Disclosure: I work on Bytewells by ThoughtPivot, a second store for Apify Actors. Bytewells is an independent marketplace and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apify.
In December 2025, Apify and The Web Scraping Club surveyed hundreds of web scraping professionals. The report came out on Jan 29, 2026, and two of its findings matter if you build and sell Actors.
1. Running scrapers keeps getting more expensive
- 65.8% of respondents reported increased proxy usage.
- 58.3% said their proxy spending went up year over year.
- More than 62% reported higher infrastructure spending, driven largely by stronger anti-bot protections.
If you sell an Actor, that cost lands somewhere: in your price, in your margin, or on your renter's compute bill. A browser-based Actor going through residential proxies costs far more per run than a plain HTTP fetch, and a per-result price that ignores this can lose money on every run. Two habits help on any store. Measure compute per result before you set a price, and don't route traffic through a proxy the target doesn't require.
2. AI-assisted scraping is growing, but trust isn't there yet
45.8% of respondents use AI in their scraping workflows and 54.2% don't. The holdouts cited trust in results, cost, integration pain and unreliable performance on some sites. Still, 66.2% plan to try AI-assisted tools, and 72.7% of current AI users report productivity gains.
For Actor developers, the practical change is a new kind of buyer: agents. An agent rarely wants a month of access. It wants an hour or a day, it wants a price it can read before it runs, and it needs a well-described input schema to call your Actor correctly.
How we're responding with Bytewells
We're building Bytewells by ThoughtPivot around those two pressures:
- Commission: 10% of each rental and pass charge, against 20% on Apify, and 0% on renters you bring yourself. Stripe's card and billing fees pass through at cost, so a typical $17.50 rental nets you about 85%.
- Pricing models: monthly rentals, plus optional Flash (1 hour), Burst (24 hours) and Sprint (7 days) passes for bursty and agent workloads. Apify retired rental pricing on Oct 1, 2026, so this brings that option back for your heavy renters.
- Compute: $0.15 per compute unit, paid by the renter separately from the rental. That's below Apify Starter ($0.20) and above Apify Business ($0.13), so it isn't the cheapest option for every buyer.
- No exclusivity: the Apify SDK and apify-client work unchanged, so one codebase can ship to both stores and your Apify listing stays as it is.
The reality check
Bytewells is in private beta, and the public launch is planned for Nov 2, 2026. We have no paying renters yet. Pay-per-event pricing isn't available at launch, so if your Actor's business model depends on Actor.charge(), Bytewells doesn't fit that model yet. If your buyers are recurring high-volume teams, or agents that work in short bursts, listing on Bytewells too may be worth it. If they're occasional long-tail users, pay-per-event on Apify probably still suits them better.
Source: State of web scraping report 2026
If you sell Actors and want in, developers on the waitlist are invited first: https://bytewells.com/developer-waitlist
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