r/apify

Have you come across a great Actor, workflow, post, or podcast that you want to share with the world? This is your opportunity to support someone making cool things. Drop it here with credit to the creator, and help expand the karmic universe of Apify.

This is the thread for all your questions that may seem too short for a standalone post, such as, "What is proxy?", "Where is Apify?", "Who is Store?". No question is too small for this megathread. Ask away!

Last week it was 39k actors. Today it's 45k. The growth is wild but the distribution isn't.

I have 32 scrapers listed. I'm pretty happy with the quality, customers tell us they beat the competition. But only 1 generates any real revenue (~$1.5k this month, sitting at #9 in its category). The other 31 are basically invisible.

It feels more winner take all than ever. The top actors get traffic, the rest get nothing regardless of quality.

Anyone else building on the marketplace seeing the same thing? Is discoverability just broken or is there something that actually moves the needle?

I wanted a clean dataset of every API on the RapidAPI marketplace, sortable by pricing model, popularity, reliability, and publisher, so I could actually compare options instead of clicking through cards. Nothing existed that was cheap and structured, so I built one and put it on Apify.

The interesting part (for the scraping folks): RapidAPI's listing data is not in the page HTML. It loads client-side through an internal GraphQL gateway, and a plain request to that gateway returns 403 Forbidden from upstream. Even a real, logged-in browser session gets blocked if you replay the call directly.

What actually works:

• GET https://rapidapi.com/gateway/csrf first. It returns a { csrfToken } and sets a session cookie.
• Then POST https://rapidapi.com/gateway/graphql with that csrf-token header (plus rapid-client: hub-service and the cookie jar) and the searchApis operation. Cursor-paginated, capped at 1000 per term.
• For full per-API detail (billing plans, ratings, subscriber count, readme, website), the API's own page server-renders everything into the Next.js RSC flight data, so you just GET /{publisher}/api/{slug} and parse the __next_f chunks. No gateway auth needed for that path.

The nice payoff: no headless browser required. The whole thing runs in 128 MB with plain HTTP, which keeps it fast and cheap.

What it pulls per API: name, description, pricing model (FREE/FREEMIUM/PAID), category, popularity score, avg latency, success rate, publisher, billing plans, ratings, subscriber count, and the listing URL.

Useful for: finding every API for a given keyword or category, market research on how APIs price themselves, and competitive intel on who's winning a niche.

It's pay-per-result (about $0.0001 per result, roughly 6x cheaper than the other RapidAPI scrapers on the store), and it's also exposed as an MCP tool so you can hand it to an AI agent.

Link: https://apify.com/johnvc/rapidapi-marketplace-api

We just 10x'd the number of endpoints available on x402

In partnership with Coinbase, Apify is now the first community-driven marketplace on x402: AI agents can discover, pay for, and run more than 20,000 Apify Actors on their own - no account, no subscription, no API key, no human in the loop. Just a funded wallet and an HTTP request.

x402 is the open payment standard built by Coinbase (now governed by the Linux Foundation) that lets agents pay per call in USDC. As of today, all PPE priced Actors are callable through it.

What this means if you build Actors

Agents are a new kind of customer. When an autonomous agent runs your Actor, you earn per event - no seat to sell, no subscription, no human deciding to sign up first. We're still in the first inning of the agentic economy, and Apify is the first community driven marketplace to pioneer its adoption.

One catch: x402 only works with PPE Actors

Only pay-per-event (PPE) Actors are eligible. If your Actor is still using a rental pricing model, switching to PPE is how you put it in front of autonomous agents. PPE pricing docs are here.

Try it / learn more

• Launch blog post here
• Docs for humans here
• Skill for agents here

Help us amplify the launch

• Link to announcement post on X/Twitter
• Link to announcement post on LinkedIn

Click here to discover Apify endpoints on agentic.market

I’ve been improving my Apify Actor portfolio and one thing became clear:

A working Actor is only half the job.

Before users run an Actor, they need to quickly understand what it does, what input it needs, what output they will get, and roughly what it may cost.

Recently I focused on:

- Ready-to-run example tasks

- Small default inputs

- Cleaner dataset columns

- Clearer pricing

- Better README and input schema text

Question for other Actor builders and users:

What matters most to you before trying a new Actor?

1. README clarity

2. Example task

3. Output preview

4. Pricing clarity

5. Input schema simplicity

Curious to learn what makes an Actor feel trustworthy before the first run.

Before building an Actor, what are specific ways that can tell me if an Actor is likely to succeed (supposing it works reliably)? What makes it worth investing time and effort in building? How do I get traffic? What is the average time it takes an Actor to start picking up traffic? I hope someone answers these questions for me. Thanks.