Sneaker culture
Proxy
Also called Proxies, Residential proxy, Proxy list
A proxy is an intermediate server that makes web traffic appear to come from somewhere else. Sneaker bots use pools of them so that many simultaneous checkout attempts do not all arrive from one address and get blocked. Proxies are rented by the month or by the gigabyte and are a recurring cost of running a bot.
In use: Someone running fifty bot tasks might rent residential proxies billed per gigabyte on top of the bot licence itself. The bill arrives every month, and it buys nothing at all on a release decided by random selection at the close.
Why bots need them and draws do not
A proxy sits between a program and a website. The site sees the proxy’s address instead of the real one. Run enough of them and fifty checkout attempts look like fifty different people in fifty different places, which is the entire point.
Retailers rate-limit and block by address, so an automation tool sending everything down one connection is easy to stop. Proxies are the answer to that problem, and they come in grades. Datacentre proxies are cheap and simple to identify. Residential proxies route through real consumer connections, cost a great deal more, and are usually billed by the gigabyte, which makes the monthly figure hard to predict before you start.
Two things are worth being clear about.
Proxies exist to make automated traffic harder to attribute. Whatever you think of that, it is not a neutral technical detail. It is the part of a bot setup that collides most directly with a retailer’s terms of service.
And on a SNKRS Draw they buy no speed, because speed is not what a Draw measures. A Draw closes at a published time and selects at random from the entries it received. What proxies do on a Draw is keep many separate entries looking like what they are: many separate people. Laced handles that side itself, on its own infrastructure, so there is nothing for you to buy, rotate or replace.