SaaS, AI and proxy terms, in plain English.

A third-party logistics provider stores your inventory, picks and packs orders, and ships them to customers on your behalf. You send stock to their…

The share of new signups who reach a defined 'aha' moment — the first action that reliably predicts they will stick around. That milestone is…

An affiliate network is a marketplace that connects advertisers (merchants) with publishers (affiliates). The network handles tracking, attribution, fraud…

AI systems that pursue a goal over multiple steps rather than answering a single prompt. An agent plans, calls tools or APIs, observes the result, and…

An AI agent is an LLM-based system that can take autonomous actions — calling tools, browsing the web, writing code, querying databases — to complete a…

The average annualised revenue from a single customer contract, excluding one-off fees. A three-year deal worth $150,000 in total has an ACV of $50,000…

Current revenue extrapolated over a full year — typically the latest month's recurring revenue multiplied by twelve. ARR gives a fast, forward-looking…

Anti-bot detection is a suite of techniques websites use to identify and block automated requests. It combines IP reputation scoring, behavioral analysis…

A browser that masks or randomises the fingerprint your device broadcasts — user agent, screen resolution, installed fonts, canvas and WebGL rendering…

A unique string that identifies and authenticates your application when it calls an API. The server checks the key on every request to confirm who you…

A cap on how many API requests you may make in a given window — for example 100 requests per minute or 10,000 per day. Providers enforce limits to protect…

API-first means the product is designed so every feature is accessible via API before — or simultaneously with — any UI. Developers can build on top of it…

ARPU is total recurring revenue divided by the total number of paying accounts for a given period. It tells you the average deal size across your customer…

Annual Recurring Revenue is MRR × 12 — the yearly run-rate of all active subscription revenue at a point in time. It excludes one-time fees, services, and…

The attribution window is the length of time between a user click and a conversion during which an affiliate or ad source can claim credit. Typical…

Total revenue divided by number of orders over the same period. If 200 orders generate $9,000, AOV is $45. It is one of only three ways to grow ecommerce…

In proxy pricing, the volume of data passed through the proxy, billed per gigabyte. Every page you request consumes bandwidth — HTML, images, scripts…

The total contracted value a customer commits to, recorded when the contract is signed rather than when cash arrives or revenue is recognised. A customer…

The percentage of visitors who land on a page and leave without any further interaction. High bounce is not automatically bad: a visitor who reads a…

Browser fingerprinting is the collection and analysis of browser attributes — installed fonts, screen resolution, WebGL renderer, audio context, timezone…

How much cash a company consumes each month. Gross burn is total monthly spend; net burn is spend minus revenue, and is the number that actually matters…

CAC is the total cost of acquiring one new paying customer — marketing spend, sales salaries, tools, and overhead — divided by the number of customers…

Payback period is the number of months required to recover the cost of acquiring a customer through that customer's gross profit. Formula: CAC ÷ (ARPU ×…

CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge mechanism designed to block automated requests. Common…

When a shopper adds items to their cart but leaves without completing checkout. Industry-wide it affects roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of carts…

A rebate that returns part of a purchase price to the buyer after the transaction completes. In affiliate marketing, a cashback site shares its commission…

A globally distributed network of servers that caches your static files — images, CSS, JavaScript, video — and serves each visitor from the location…

A prompting technique in which a model is asked to work through its reasoning step by step before giving a final answer. Making the intermediate steps…

A forced payment reversal initiated by the cardholder through their bank rather than by asking the merchant for a refund. The merchant loses the revenue…

Churn is the rate at which subscription customers cancel or downgrade in a given period. Gross churn counts only departures; net churn subtracts expansion…

The percentage of people who click something after seeing it — clicks divided by impressions. It is the standard measure of whether a piece of creative…

Grouping users by a shared starting characteristic — usually their signup month — and tracking each group's behaviour over time instead of blending…

Contacting prospects who have had no prior relationship with you, typically by email, LinkedIn or phone. Effectiveness depends far more on targeting and…

The number of requests a scraper runs simultaneously. Higher concurrency finishes large jobs faster but increases the chance of rate limiting, IP bans and…

Concurrent connections (or concurrency) is the number of simultaneous requests a proxy plan supports at once. Higher concurrency means faster scraping —…

The context window is the maximum amount of text — measured in tokens — that an LLM can process in a single request, including both the prompt you send…

Contraction MRR is the monthly recurring revenue lost when existing customers downgrade their plan, reduce seats, or move to a lower tier — without…

The sequence of steps a visitor passes through on the way to a desired action — for example visit, signup, activation, purchase. Each step loses some…

A small snippet of tracking code placed on a confirmation or thank-you page that fires when a visitor completes a valuable action, reporting it back to…

The percentage of visitors who complete a target action — buying, signing up, booking a demo — out of everyone who had the chance. It is the efficiency…

Cookie duration is the length of time an affiliate's tracking cookie remains active after a user clicks their link. If the user converts during this…

Applying more than one discount to a single order — for example a percentage-off code plus free shipping plus store credit. Most ecommerce platforms…

CPA is an affiliate commission model where the advertiser pays only when a user completes a specific action — typically a purchase, subscription signup…

CPC is a pricing model where the advertiser pays for each click on their ad or affiliate link, regardless of whether the click converts into a purchase or…

CPM is an advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays per 1,000 impressions (views), regardless of clicks or conversions. "Mille" is Latin for…

A CSS selector is a pattern used to identify and extract specific elements from an HTML document, based on element type, class, ID, attribute, or…

A composite metric that predicts whether an account is likely to renew, churn or expand, built from signals such as product usage depth, feature adoption…

Extracting structured fields from unstructured or semi-structured source data — pulling a price, title and rating out of a scraped HTML page and turning…

A datacenter proxy routes traffic through an IP address hosted in a commercial hosting provider — AWS, Hetzner, OVH, DigitalOcean — rather than a…

Deep linking in affiliate marketing means generating a tracked link that sends users directly to a specific product page, landing page, or pricing page —…

The DOM is the in-memory tree representation of an HTML document that the browser builds after parsing HTML and executing JavaScript. It is the live…

A pre-written sequence of messages sent automatically on a schedule or in response to behaviour — a welcome series, an onboarding sequence, a…

A retail model where you never hold inventory: when a customer orders, the supplier ships the product directly to them, and you keep the difference…

The automated process of recovering failed subscription payments. When a card is declined — usually because it expired, hit a limit or was flagged —…

Running code and serving data from locations physically close to the user rather than from one centralised region. Because the request travels a shorter…

Embeddings are numerical vector representations of text (or images, audio, or other data) that capture semantic meaning. Similar content produces vectors…

Encryption where data is encrypted on the sender's device and only decrypted on the recipient's, so nobody in between — including the service provider —…

EPC is an affiliate metric measuring average revenue generated per 100 clicks sent to an offer. Formula: total commissions ÷ total clicks × 100. It is a…

The exit node is the final server or device in a proxy chain whose IP address the target website sees. In a residential proxy network, the exit node is…

Expansion MRR is the additional monthly recurring revenue generated from existing customers through upgrades, seat additions, add-on purchases, or moving…

Fine-tuning is the process of continuing to train a pre-trained foundation model on a smaller, domain-specific dataset to specialize its behavior. Rather…

A cookie set by the website you are actually visiting, used for essentials like keeping you logged in, remembering preferences and measuring your own…

A foundation model is a large AI model trained on broad, general data that can be adapted — via fine-tuning, prompting, or retrieval augmentation — for a…

Freemium is a pricing model where a core set of features is permanently free, with additional functionality available on paid tiers. Unlike a free trial…

A programme in which sellers ship inventory to Amazon's warehouses and Amazon handles storage, picking, packing, delivery, customer service and returns…

The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which governs how personal data of people in the EU and EEA is collected, stored and used —…

Generative AI refers to AI systems that produce new content — text, images, audio, video, code — rather than just classifying or analyzing existing…

Geo-targeting in the proxy context means selecting IP addresses from a specific country, state/region, or city. Many web targets serve different content…

Revenue minus cost of goods sold, expressed as a percentage of revenue. For SaaS, COGS covers hosting, third-party APIs, payment processing and customer…

GRR measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers — excluding any expansion. Where NRR can exceed 100% via upsell, GRR is…

Constraints placed around an AI system to keep its behaviour within acceptable bounds — input filters, output validation, refusal rules, permission…

Hallucination is when an LLM generates confident, fluent text that is factually incorrect — inventing citations, people, statistics, or events that do not…

A headless browser is a real browser (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) run without a visible UI, controlled programmatically via a driver like Playwright…

A content management system that stores and serves content through an API without dictating how it is displayed. Removing the front end lets the same…

An ICP is a data-driven description of the company type most likely to buy, retain, and expand — defined by industry, headcount, tech stack, geography…

Inference is the process of running a trained AI model on new input to generate a prediction or output. When you send a message to Claude or generate an…

IP rotation is the practice of cycling through a pool of IP addresses during web requests to avoid detection and rate limiting. Rotation can happen on…

IP whitelisting (or allowlisting) is a security control that grants access only to requests from pre-approved IP addresses. Proxy providers offer static…

An ISP proxy (also called a static residential proxy) is an IP address assigned by an internet service provider to a data center — combining the speed of…

JavaScript rendering refers to executing a page's JavaScript before extracting data from it. Many modern sites load content via JS after the initial HTML…

The date after which a model's training data ends. The model has no inherent knowledge of anything that happened later — new product releases, price…

An attribution model that assigns 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint before it. It is simple, universally supported and…

The delay between sending a request and receiving a response. For AI applications it is usually split into time-to-first-token, which governs how…

Something valuable offered free in exchange for contact details — a template, checklist, calculator, report or mini-course. The best lead magnets solve a…

An LLM is a deep learning model trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human language. GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, and Llama are all…

Churn measured by the number of customers lost, as distinct from revenue churn, which measures the money lost. The two can diverge dramatically and the…

An advertising audience built by an ad platform to resemble a source list you supply — typically your existing customers or highest-value users. The…

LTV (also called CLV or Customer Lifetime Value) is the total revenue — or more usefully, gross profit — a customer generates from sign-up to churn. The…

A SaaS efficiency metric that measures how much new annual recurring revenue each dollar of sales and marketing generates, calculated by comparing the…

The legal entity that sells to the customer, appears on their card statement, and carries responsibility for tax collection and remittance, chargebacks…

A model architecture that contains many specialised sub-networks, or experts, but activates only a small subset for any given input. This decouples total…

A mobile proxy routes traffic through real mobile devices connected to carrier networks (3G/4G/5G), giving requests an IP address from a major telecoms…

An open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data sources through a consistent interface. Rather than every application building…

Monthly Recurring Revenue is the normalized monthly value of all active subscriptions. Annual plans are divided by 12. One-time fees, overages, and…

Multi-tenancy is a SaaS architecture where a single instance of the software serves multiple customers (tenants), with data isolation between them. Most…

An attribution approach that distributes credit for a conversion across several touchpoints in the customer journey rather than awarding it all to one…

AI that works across more than one type of input or output — text, images, audio, video — within a single model rather than chaining separate specialised…

Revenue retained from existing customers over a period, including expansion, contraction and churn, but excluding new customers. Above 100% means the…

A loyalty metric derived from one question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a scale of zero to ten. Respondents scoring 9–10 are promoters, 7–8…

NRR measures how much revenue you keep and grow from existing customers over a period — after accounting for expansion (upsells, seat adds), contraction…

An open standard that lets you grant one application limited access to your account on another without ever sharing your password. When you click 'Sign in…

The service that transmits card details from your checkout to the payment networks and returns an approval or decline, handling encryption and fraud…

PLG is a go-to-market strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of acquisition, activation, and expansion — rather than marketing campaigns…

A postback URL (also called server-to-server or S2S tracking) is a server-side conversion notification: when a user converts, the advertiser's server…

A lead who has demonstrated buying intent through product usage rather than by filling in a form — someone who hit a plan limit, invited colleagues, or…

Prompt engineering is the practice of crafting inputs to an LLM to reliably produce the desired output. It ranges from simple instruction phrasing to…

An attack in which malicious instructions hidden inside content the model reads — a web page, document, email or code comment — cause it to ignore its…

How a proxy verifies you are entitled to use it. The two standard methods are username-and-password credentials sent with each request, and IP…

A proxy pool is the full inventory of IP addresses a proxy provider maintains for rotation and customer assignment. Pool size — often measured in millions…

In affiliate marketing, the publisher is the affiliate — the website, newsletter, social account, or content creator driving traffic and earning…

Reducing the numerical precision used to store a model's weights — for example from 16-bit to 8-bit or 4-bit — so it occupies far less memory and runs…

A SaaS growth-efficiency metric comparing revenue gained to revenue lost: new plus expansion revenue divided by churned plus contracted revenue. It…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation combines a vector store (or hybrid BM25 + vector) with a language model. Relevant documents are retrieved at query time and…

Rate limiting is a server-side control that caps the number of requests an IP address, API key, or user can make within a time window. Exceeding the limit…

A residential proxy routes traffic through an IP address assigned to a real home ISP subscriber, making requests look like organic consumer traffic rather…

Showing ads specifically to people who have already interacted with you — visited a page, viewed a product, abandoned a cart. Because these audiences have…

Revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising, so a ROAS of 4 means $4 back for every $1 spent. It measures advertising efficiency in…

Revenue share is an affiliate commission model where the publisher earns a percentage of ongoing revenue from referred customers — not just the first…

RLHF is the training technique that aligns LLMs to human preferences — making them helpful, harmless, and honest. Human raters score model outputs, those…

A rotating proxy automatically assigns a new IP address from a pool for each request — or at set time intervals — making large-scale web requests appear…

The Rule of 40 states that a SaaS company's revenue growth rate and profit margin (usually EBITDA or free cash flow margin) should add up to at least 40%…

How long a company can keep operating before it runs out of cash, calculated as cash on hand divided by net monthly burn. Twelve months of runway on…

An XML-based open standard that lets an identity provider pass authentication and authorisation data to a service provider, enabling single sign-on. In…

An isolated copy of a system used for testing, where changes cannot affect real customers, live data or production billing. Sandboxes let teams trial…

A managed service that handles the hard parts of web scraping — proxy rotation, browser rendering, CAPTCHA solving, retries and geographic targeting —…

Seat-based pricing charges per user or per license — typically a flat monthly fee per active user. It is the most common SaaS pricing model for…

Search that matches on meaning rather than exact keywords, by converting both the query and the indexed content into vector embeddings and finding the…

Sending conversion data directly from your server to an ad platform's API rather than relying on a browser pixel. Because it does not depend on the user's…

A model where you deploy functions and the platform handles all provisioning, scaling and server management, billing only for actual execution rather than…

A unique identifier assigned to each distinct sellable variant of a product. A shirt in three colours and four sizes is twelve SKUs, not one product…

A contractual commitment defining the service level a provider will deliver — most often uptime, but also support response times and resolution targets —…

An auditing standard for how service organisations handle customer data, assessed against trust principles covering security, availability, processing…

SOCKS5 is a general-purpose proxy protocol that operates at the network layer, routing any type of TCP or UDP traffic — HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, or custom…

A system letting users authenticate once and access multiple applications without signing in again to each. For employees it removes password fatigue; for…

A sticky session (sometimes called a session-based proxy) holds the same exit IP for a configurable duration — typically 1, 10, or 30 minutes — so a…

A sub-affiliate is an affiliate recruited by another affiliate (the master affiliate or super affiliate) who earns a cut of the sub-affiliate's…

Charging customers on a recurring schedule rather than per transaction, together with everything that entails: proration when plans change mid-cycle…

Artificially generated data that mimics the statistical properties of real data without containing real records. It is used to train models where genuine…

A generation parameter controlling how much randomness a model uses when choosing each next token. Low values make output more deterministic and…

How long it takes a new customer to experience the first real benefit of your product, measured from signup to that first meaningful outcome. It is one of…

In LLMs, a token is the basic unit of text the model processes — roughly ¾ of a word in English. "SaaSTweaks" might split into 3 tokens; "the" is usually…

A throughput measure for language model inference — how many tokens the model generates each second. It determines how fast text appears and, combined…

The full value of a contract across its entire term, including recurring subscription revenue plus any one-off fees such as implementation, training or…

A tracking pixel is a 1×1 transparent image embedded on a web page or in an email that fires a request to a tracking server when loaded — recording an…

A security control requiring a second proof of identity in addition to a password — typically a time-based code from an authenticator app, a hardware key…

The percentage of time a service is available and functioning, usually measured monthly and often committed to in an SLA. The practical meaning of each…

Usage-based pricing charges customers based on what they consume — API calls, data volume, active seats, or compute hours — rather than a flat monthly…

The user agent (UA) is a string sent in HTTP request headers that identifies the client software — browser type, version, and operating system. Websites…

Tags appended to a URL that tell analytics tools where a visitor came from — source, medium, campaign, and optionally term and content. They are how you…

A vector database stores and indexes high-dimensional embedding vectors, enabling fast similarity search across millions of records. Unlike a traditional…

A numerical representation of content — text, an image, audio — as a list of numbers positioned in a high-dimensional space such that similar meanings sit…

Web crawling is the automated traversal of websites by following links to discover and index content. A crawler starts from a seed URL, parses all links…

Web scraping is the automated extraction of structured data from websites — product prices, review text, contact information, job listings, or any…

An automated HTTP request a service sends to a URL you specify when a particular event occurs, so you receive updates the moment they happen instead of…

The mechanism by which a provider re-sends a webhook that failed to deliver — because your endpoint was down, timed out or returned an error — usually on…

White-labeling is when a vendor allows customers or partners to rebrand the product as their own — replacing logos, colors, and domain with the buyer's…

A security model that assumes no user, device or network location is inherently trustworthy, so every request is authenticated and authorised regardless…

Zero-shot means prompting an LLM to perform a task without providing any examples — relying entirely on the model's training. Few-shot means providing 2–5…