One thing I'd flag: the 25 DMs/day number is really a ceiling for an established, trusted account, not a starting point. Brand-new accounts made from fresh Gmails get throttled way below that, and if you push them to the limit in week one you'll hit action blocks fast. What's helped me more than the proxy question is treating the first 2-3 weeks as pure account-building: post a few times, fill out the bio, follow and genuinely engage in your niche, and only start DMing once the account looks and behaves like a real person. Also worth knowing that DMs to people who don't follow you land in their message requests folder, where open/reply rates are much lower, so a lot of the "warm-up" value comes from getting some inbound engagement first. On proxies: if you're running 5 accounts, keeping them on separate clean connections does matter because Instagram clusters accounts that share the same fingerprint, but I wouldn't over-engineer it before the accounts are even aged. Curious what niche you're targeting, since that affects whether IG DMs or a follow-first approach converts better.