Apify

Apify is the web scraping and automation platform that turned 'scrape this website' from a multi-day engineering project into a half-hour task. If you've ever needed structured data from a site that doesn't have an API — competitor pricing, real estate listings, news articles, e-commerce inventory, social media posts — Apify is probably the cleanest answer. Founded in 2015 in Prague by Jan Čurn and team, Apify is the dominant scraping platform alongside Bright Data and ScrapingBee. The product is two things in one: (1) a marketplace of pre-built scrapers ('Actors') for specific sites — Google Maps scraper, LinkedIn scraper, Instagram scraper, Amazon scraper, etc., and (2) a developer platform for building your own scrapers if no off-the-shelf Actor exists. For founders the use cases are surprisingly broad. Lead generation (scrape companies from directories, founders from LinkedIn). Competitive research (scrape competitor pricing daily, alert on changes). Content aggregation (scrape news from 50 sources, pipe into a newsletter). E-commerce arbitrage (scrape product listings, find pricing inefficiencies). SEO research (scrape SERPs at scale). The actor marketplace has 4,000+ pre-built scrapers; you pick one, configure it with a URL or query, and it returns clean JSON. The killer feature for non-developers is the marketplace. Need to scrape Google Maps for all restaurants in Austin? There's an Actor for that — set up takes 5 minutes, you pay per run (~$1-10 typically). Building this yourself would take a real engineer 1-3 days plus ongoing maintenance as Google changes the layout. Apify Actors get maintained by their authors and update when target sites change. The pricing model is consumption-based. Free tier gives you $5/month of compute credits — enough to play with most Actors but you'll exceed it on real work. Starter at $49/month gives $49 of credits (effective discount), Scale at $499/month for high-volume use, Business custom. Pay-as-you-go is also available. Where Apify wins beyond the marketplace: the developer platform is genuinely good. You write a scraper in JavaScript or Python using Crawlee (their open-source library), deploy to Apify, and it runs at scale with built-in proxy rotation, browser instances, and storage. The 'we'll handle the infrastructure' value prop is real. The trade-offs: scraping is a legal grey zone — many sites' ToS prohibit it, and you're responsible for compliance. Apify's stance: they provide the tool, you're responsible for use. Some Actors get blocked or stop working as target sites change defenses. And the consumption pricing can surprise you on first month if you don't set budgets. My take: if you need structured data from the web for any real founder workflow (sales prospecting, market research, competitive intel), Apify saves you weeks. Start with the marketplace Actors; only build custom when nothing fits. The $49/month Starter tier is worth it the first time you replace 'I'll hire a freelancer to do this' with 'I'll just run the Actor.'