansas. The CSV: 192.0.2.0/24, US, US-NY, New York The Result: MaxMind, Google, and Cloudflare scrape that CSV and update their databases. Suddenly, a cheap datacenter IP is sold to you as a "Premium New York Residential Proxy." It costs the provider pennies, but they sell it to you at residential markups. The "Clean Slate" Business The most disturbing part of the leasing economy is 'Reputation Laundering'

If a subnet gets burned by spam or fraud, it should be dead. That is the immune system of the internet working. But in the leasing market, you can pay a "cleaning fee." Providers will actively petition Spamhaus, Barracuda, and SORBS to delist the IPs, claiming the "issue is resolved," only to lease them to the next bot farm five minutes later. This artificially keeps "zombie" IPs in circulation, degrading the trust of the entire network. How we made it Different (The Hard Way) When we built Proxyon, we had a choice. We could go to these massive leasing marketplaces, rent 10,000 IPs for cheap, fake the geodata, and sell them as "Premium Residential." We didn't. We realized that "Privacy" and "Deception" are not the same thing. You come to us for privacy (No KYC), not to be lied to about what you are buying. -We Don't Fake Residential If you buy a Residential IP from us, it comes from a legitimate peer or ISP partnership, not a mislabeled datacenter block. We don't use Geofeed manipulation to pretend a server rack is a suburban house. -We Don't "Launder" IPs We don't pay bribes to get off blacklists. If an IP in our pool is flagged, we rotate it out and let it cool down naturally. We maintain pool health by enforcing strict ethical usage policies, not by paying "cleaning fees" to cover up abuse. -True "Pay-As-You-Go" (Anti-Hoarding) The article correctly identifies that hoarding is the cause of IPv4 exhaustion. Large providers force you into monthly subscriptions where you buy bandwidth you don't use. That is artificial scarcity. We operate on a non-expiring model. You buy the data, you keep it until you use it. We don't hoard bandwidth or IPs that aren't being utilized.

The "Shady World of IP Leasing" isn't going away. As long as RIRs (like ARIN and RIPE) lack the teeth to enforce usage policies, the gray market will thrive. But as a user, you have a choice. You can buy from the "70 Million IP" giants who are leasing laundered space, or you can buy from providers who are transparent about their sourcing. We might be smaller than the giants. But our IPs are real.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47286086

Points: 2

# Comments: 4

The "Free" App Dilemma To understand where residential IPs come from, you have to look at the mobile app ecosystem. Let’s say you are an indie developer. You build a free "Flashlight" app, a "Sudoku" game, or a "Weather Widget."

You have 50,000 daily active users (DAU).

Ad Revenue: Banner ads are terrible. You might make $0.50 CPM (Cost Per Mille/Thousand views). Premium Subscriptions: Nobody pays for a flashlight app. You are losing money on server costs.

Enter the "Monetization SDK" One day, you get an email from a Proxy Network (or an SDK aggregator). The pitch is simple:

"Include our tiny code snippet (SDK) in your app. It runs in the background. We will pay you $500 per month for your 50,000 users. You don’t have to show ads anymore."

To the developer, this is a lifeline. They integrate the SDK. They update their Terms of Service (ToS) to say: "Your device may be used to route public web traffic for research purposes." The User Experience (The Opt-In) The user updates the app. A pop-up appears asking for permissions. The Reality: Users have "Banner Blindness." They click "Accept" to get to the flashlight. The Result: That device is now a Residential Exit Node. When a data scientist at a Fortune 500 company buys 1GB of residential bandwidth to scrape Amazon pricing, their request travels from their server -> The Proxy Gateway -> The User’s Phone (running the flashlight app) -> Amazon.com. Amazon sees a legitimate AT&T or Verizon mobile IP. They serve the data. The proxy provider charges the data scientist $15/GB. The app developer gets a fraction of a penny.

The Engineering Nightmare: Churn This economic model creates a massive engineering challenge for us. Unlike a Datacenter IP (which lives in a rack and stays online 24/7), a Residential IP is a living, breathing human behavior. WiFi to 4G: The user walks out of their house. Their IP changes from Comcast (WiFi) to T-Mobile (4G) instantly. Battery Optimization: Android/iOS kills background processes to save battery. The node dies.

The "Pocket" Factor: The user puts the phone in their pocket, losing signal. A residential proxy pool has a Churn Rate of roughly 10-20% per minute.

This is why "Sticky Sessions" (keeping the same IP for 10 minutes) are so hard to guarantee. We aren't just routing traffic; we are playing a game of "Whack-a-Mole" with millions of devices, trying to predict which ones will stay online long enough to load a webpage. The Ethical Divide: "Silent" vs. "Rewarded" This is where the industry splits. The "Silent" Model: The user has no idea. The SDK is hidden in a shady calculator app. This is cheaper for providers but ethically bankrupt (and results in poor connection quality when users delete the app). The "Rewarded" Model: Services like Honeygain or Pawns.app explicitly tell the user: "Install this app, share your internet, and we will pay you cash." At Proxyon, we realized that "Silent" SDKs are a ticking time bomb. We focus on sourcing from Rewarded pools. Why? Because users want to keep the app open. They want to be on WiFi. The connections are faster, the latency is lower, and crucially it’s consensual.