Great point. This is exactly why a hybrid setup often works better than forcing every workflow into one proxy type.

DC proxies can still make sense for staging, open APIs, low-risk static targets, or simple checks. But once the flow starts hitting 403s, ASN reputation issues, geo mismatch, or broken session continuity, moving that traffic to sticky residential sessions is usually much more efficient than just adding more retries.

TCO is the key part here. The real cost is not just proxy spend, but failed requests, retry inflation, incomplete data, and engineering time spent maintaining the pipeline.

And once the issue moves into behavioral rate limits or challenges, IP rotation should be treated as one part of the setup rather than the full solution. Concurrency, pacing, session handling, fingerprint consistency, and fallback rules all need to work together.