Use cases

Proxlane is worth adding when you already scrape and the problem is reliability, cost or visibility. It is not a scraper. It routes to the ones you already pay for.

You already use a scraping API

The common starting point. One provider works until it does not, and you find out from a customer rather than a dashboard.

Proxlane changes the failure from "the job returned garbage" to "provider A was blocked, provider B served it, here is the rule that fired". Migration is a hostname change.

You want a second provider without writing a second integration

Adding a fallback provider normally means a second client, a second set of parameters, a second error shape, and a decision about when to switch.

Proxlane makes that one endpoint. Providers are configuration, not code. Add a key and the new provider joins the chain.

You cannot tell blocked from empty

The expensive failure in scraping is the silent one. A block page returns HTTP 200 with a body, so anything checking status codes records a success and stores a challenge page.

Proxlane reads the body and calls it SOFT_BLOCK, with X-Detect-Rule naming the rule that matched. Bad data stops entering your pipeline as though it were good.

You are feeding a model

Retrieval pipelines are the worst place for a silent block, because the model will confidently summarise whatever it is given.

Proxlane gives every fetch a verdict you can gate on. See using Proxlane from an agent.

You need to know what scraping actually costs

X-Cost-Estimate reports the spend across every attempt, including failed ones. A failover that burned two charged hops reports two.

That is the number that tells you a target has become expensive, which usually happens well before it starts failing outright.

You have a compliance or data-residency requirement

Self-host it. The gateway is AGPL, runs in a container, and holds provider keys in its own environment. Nothing is sent to us, because there is no us in the request path.

country_code selects where the request appears to come from, subject to provider coverage.

What it is not for

Not a scraper. Proxlane does not parse HTML, manage crawl queues or schedule jobs. It makes one request and returns one response.

Not a proxy pool. It routes to commercial scraping APIs. It does not manage IPs.

Not a way to avoid paying providers. It uses your keys and your credits, and it reports what they cost.

Not a bypass tool. Detection tells you that you were blocked. It does not defeat the block. What each provider does about anti-bot measures is between you and that provider, under their terms.