API Discovery in 2026: Scrape the RapidAPI Marketplace into One Sortable Dataset

Picking an API off RapidAPI Hub usually means thirty open tabs and a homemade spreadsheet: pricing on one tab, latency stats on another, ratings on a third, and no way to sort any of it. The catalog is public, but there is no export. This post shows how I turn that whole marketplace into structured data with the RapidAPI Marketplace API on Apify, one JSON row per listing.

Disclosure: the Apify links in this post are affiliate links. If you run the Actor, I may earn a referral commission at no extra cost to you.

Does RapidAPI have an API for its own catalog?

Here is the small irony: the biggest API marketplace does not offer a public API for searching its own listings. You can subscribe to any API on the hub, but there is no documented endpoint that returns "every weather API with its pricing model, popularity score, and latency" as data. For api discovery at any real scale, that leaves scraping the public catalog, which is exactly what this Actor packages: a search box you call programmatically, no RapidAPI account or key required.

What the RapidAPI Marketplace API returns

The RapidAPI Marketplace API returns public API listings as flat JSON records with pricing model, category, popularity, reliability metrics, publisher, and, in detailed mode, billing plans and ratings.

Field	Example	Notes
title	Open Weather Map	With name, description, and the listing url
pricing	FREEMIUM	FREE, FREEMIUM, or PAID
popularityScore	9.8	RapidAPI's 0 to 10 score
avgLatency	142	Milliseconds, with avgSuccessRate alongside
billingPlans	{ "name": "Pro", "price": 10, "quota": "600 requests/minute" }	Detailed mode
subscriptionsCount	84213	Detailed mode, with ratingScore and ratingVotes

Basic search rows carry the core fields; flip detailedInfo to true and each listing adds billing plans, subscriber counts, ratings, and the publisher's readme.

Who this is for

Developers doing api discovery who want to shortlist candidates on data instead of marketing pages. Product and research folks sizing a category, say, how many paid sentiment-analysis APIs exist and what they charge. And API publishers watching their own niche: who entered, what they price, how their popularity moves.

The manual way, and where it breaks

The DIY approach is to browse the hub and copy listings into a sheet, or script against the site directly. Copying breaks at about the tenth listing, when you realize the billing plans live two clicks deep on every page. Scripting breaks differently: the catalog renders through JavaScript, pagination is stateful, and the markup is not something anyone promises to keep stable. I built the tab-and-spreadsheet version myself before this Actor existed, which is a big part of why this Actor exists.

The faster way: run the RapidAPI scraper

Apify Console

1. Open the RapidAPI Marketplace API and click Try for free.
2. Add one or more searchTerms, set maxResults, and optionally enable detailedInfo.
3. Run it and export the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel.

REST

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/johnvc~rapidapi-marketplace-api/runs?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "searchTerms": ["weather"], "maxResults": 25, "detailedInfo": true }'

Endpoint reference: the Apify API docs.

Shortlist APIs in Python

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN")

run = client.actor("johnvc/rapidapi-marketplace-api").call(
    run_input={"searchTerms": ["weather"], "maxResults": 25}
)

for api in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(api["title"], api.get("pricing"), api.get("popularityScore"), api.get("avgLatency"))

Sort by popularityScore and you have a defensible shortlist in one run.

Compare every API in a category

The Actor ships with dozens of ready-made comparison tasks, one per category, so you can start from a preconfigured run instead of a blank input. Compare crypto APIs, compare news APIs, and compare LinkedIn APIs each pull a full category with pricing and reliability side by side.

Rank listings by rating, price, or popularity

Because every row carries scores and plans, sorting is a one-liner. The tasks find OCR APIs by rating, find PDF APIs by price, and find the most popular APIs by popularity score show the pattern.

Scan a niche in one run

Niche scans work the same way for any keyword: AI APIs, weather APIs, free APIs, and web scraping APIs by popularity are all one-click starts, and the Actor's examples tab lists the rest.

Let Claude do the API shopping over MCP

Connected through the Model Context Protocol, the Actor becomes a tool that Claude, Claude Code, or Cursor can call, so "find me a freemium geocoding API with good reliability" turns into a live catalog query with real numbers behind the answer. You can read more about Claude at claude.ai.

FAQ about scraping RapidAPI

How much does the RapidAPI scraper cost to run?

It is priced as a loss leader: 0.0001 dollars per listing returned, basic or detailed, with no start fee. A 500-listing category scan costs five cents, and you only pay for rows actually delivered.

Is it legal to run a scraper against RapidAPI listings?

The Actor collects only public marketplace listings, the same information any visitor sees, with no login and no paywalled content. As with any scraped source, check your own use case and jurisdiction before building on it commercially.

Can an AI agent use this scraper through MCP?

Yes. Expose it through the Apify MCP server and any MCP client, Claude included, can search the catalog as a tool call and reason over pricing and reliability fields in the response.

Can I schedule the scraper to track a niche over time?

You can, and it is the best way to catch new entrants and price changes. Save a task for your category, attach an Apify schedule, and diff the runs. Start from the RapidAPI Marketplace API.

What will this scraper not give me?

Anything behind a login or a subscription: no private APIs, no per-endpoint request consoles, no usage data beyond what listings publish. The readme field also only arrives in detailed mode, so basic rows stay lean by design.

More from Truffle Pig Data

Marketplace intelligence generalizes. The Apify Store API does the same job for Apify's Actor catalog, Apple App Store Search covers app marketplaces, and the G2 Reviews API adds review data for the vendors you find.

Wrapping up

API discovery should be a query, not an afternoon of tabs. Point the RapidAPI Marketplace API at your category and get the whole field as one sortable dataset.