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2026-06-13

I suspect prices of residential proxy providers can be undercut

Disclaimer

• Quick Note
• I have not actually built this app, so nothing below is actually validated irl.
• I will update this page if I ever actually end up building this app.

Main

• Both of these are two fronts for the same business:
  • Pawns.app pays $0.20 / GB to people who do a login and download an app on their phone.
    • Target user - My guess is lower socioeconomic class, non-technical users, english-speaking, who don't have any savings and value immediate cash.
    • Login method - google login / apple login (not anonymous, google and apple both demand OTP login)
    • Payout method - Paypal / crypto / amazon or visa gift cards (anonymous allowed)
  • IProyal sells residential ISP bandwidth to users at anywhere between $2 / GB and $10 / GB.
    • Target user - My guess is primarily tech founders who wanna do web scraping, or hackers who want anonymous IPs to send outbound traffic. My guess is this is not used by botnets for DDOS.
    • Login method - email (anonymous allowed)
    • Payment method - crypto (anonymous allowed) / various bank cards
• If I was building a competitor to IProyal / Pawns.app, my first attempt would be as follows:
  • Bandwidth sellers
    • Target user - same
    • Login method - OTP login only
    • Payout method - Gift card only
  • Bandwidth buyers
    • Target user - same
    • Login method - email (anonymous allowed)
    • Payment method - crypto (anonymous allowed)
  • Also
    • I would purchase gift cards anonymously with crypto on bitrefill or coinsbee or similar, to pay the bandwidth sellers. If targeting Indian users, also use hindi, pay via Airtel/Jio recharge purchased via coinsbee. This avoids a separate login step which is good UX, also it is obvious to me this is the payment method prefered by the target user.
    • I would enforce few common tasks like running yt-dlp, running self-hosted nitter, etc, instead of buying and selling bandwidth for open-ended tasks. Verify 1 in 1000 provided outputs (such as youtube videos or tweets) against the real data to prevent fraud, and add the mobile number to server blacklist if fake data is provided.
    • Most importantly I would undercut everyone's prices, pay the sellers more and charge the buyers less.
    • I would make myself the first buyer to kickstart the market. Two-sided market problem exists as usual, that's also why I would undercut prices by a lot if I ever start it.

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