Summary
A marketplace of thousands of ready-made scrapers and automation tools, plus the cloud to run your own.
Description
Apify is a platform for web scraping and browser automation, built around Actors — packaged, runnable programs that extract data from a specific site or perform a specific task.
Two ways to use it
Use an Actor. The store has thousands of maintained scrapers for major platforms — search engines, social networks, marketplaces, maps, job boards, review sites. Each has a documented input schema, runs on demand or on a schedule, and returns structured data. When a site changes its markup, the maintainer fixes it, not you.
Build an Actor. Deploy your own scraper in Python or JavaScript and get proxies, storage, scheduling, queueing, monitoring, and an API for free. Apify maintains Crawlee, the open-source crawling library underneath.
Infrastructure that matters
Residential and datacentre proxies with automatic rotation, headless browsers, dataset and key-value storage, and webhook integrations. Actors are also exposed via MCP, so agents can call them as tools.
Access
Free monthly platform credits are enough for real work on small projects; paid plans scale by compute units and proxy usage. A pragmatic choice when you need data from a site that has no API and you would rather not maintain the scraper.
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