Catalogue numbers follow the order of entry, not of age, which is how the oldest project here became OB-002. gimmeproxy's domain was registered on 21 April 2015, seven years before ip-api's first commit.
The observation
Free proxy lists are full of dead addresses, and everyone who uses one ends up writing the same checker: fetch the list, try each proxy, keep the ones that answer, repeat before they die. gimmeproxy was that checker written once, with an API in front: one GET, one proxy that was verified minutes ago.
The decision
Verify, do not aggregate. Every address makes a real connection, a real TLS handshake and a real HTTPS request to gimmeproxy's own judge before it is ever served, and is checked again every 45 minutes while it stays in the pool. The API stays free: a Starter key costs nothing, no card, and gives 1 request a second and 100,000 requests a month, because a verified proxy is a small thing to give away; paid keys add volume and requests per second.
The working result
In October 2026 the service was rewritten in Rust as a single binary: scraper, checker, judge, API and website in one process, no Redis, about 3 MB on disk. The API answers exactly as the Node version did, quirks included, so scripts written years ago keep working. The checker's concurrency was measured: pushing harder loses live proxies to dropped packets.
The sources were re-evaluated too: every candidate list was fetched and tested, and only the ones that added live addresses stayed. More lists would mostly add more copies of the same addresses, which is an unglamorous finding and probably an accurate one.