Alex Spinov

Posted on Mar 25

I Built 77 Web Scrapers on Apify — Here's What Nobody Tells You About Cloud Scraping

#webdev #python #discuss #beginners

Over the past 3 months, I built and published 77 scrapers on Apify's platform. Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, Google News, Trustpilot, Bluesky — you name it.

Here's what I learned that the marketing pages don't tell you.

The Good Parts (Why I Keep Using It)

1. Free Tier Is Actually Generous

Apify gives you $5/month free credits. For lightweight scrapers, that's enough to:

Run 10-20 scraping jobs per day
Store 100K+ results in their dataset
Use their residential proxy pool

For comparison, running the same scrapers on a VPS would cost $5-20/month just for the server.

2. Infrastructure Is Solved

The biggest time sink in scraping isn't writing the scraper — it's:

Managing browser instances (memory leaks, crashes)
Rotating proxies (blocked IPs, rate limits)
Handling retries (network errors, timeouts)
Scheduling (cron, monitoring, alerts)

Apify handles all of this. My scraper code is 100-200 lines. The infrastructure code I'd need otherwise is 500-1000 lines.

3. The Actor Model Is Clever

Each scraper runs in its own Docker container (called an "actor"). This means:

Total isolation — one crashing scraper doesn't affect others
Reproducible environments �� same result locally and in cloud
Versioning �� roll back to any previous version
Sharing — publish to the store, others can use it

The Hard Parts (What Marketing Won't Tell You)

1. Getting Users Is Incredibly Hard

I have 77 actors published. Total users across all of them: ~2.

The Apify Store is dominated by a few power users with 500K+ users. Breaking through is like trying to rank on page 1 of Google — technically possible, but the top spots are cemented.

2. The Pay-Per-Event Model Is Misleading

Apify's revenue model for actors is "pay per event" (per API call, per result row, etc.). Sounds great in theory.

In practice: most users use the free tier, and your actor competes with dozens of similar ones. Unless you have a truly unique data source, revenue is near zero.

3. Debug Cycles Are Slow

When your actor fails in the cloud, the debug cycle is:

Read logs (often truncated)
Modify code locally
Push to Apify (30-60 seconds)
Run again (another 30-60 seconds)
Check if it works

That's 2-3 minutes per iteration, vs 5 seconds locally. For complex scrapers, this adds up fast.

4. Vendor Lock-In Is Real

Apify has their own SDK (apify npm/python package), their own storage format (Dataset, KeyValueStore), and their own proxy interface.

If you want to move to AWS Lambda or your own server later, you'll rewrite 30-50% of the code.

My Honest Recommendation

Use Apify when:

You need scheduled scrapes without managing servers
You want built-in proxy rotation
You're building a quick MVP
You want to monetize a scraper (even if odds are low)

Build your own when:

You're scraping >10K pages/day (cost adds up)
You need custom anti-detection logic
You want to avoid vendor lock-in
You're already comfortable with Docker/K8s

What I'd Do Differently

If I started over:

Build 5 actors, not 77. Quality > quantity. One great Reddit scraper > 20 mediocre ones.
Focus on unique data sources. Don't build "yet another Amazon scraper" — find sites nobody else is scraping.
Write tutorials. The actors with the most users all have accompanying blog posts explaining the use case.
Use the Crawlee framework from day one. It's designed for Apify and handles 80% of boilerplate.

My Top 5 Actors (the ones people actually use)

Actor	Data Source	Why It Works
Reddit Scraper Pro	Reddit JSON API	No login, no API key, just works
YouTube Comments	Innertube API	Extracts comments without YouTube API quota
Hacker News	Firebase API	Complete story + comment data
Trustpilot Reviews	JSON-LD	Reviews via structured data
Google News	RSS feeds	15 languages, no API key

Have you built scrapers on Apify or a similar platform? What was your experience? I'm genuinely curious about the revenue side — did anyone actually make money from published actors?

Drop your experience below 👇

Need custom dev tools, scrapers, or API integrations? I build automation for dev teams. Email spinov001@gmail.com — or explore awesome-web-scraping.

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