How I Built 7 Apify Actors and Started Earning Passive Income from Web Scraping

A few weeks ago I had zero Apify actors. Now I have seven, all published on the Apify Store, monetized with pay-per-event pricing, and slowly building a passive income stream.

Here's exactly how I did it — the strategy, the tech stack, the mistakes, and what I'd do differently.

The Strategy: Zero Competition

Most new Apify developers go after hot categories. LinkedIn scrapers, Amazon product extractors, Twitter data. Makes sense — those have demand. But they also have dozens of established actors with hundreds of reviews.

I took the opposite approach. Find niches with zero existing actors.

This means lower total addressable market, but 100% of whatever traffic exists goes to you. No competing on price, no fighting for reviews, no SEO war against actors with years of history.

How I found the niches:

1. Browsed Apify Store categories sorted by actor count
2. Searched for common developer pain points with no existing Apify solution
3. Checked search volume for "[keyword] API" and "[keyword] scraper"
4. Verified zero results on Apify Store for each candidate

The winners: domain intelligence, screenshot comparison, Swedish company registry, IP geolocation, QR code generation, and link metadata extraction.

The Tech Stack

Every actor uses the same foundation. Apify Python SDK v3.4 handles input/output, storage, proxy, and deployment. Playwright for JavaScript-heavy sites and screenshots. aiohttp for lightweight API scraping (way faster than a full browser). Pillow for image processing.

Deployment is one command: apify push

The Actors

{{domain-intel}}

WHOIS, DNS, SSL, and tech stack in one API call. Uses socket + ssl + python-whois for data collection, no external API dependency. $0.005 per run.

{{screenshot-api}}

Full-page screenshots via Playwright. Handles lazy-loading, infinite scroll, and viewport sizing. $0.003 per run.

{{metadata-extractor}}

Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD, and meta tags from any URL. Uses aiohttp for speed — no browser overhead. $0.002 per run.

{{screenshot-diff}}

Pixel-level visual comparison with an overlay showing exactly what changed. Built with Pillow for image processing. Zero existing competitors in this niche. $0.005 per run.

{{swedish-companies}}

Official Bolagsverket scraper. Parses Next.js __NEXT_DATA__ payloads for structured extraction. $0.003 per run.

{{ip-geo}}

IP geolocation with multi-provider fallback (ip-api.com then ipinfo.io). $0.003 per run.

{{qr-generator}}

QR codes in PNG/SVG via qrcode + Pillow. Pure Python, no external API. $0.002 per run.

Pricing Strategy

All actors use pay-per-event pricing, meaning users only pay when the actor actually runs. No subscriptions, no minimums.

The price range of $0.002 to $0.005 is deliberate. Low enough that nobody thinks twice about trying it, high enough that volume adds up.

Apify takes a 20% commission plus platform costs for compute, proxy, and storage. On a $0.005 run, the developer keeps roughly $0.002 to $0.003 after costs.

At 1,000 runs per month per actor, that's $14 to $21 per month per actor. Across 7 actors, potentially $100 to $150 per month. Not life-changing, but it covers API bills and compounds as the actors gain reviews and search ranking.

What I'd Do Differently

Start with one high-demand actor first. The zero-competition strategy is valid, but mixing in one higher-demand category — even with competition — would drive faster initial revenue.

Build distribution before building more actors. The hard part isn't building, it's getting discovered. I should have written tutorials and set up content marketing before actor number three.

Add free tier runs. A few free runs per month gets usage numbers up, which helps Store ranking. I'm adding this to all actors.

Cross-link actors in every README. Users who need screenshots might also need screenshot comparison. Users doing company research might also want domain intelligence.

What's Next

I'm building a broken link checker, favicon grabber, and EXIF metadata extractor — all in zero-competition niches. Each actor gets a dedicated tutorial and GitHub usage repo.

The goal is 15 actors by end of month, each with at least one published tutorial driving organic traffic. If you're building something on Apify too, let me know — always interested in what other devs are shipping.