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

What do you like best about the product?

The Actor Store is the whole value for me. I'm a one-person engineering team, and building plus maintaining scrapers for two marketplaces that change their markup every few weeks was never going to be a good use of my time. I found existing actors for both sources I needed, and I've been running them in production for months without touching scraper code once. The `run-sync-get-dataset-items` endpoint is also underrated: it's a single authenticated HTTP call that returns the parsed dataset in the same request, so I integrated Apify into a serverless route in about twenty minutes with no SDK and no queue or webhook plumbing.

What do you dislike about the product?

Prepaid credits don't roll over — whatever you haven't spent when the billing cycle ends is simply gone. I lost part of a month's budget before I realised that, and I've since had to write my own end-of-cycle job that spends the remainder down on purpose. For a metered infrastructure product I'd expect at least a short grace window, or a warning email when a cycle is about to close with a meaningful balance unused.

Cost predictability is the other rough edge. Pay-per-event actors charge a start event priced per GB of run memory, so the same job costs double at the 4 GB default versus 2 GB — a knob that isn't obvious until you go looking for it. When several jobs share one account, attributing spend back to which job caused it takes real effort.

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

It's my entire data-acquisition layer. Every day a scheduled job pulls fresh best-selling products and matching short-form video into my database, and that dataset is the product my users actually pay for. Apify turned "hire or become a scraping team" into a line item under twenty dollars a month. The API also exposes the current billing cycle and usage, which let me automate my own spend controls — combined with the account-level monthly usage cap, I can leave the crons running unattended and know the worst case is a failed run rather than a surprise invoice.

What do you like best about the product?

Apify is exceptionally well suited for structured B2B prospecting at scale. In my case, I need to verify hundreds of potential clients per month by cross-referencing data from public directories, company websites, and professional networks. Instead of having a junior researcher manually copy-paste information for hours, I can configure an Apify actor once and run it on a schedule.

What do you dislike about the product?

It's not the best fit for one-time research with unique parameters per query. The setup overhead doesn't justify the time savings if you're only scraping a handful of pages with irregular structures.

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

We use Apify to run specific actors that automate our B2B lead verification process. It helps us evaluate and validate potential clients at scale, saving hours of manual research. The main business problem it solves is reducing the time our team spends on prospect validation while improving data accuracy.

What do you like best about the product?

I use plain-language prompts to pull lead lists for mass mailing campaigns. It’s also helpful for real estate due diligence, like pulling property information, and for finding businesses to contact for sponsorship outreach.

What do you dislike about the product?

Setting up MCP manually through the developer settings was difficult, and it took a lot of back-and-forth to get the server URL configured correctly. On top of that, whenever I added new actors, I had to redo the connection.

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

The problem it solves is manual research. Instead of hunting for data across sources myself, it extracts it and brings it into one place. The benefit is time back and a repeatable way to pull leads and property data instead of doing it by hand each time.

What do you like best about the product?

The biggest thing for me is being able to automate scraping and data collection instead of doing it by hand -- that alone has saved a ton of time. I especially like how you can tailor Actors to your specific use case and then just pull the results straight into CSV or JSON without any hassle.

What do you dislike about the product?

The flip side of having so many features is that it takes a little while to find your footing -- getting comfortable with how Actors are configured, how to read the logs, how everything fits together. A more beginner-friendly onboarding flow and clearer explanations when something goes wrong would make it a lot easier to get started.

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

It's solved a real problem for us -- manually pulling and organizing public info from multiple sites was just eating up too much time. Being able to automate that part of the process has freed things up enough that we can actually put that time toward analyzing the data or working on other projects instead.

What do you like best about the product?

What Apify does particularly well for me is turning a repetitive research process that could take several hours into an automated workflow that can run in the background and produce structured data ready for analysis. In practice, this saves me roughly 10+ hours per week and allows me to spend more time on strategy rather than manual data collection. So far I did use it with LLm, no complaints.

What do you dislike about the product?

So far so good. Sometimes a little bit pricey

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

I use Apify for automating repetitive web research and turning publicly available information into structured datasets that I can use for marketing analysis. So saving my time