ProxyLedger

Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.

At $49/mo (assumed category price), you need 1,701 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.

Nearest tracked rivals on that curve:

A rival's moat trend is its verified-revenue trajectory, not its rating — a 4.9★ incumbent with eroding revenue is a different opponent than a widening one. How it's computed →

• Peekaboo — Verified $43k MRR in the adjacent analytics slot — already proven and further along than a cold start.
• Visby — 166 reviews at 5.0★ on AppSumo means distribution plus goodwill you'd have to outspend.
• Proxy vendors' own dashboards — Bright Data/Oxylabs-class providers ship usage and cost views free with the service, killing willingness to pay.

• No Reddit or forum demand signal found for proxy cost/usage analytics keywords — the core need is unproven.
• No funded companies tracked in or near the space, so no investor or acquirer validation of the category.
• Only two similar products tracked; Peekaboo's $43k MRR is the single revenue datapoint and its overlap with proxy-specific cost analytics is unverified.
• Evidence is genuinely thin: no observed spend, complaint volume, or churn data for this exact wedge.

• Buyer count is tiny — scraping/proxy-heavy engineering teams are a narrow slice of a narrow market.
• Per-seat pricing misfits the buyer: usually one or two infra engineers own proxy spend, capping ACV.
• Value is entirely derivative of vendor APIs; each provider rate-limit or schema change breaks ingestion.
• Proxy vendors can add cost breakdowns natively at zero marginal cost and erase the product overnight.

• Proxy provider usage/billing APIs (Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy et al.) — Any one deprecating or gating billing endpoints removes the data feed the dashboard exists to display.
• Provider-native cost analytics — A single vendor release of free spend breakdowns removes the reason to buy a third-party layer.
• Provider ToS on scraping/reselling account data — A clause banning third-party aggregation of account usage makes the integration contractually unusable.

• Cannot verify whether Peekaboo or Visby actually serve proxy-infrastructure buyers or a different analytics niche.
• Cannot size how many teams spend enough on proxies (> $5k/mo) to justify an optimization tool.
• Cannot tell whether the major proxy vendors expose stable, documented billing APIs at all.

Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-03.

Multi-vendor proxy spend reconciliation with per-target cost attribution — the one view no single provider will ever build.

Cheapest next step: DM 15 engineers in scraping/data-collection communities asking what they paid for proxies last month and how they track it; offer a $200 paid teardown.

Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 4.6 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.

This one got a skip. Every morning the engine files one mined gap that could be a yes — idea, score, and what holds it back, free at 7am AEST. Unedited, like this verdict.

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