Apify

Apify turns the web into a source of structured data. A marketplace called Apify Store offers thousands of Actors, which are cloud programs that scrape or automate specific websites and tasks: extracting listings from Google Maps, posts from social networks, product details from e-commerce sites, or contact information from pages. You configure an Actor, run it in the cloud, and receive results as JSON, CSV, or through an API, without managing servers or proxies.

Developers can build their own Actors, using Apify’s open-source Crawlee library, and publish them to the store to earn money from usage. The platform handles scheduling, proxy rotation, storage, and scaling, which are the usual headaches in scraping at volume. It has become popular for feeding AI systems: Actors can be exposed to AI agents through the Model Context Protocol, and tools support gathering data for retrieval and training.

Apify has a free tier with monthly credits and paid plans based on compute usage. Scraping carries legal and ethical considerations, including website terms of service, privacy laws, and copyright, and some sites actively block automated access. Alternatives include Bright Data, ScrapingBee, Zyte, Firecrawl for AI-ready extraction, and open-source tools such as Scrapy and Playwright. Apify suits teams that need reliable web data without maintaining their own scraping infrastructure.