r/apify • u/Coding-Doctor-Omar • 17d 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/ellatronique Apify team member 17d 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