Apify

Founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada out of a Y Combinator Fellowship (team since based in Prague), Apify is both an execution platform and a two-sided marketplace: developers publish "Actors" to the Apify Store and get paid when others run them, while buyers rent pre-built Actors or write their own with the Apify SDK/CLI.

• Apify Store: a marketplace of 73,000+ ready-made Actors (scrapers, crawlers, automations) covering social media, e-commerce, search engines, maps, and AI/agent use cases
• Anti-blocking infrastructure: residential, datacenter, and Google SERP proxy services with IP rotation, plus a per-request Unblocker, built into the platform
• Cloud storage primitives (datasets, key-value stores, request queues) that every Actor run writes to
• Integrations with n8n, Make, LangChain, Zapier, and direct LLM/agent pipelines for feeding scraped data into AI applications

Developers and data teams who need to extract structured data from websites at scale - for lead generation, competitive research, e-commerce monitoring, or feeding LLM/AI pipelines - and either want a large catalog of pre-built scrapers to run immediately or need serverless infrastructure (compute, proxies, storage, scheduling) to build and operate their own.

The Store is a marketplace of community- and vendor-built Actors of uneven quality and maintenance, so teams that need one narrowly-scoped, fully-supported data source rather than an ecosystem to evaluate may prefer a single-purpose vendor instead. Billing is compute-unit and proxy-usage based, which is harder to forecast than a flat per-seat price, so teams that want predictable fixed costs at high scrape volumes should model usage carefully before committing.

Setup assessment: 5m

The vendor's own FAQ states the free plan needs no credit card and most platform features are usable immediately; running a pre-built Store Actor for the first time is a matter of minutes. Building a custom Actor with the SDK/CLI takes materially longer and was not separately timed here.

Prerequisites

• An Apify account (email, Google, or GitHub sign-in)
• An API token from the Console's Integrations page (only needed for API/SDK/CLI/MCP use, not for running an Actor from the Console UI)

Authentication

API token (Bearer token via `Authorization: Bearer <token>` header, recommended) or token as a `?token=` query parameter (documented as less secure); tokens issued from the Integrations page in Apify Console

Base URL

https://api.apify.com/v2

Rate limits

Global: 250,000 requests/minute per authenticated user (per IP if unauthenticated). Per-resource default: 60 requests/second, with higher limits for some endpoints (200 req/s for key-value store record CRUD; 400 req/s for running Actors and tasks, metamorph, pushing dataset items, and request-queue request CRUD); each endpoint returns its limit in the X-RateLimit-Limit header.

Machine-readable API

OpenAPI specification linked

• Actors and Actor management - versions, builds, runs (/v2/acts/ is a deprecated alias for /v2/actors/)
• Storage - datasets, key-value stores, request queues
• Webhooks and webhook dispatches
• Schedules and tasks
• Apify Store access, logs, and user data

• Exact current funding total/valuation (about page references a 2016 seed round and a separate €2.8M raise for AI data mining, but no consolidated funding figure was found)
• Enterprise/custom plan pricing (the pricing page lists an Enterprise column with Custom values and "Talk to us"; no public price)
• Independent verification of the 84,000 customers / 1PB monthly data / $1.6M developer payout figures - these are vendor-stated and not independently confirmed