Their Pitch
Get web data. Build automations.
Our Take
It's web scraping without the server headaches. Pre-built scripts handle the tricky stuff so you don't spend weeks fighting anti-bot measures.
Deep Dive & Reality Check
Used For
- +**Checking competitor prices daily in Excel for 10 hours/week** → Automated hourly scrapes dump fresh data into Google Sheets, you get 9.5 hours back
- +**Your AI chatbot chokes on messy HTML from product pages** → Returns clean JSON that actually works with ChatGPT and Claude
- +**Building the same scraper logic for 20 different sites** → Pre-built actors for LinkedIn, Amazon, Google Maps - just plug in your search terms
- +Handles JavaScript-heavy sites automatically - no more missing data from React apps that load content after the page
Best For
- >Tracking 50+ competitor prices manually in spreadsheets
- >Your custom scrapers break every time sites update their code
- >Need data but hiring a developer costs more than your entire marketing budget
Not For
- -Solo projects scraping under 1,000 pages per month — you'll hit expensive overages fast on small tasks
- -Teams wanting simple point-and-click tools — you'll need basic comfort with JSON and connecting tools together
- -Anyone expecting predictable monthly bills — usage-based pricing can jump 5x on your first big scraping job
Pairs With
- *Google Sheets (where your scraped competitor prices automatically populate so your boss stops asking for manual reports)
- *Slack (to get alerts when competitors drop prices below your threshold)
- *Zapier (to connect scraped leads to your CRM without coding)
- *OpenAI API (to analyze the scraped content since Apify gives you raw data, not insights)
- *PostgreSQL (to store historical pricing data because Apify's storage gets expensive fast)
- *GitHub Actions (where developers automate scraper updates instead of babysitting them)
The Catch
- !The pricing model confuses everyone - that $49/month turns into $200+ once you factor in compute, storage, and proxy overages
- !Free tier feels generous until you realize it covers maybe 5,000 small scrapes, then you're paying per everything
- !You'll need someone who can debug webhook chains when they fail 20% of the time on retries
Bottom Line
Takes web scraping from a 2-week coding project to a 15-minute copy-paste job.