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Comment by mateuszbuda | Hacker News Reader

For https://scrapingfish.com/ it took us about 5-6 months from idea to $2k/month. It’s still not our main source of income. It was fun to build especially that it involved working with hardware.

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Just curious, so how exactly do you source your IPs? I clicked on the "How IPs for web scraping are sourced" page expecting an answer on how you do it, but it doesn't actually tell me that; it just tells me how they're not sourced. You said that "it involved working with hardware", so did you source your own mobile SIM cards in various countries, hook up your own phones to that and use those as proxies?

Good question. Here we explain, with a few simplifications, how we source our IPs: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Wouldn't this mean that you're bandwidth constrained by the data plan associated with the SIM from the mobile carrier?

Yes, but we have so many plans and actually many of them are unlimited. We also track data usage and can either add extra data package or a SIM card gets excluded from our proxy pool.

Props to you guys for putting a complete tutorial on that and not keeping it for you. Cheers!

Thanks! Internally we use more sophisticated system required by larger scale to support higher volume and concurrent connections from multiple clients, but for smaller scale limited to one person or a small team, everything described on our blog should be enough.

Looks great, will give it a try.

Bug found: Your "Buy" page is missing the header bar for navigation etc.

edit: Contact page has the same problem. :-)

Actually, it’s a feature :)

Some of us find that type of attempted lock-in extremely off-putting. I know it is common, but just a heads up. I have no idea how much of a minority we are.

I've got no use for it now but damn this used to be such a pain point in an old job. Looks great!

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