We built a free open-source tool instead of buying ads to launch our proxy service

We just launched BifrostNetwork, a residential/static ISP proxy service. Instead of leading with paid ads, we spent the first two weeks building proxycheck-cli, a free open-source CLI tool that tests any proxy's connectivity, anonymity level, type, and speed — not just ours, any proxy.

Why a free tool instead of ads

Our buyers are developers and technical teams who are naturally skeptical of proxy marketing claims. A tool that's genuinely useful regardless of which proxy you use builds trust in a way an ad never could. It also gave us a legitimate reason to show up in developer communities (GitHub, Hacker News, technical forums) without it reading as a pitch.

What we shipped

- Protocol connectivity checks (HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5/SOCKS5h)

- Anonymity level detection (transparent/anonymous/elite)

- Proxy type heuristics (residential/datacenter/mobile)

- Exit IP geolocation and speed testing

- MIT licensed, one dependency, JSON output for scripting

What actually happened when we dogfooded it

Testing it against our own proxies surfaced real bugs before anyone else could point them out publicly — for example, an ISP named "Tojiktelecom" was getting misclassified as "mobile" purely because our keyword matcher saw "telecom" as a substring. Fixed it, added a regression test, and used the fix itself as content for a follow-up post. Finding your own bugs in public, transparently, turned out to be better marketing than pretending everything was perfect from day one.

Where we launched

Show HN, Product Hunt, a few Chinese dev communities (V2EX, NodeSeek), and GitHub awesome-lists. Each channel needed different framing — Show HN wanted the technical "why," Product Hunt wanted the visual pitch, dev forums wanted zero marketing language at all. Reposting identical copy everywhere didn't work; each community could tell.

Takeaway for early-stage founders

If your buyers are technical, something that solves a real adjacent problem for free will outperform generic ad spend on trust-building, even if it's more upfront work. It also gives you something honest to say when people ask "why should I trust your numbers" — point them at the tool, not the marketing page.

Happy to answer questions about the build or the launch sequencing.

We just launched [BifrostNetwork](https://bifrostnetwork.cc/), a residential/static ISP proxy service.

we spent the first two weeks building [**proxycheck-cli**](https://github.com/bifrostnetworkcc/proxycheck-cli), a free open-source CLI tool...