Apify: web scraping, data extraction, and automation tools for AI

What do you like best about the product?

Apify is the only marketplace I've found that works as a true merchant of record for a solo, unincorporated developer — it handles buyer billing, payouts, and support, so I can publish a paid Actor and start earning without building a payments stack myself. The CLI/API deploy flow is fast once you know it, and the Apify Store's internal search actually surfaces a brand-new listing to real buyers on day one, which is rare for any marketplace. Automated QA test-runs published Actors and flags broken ones as "under maintenance" — it caught a failure of mine before users did. Actors expose input/output schemas that AI agents read directly, and the API covers builds, pricing and schedules, so my whole publish pipeline runs from CI.

What do you dislike about the product?

Revenue and payout data are Console-only — most useful endpoints for reading back earnings, monetization, and payout status simply 404 on the public API, so you're stuck clicking through the dashboard instead of scripting it. Personal-account payout documentation is thin, and some account fields (bio, picture, payout billing info) can only be set through the Console, not the API, which breaks automation workflows that otherwise deploy and price actors end to end via CLI/API.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

As a solo, unincorporated developer in the UAE, I can't get a merchant account or payment processor of my own for selling software directly to global buyers. Apify solves that by being the actual merchant of record: I publish a paid Actor, it handles buyer billing and currency, and pays me out — no company entity, no payment gateway integration, no invoicing buyers myself. That turned a side project into something with real, measurable monthly revenue within weeks of first publishing.

What do you like best about the product?

I really like how easy it is to use, especially with MCP. It's fast, not confusing and actually gives me data I want. For instance, I can now easily scrape local businesses It's really good

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing particularly important. Sometimes you just want to know how much a certain run will cost.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Scraping every data point I want, for instance:
- LinkedIn company profiles
- web crawling
- Google Maps scraping
I could go on and on and on.

What do you like best about the product?

Apify makes it much easier to build and operate web scraping workflows without having to manage all the surrounding infrastructure yourself.

I particularly like the combination of Actors, scheduling, datasets, proxies and API access. The marketplace of existing Actors is also useful for quickly testing different approaches.

What do you dislike about the product?

As workflows become more complex, debugging and understanding resource consumption can require some attention. Community Actors also vary in quality and documentation.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It removes a lot of the operational work involved in web scraping and lets me focus more on the actual application logic and use of the resulting data.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

To improve the experience, it would be beneficial to enhance the documentation and provide more detailed examples for complex workflows.

What do you like best about the product?

The thing that actually changed how I work is that publishing an Actor costs nothing up front. I have built and published 23 of them as a solo developer, and at no point did I need my own server, container registry, scheduler or payment processor. I write the code, push it, and it goes live with an input schema, a run history and usage-based billing already attached.

The API is unusually complete for a platform this size. Almost everything the Console does is reachable programmatically, so I update a README with a PUT to the build endpoint instead of re-pushing the whole source, and I pull my own Store statistics with a small script instead of reading dashboards by hand. That let me automate my own release checks across all 23 Actors.

Output schemas turned out to be the highest-leverage thing I added. Putting one in raised the quality score on my Actors from 74 to 78-79 across the board, and it is roughly ten minutes of work each.

The free compute tier is genuinely enough to develop on. I built and tested everything I have shipped so far without paying anything, which matters a lot when you are testing an idea rather than running a business on it yet.

What do you dislike about the product?

The biggest one for me: a published Actor is excluded from Store search until the developer passes identity verification, and nothing in the publishing flow says so. I published 23 Actors over several weeks and only found the problem when I compared the Store search API with and without an auth token. Logged in as myself, my Actors ranked #1 and #2 for their keywords; to a logged-out visitor they did not appear at all. Everything looked healthy from the inside. A banner on the Actor page, or one line in the publish confirmation, would have saved me weeks of tuning titles and descriptions for a shelf I was not actually on.

The verification itself has been hard to finish from Japan. The document check does not accept a Japanese driver's licence because the name is in Japanese characters rather than Latin script, which in practice leaves a passport as the only route. Support has been responsive and is still working on it with me, but the flow assumes documents that not every country's residents hold.

Second, the container has no outbound access on SMTP ports 25, 587 and 465. I tested four different mail domains and every one refused or timed out, while DNS resolved fine, so it took a while to work out that the block was at the network level rather than in my code. That rules out a whole category of Actors, and I could not find it documented anywhere.

Third, cost is hard to predict before a run. I like usage-based pricing in principle, but compute units are not something you can estimate from outside, and the number you actually care about only appears after the run has finished.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am a one-person operation trying to sell small automation tools, and the problem Apify solves is distribution and billing without infrastructure. Before this, shipping a tool meant standing up a server, keeping it patched, writing a job runner, and wiring in a payment provider before a single person could use it. On Apify all of that comes with the platform, so the distance between "this script works on my machine" and "someone else can run it and be charged for it" is one push.

Concretely, it let me put 23 tools in front of an audience I do not have to recruit myself. Most of mine are auditing tools rather than scrapers - checking a site's robots.txt and llms.txt against 26 AI crawlers, finding broken links and stale RSS feeds, auditing App Store listings for EU availability. Those are things I would never have hosted on my own because the traffic is too sporadic to justify a server, but they cost nothing to leave published here.

The second benefit is that the platform gives me numbers I can act on. Run counts, unique users over the last 30 days, and quality scores are all in the API, so I can measure which tools people actually return to instead of guessing. I have used that to decide what to build next more than once, and it has stopped me from writing tools nobody wanted.

The honest limit is that none of this converts to revenue until identity verification is done, since unverified developers are kept out of Store search - so right now the value I get is the build-and-ship pipeline rather than the sales channel.

What do you like best about the product?

Automation

What do you dislike about the product?

Time Delay

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Job finding