6 Apify actors I actually use myself

I have 27 public Apify actors. Most are good. Six are genuinely useful and I run them through n8n and curl on a weekly basis. This is a tour of those six, with the actual prices, sample inputs, and the use cases I built them for.

If you found me through the silent-churn postmortem from earlier this week, this is the followup people kept asking for: "what else do you have?"

1. LinkedIn Company Employees Scraper

apify.com/george.the.developer/linkedin-company-employees-scraper

The one most people find me through. Takes a LinkedIn company URL, returns the top N employees who match your title filter. Verifies via JA4-accurate TLS fetch on a self-hosted Go service so it does not need login cookies and does not get flagged as a bot.

Sample input:

{
  "companies": ["https://www.linkedin.com/company/stripe"],
  "maxEmployees": 25,
  "targetTitles": ["CEO", "CTO", "Head of Engineering"]
}

Pay per event. $0.005 actor-start, $0.003 per short profile. Hike scheduled for May 5 to $0.009 per short profile to cover residential proxy cost properly.

Use it for: lead lists, sales prospecting, recruiter sourcing.

2. Email Validator API

apify.com/george.the.developer/email-validator-api

Standby HTTP API. Sub-second response. Runs syntax + MX + disposable + role-based + SMTP handshake checks. Pay per event $0.002 per email. Run a list of 50,000 emails and pay $100, not the $375 NeverBounce charges.

Sample call:

curl 'https://george-the-developer--email-validator-api.apify.actor/validate?email=[e-mail]'

Use it for: pre-flight on cold email lists, signup form fraud filtering, list cleanup before importing to a CRM.

3. Domain WHOIS Lookup

apify.com/george.the.developer/domain-whois-lookup

Standby API. Returns registrar, age in days, expiry, DNS records. Falls back to RDAP since 374 gTLDs sunsetted port 43 WHOIS in early 2025. $0.005 per lookup.

Sample call:

curl 'https://george-the-developer--domain-whois-lookup.apify.actor/lookup?domain=stripe.com'

Use it for: lead-scoring (domain age is a real signal), security tooling, brand monitoring.

4. Company Enrichment API

apify.com/george.the.developer/company-enrichment-api

Domain in, company name + industry + tech stack signals out. Sub-second standby response. $0.01 per call.

Use it for: enrichment step in a lead-gen pipeline, ICP scoring, account research.

5. URL Metadata Extractor

apify.com/george.the.developer/url-metadata-extractor

OG tags, Twitter cards, favicon, canonical URL, structured data. Anything an AI agent needs to actually understand a page without parsing the full DOM. $0.003 per URL.

Use it for: content tools that show link previews, AI agents that need to summarize before they read, dashboards that aggregate links.

6. AI Content Detector

apify.com/george.the.developer/ai-content-detector

Text in, AI-probability score out. Uses an LLM-based classifier behind the scenes, not a regex. $0.003 per text.

Use it for: content moderation pipelines, marketplace listings filtering, dataset cleanup before training.

How they fit together

A typical pipeline I see in customer logs looks like this:

1. LinkedIn Company Employees Scraper finds candidates at a target company
2. Each candidate's email gets cleaned through Email Validator
3. Their company domain runs through WHOIS Lookup for age signal
4. Domain runs through Company Enrichment for industry + tech stack
5. Output goes into Hubspot or Pipedrive

Each step is pay per event. If you only need 3 of the 5 steps, you only pay for those events. There is no per-seat or per-month surcharge.

Honest pricing context

I just shipped a billing-guard fix for the LinkedIn actor that prevents it from emitting profiles when the charge would exceed your maxTotalChargeUsd cap. Postmortem on that lives here:

theaientrepreneur.hashnode.dev/why-my-linkedin-scraper-now-refuses-jobs

Same gate is rolling out across the standby APIs over the next two weeks. If you used any of these before the fix and your output count did not match your billed events, ping me.

Where to start

If you do lead generation, start with LinkedIn + Email Validator. That is the chain that produces revenue for users I see in the logs.

If you do content moderation or AI agent work, start with URL Metadata Extractor + AI Content Detector. They both return clean JSON in well under a second.

If you do security or domain research, start with WHOIS + Company Enrichment.

All six work standalone. All six bill per event, not per seat. None require API key contortions, just an Apify token and a curl.

apify.com/george.the.developer