Apify guides

Scaffold, code, run, and deploy in one sitting

A beginner-friendly walkthrough that takes you from `apify create` to a deployed JavaScript actor that scrapes page titles. No Crawlee, no Puppeteer — just the Apify SDK and built-in fetch.

Scaffold, code, run, and deploy in one sitting

A beginner-friendly walkthrough that takes you from `apify create` to a deployed Python actor that scrapes page titles. Uses the Apify Python SDK and httpx — nothing else.

Session pools, country targeting, retry-on-block

The four knobs that actually matter — datacenter vs residential, country targeting, session pools, and retry-on-block — plus drop-in JS and Python helpers for Crawlee and raw fetch.

Don't re-scrape what you scraped yesterday

A KV-store cache helper that turns 10k unchanged product pages into 1k. Includes TTL strategies, cache busting via a version constant, and the gotchas around per-actor scope and value size.

Cron + a cursor pattern that prevents rework

Apify Schedules plus a KV-store cursor so a daily 6am job doesn't re-scrape yesterday's data. Covers UTC gotchas, overlapping runs, and how to keep state consistent across failures.

Actor.call() vs Actor.start(), and reading the dataset

Call one actor from another — synchronously with `Actor.call()`, fire-and-forget with `Actor.start()`. Orchestrator patterns, dataset reading, cost compounding, and how to avoid infinite loops.

Deliver datasets to Slack, Sheets, S3, your own server

Configure Apify webhooks via the Console or `.actor/actor.json`, verify the request without HMAC, pull the dataset by id, and stay idempotent on retries. JS (Express) and Python (FastAPI) receivers.

Title formula, README skeleton, screenshots, pricing

Most actors ship with 2-star listings. The title formula that ranks, the README skeleton buyers actually read, the three screenshots that sell, and the pricing presentation that prevents chargebacks.

Cap results, runs/day, and add a cooldown

Push free users to upgrade without breaking your actor. A drop-in helper that limits results per run, daily runs, and enforces a cooldown — with paid users bypassed via APIFY_USER_IS_PAYING.

Detect paid plans with APIFY_USER_IS_PAYING

The env var Apify injects on every run to tell you whether the user is on a paid plan — plus a reusable tier helper, gating patterns, watermarking, and the gotchas worth knowing.