Best residential proxies for SaaS?

Hey everyone, hoping to get some real-world insights here. We're running a SaaS product and a critical part of our competitive analysis and feature development relies heavily on scraping competitor pricing and general market data. We've been using datacenter proxies for this for a while now, mainly because they're pretty affordable, but honestly, it's becoming a huge headache. We're constantly running into blocks, IP bans, and captchas, which means our data is often incomplete, outdated, or just plain unreliable. It's really impacting our ability to make quick, informed decisions, and it feels like we're spending more time debugging proxy issues than actually analyzing the data we manage to get.

We're seriously considering making the switch to residential proxies. From what I understand, they offer much higher anonymity and significantly lower detection rates because they look like regular user IPs. This sounds like exactly what we need for robust web scraping, especially for sensitive competitor sites. The big sticking point, though, is the cost – they are significantly more expensive than datacenter options, and as a growing SaaS, every dollar counts.

So, I'm really keen to hear from those of you who've gone down this road: is the much higher cost of residential proxies truly justified for consistent, reliable competitive intelligence scraping? What kind of practical success rate differences have you seen between really good residential proxies versus even the best datacenter ones for this specific use case? Also, any specific recommendations for providers that offer a good balance of performance and cost for SaaS data collection? And finally, are there any particular strategies, like optimal rotation frequency or geo-targeting, that you've found make residential proxies more effective and help keep the costs manageable in the long run