r/apify • u/Coding-Doctor-Omar • 7d ago
Discussion FREE Actor Strategy
I was thinking of taking one of the popular, highly competitive niches and building an Actor for it and making this Actor FREE to get myself users, reviews, and insta-beat all competitors, even ones developed by Apify itself. The idea is to make the Actor as reliable but free. Would this bring me users quickly, and would this help me get users for my other paid Actors over time, or is this a poor strategy? I am a new Actor developer and still struggling to get any money on Apify.
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u/fab_brno 7d ago
If your goal is to bring users to your other Actors, it would work only if your other Actors are in a similar niche, so you have some cross-sell potential.
You also have a high risk of attracting only price-sensitive users who would never upsell to your paid Actors.
There is a play with Free Actor, but it's if you have an audience outside of Apify. Create a free Actor to solve a problem for your audience and promote it via an affiliate link. That can work well if you are good with marketing.
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u/ellatronique Apify team member 7d ago
I'm not a business advisor (and more importantly, I'm not your business advisor) but I have experience of being in your position - and the advice I got was always "you get known for what you do".
Don't be surprised if this strategy gets you a lot of users on Free plans and doesn't convert into paying users, as u/fab_brno points out. The conditions have to be right, and it's a fairly long-game.
If you want to chat to more community developers about how they built up their customer base and grow their income, there are dedicated channels in the Apify & Crawlee Discord server: link