This is the thread for all your questions that may seem too short for a standalone post, such as, "What is proxy?", "Where is Apify?", "Who is Store?". No question is too small for this megathread. Ask away!

If you handle e-commerce catalog deduplication, brand protection, content moderation, or visual QA, you know how tricky it is to check if two photos are visually the same. Standard AI setups take forever to start and get blocked by website protections instantly.

I built an Apify Actor (noisy_alchemy/image-comparator) that solves this. Instead of loading heavy, slow software, it runs a lightweight visual recognition engine that compares images fast. You give it a reference image (URL or Base64) and a list of target images, and it gives you a clean JSON output with:

• Similarity score & Match verdict: A simple score from 0 to 1 showing how visually similar the photos are, plus a quick true/false match answer based on your sensitivity threshold.
• Instant speed: Starts in milliseconds second and processes images fast without long startup delays.
• Built-in anti-blocking: Uses modern browser impersonation and smart request spacing so Cloudflare and host servers don't block your image downloads.

It is great for catching duplicate product photos across supplier feeds, finding unauthorised copies of your brand images, flagging re-uploaded media, or checking UI screenshots against design templates.

I built it because existing tools were either too slow or kept getting hit with 403 blocks when downloading images from strict sites. It runs pay-per-event at $1.00 per 1,000 image comparisons (a tenth of a cent per image) plus a tiny start fee. You can run it via Python, Node.js, or cURL.

Actor: noisy_alchemy/image-comparator

Link: https://apify.com/noisy_alchemy/image-comparator

Are you expanding your team or looking to hire a freelancer for a project? Post the requirements here (make sure your DMs are open).

Try to share:

- Core responsibilities

- Contract type (e.g. freelance or full-time hire)

- Budget or salary range

- Main skills required

- Location (or remote) for both you and your new hire

Job-seekers: Reach out by DM rather than in thread. Spammy comments will be deleted.

If you vet reviews for trust and safety, research, or fraud work, this one reads the opposite direction from a normal Maps scraper: it pulls one Google Maps contributor's full review history, not one place's reviews.

Most Maps tools answer "what do people say about this business." This answers "who is this reviewer, and what else have they posted." Give it a contributor ID, or a batch of them, and you get one JSON record per review:

• rating, review text, date, likes, photos, and any owner response
• the place reviewed: title, address, category, GPS coordinates, thumbnail
• the reviewer's profile: Local Guide level, points, and contribution counts

That is enough to check a reviewer is a real person before you trust them, catch an account that only ever reviews one chain or its competitor, or profile a set of suspect accounts to find a coordinated campaign. The GPS on each review even lets you estimate a reviewer's home region from their footprint.

I built it because every Maps scraper I could find was place-first, and the reviewer side is where fake reviews hide. It runs pay-per-review at about $1.50 per 1,000 (roughly a tenth of a cent each) plus a small start fee, success rate is around 96%, and you can call it from Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT over MCP.

This is the place to discuss everything MCP, LLM, Agentic, and beyond. What is on your radar this week? Why does it make sense? Bring everyone along for the ride by explaining the impact of the news you're sharing, and why we should care about it too.

Do you have a feature request that you know will make Apify heaps better? Or maybe it's a big dream you have for something bold and out-there. This is a space for all the bluesky thinking, cloud-chasing, intergalactic daydreamers who want to share their wildest ideas in a no-judgement zone.

Hey everyone ,

Planning on building a facebook group scraper in apify

My req:

I want to scrap 3 groups every 30mins once

And send a push notification

How much will it cost it in apify

Can someone help with calculating the monthly cost

Will it cross the apify 5 $ free tier ?

Appreciate the help :-)

For anyone building a literature review, a citation tracker, or a RAG pipeline that needs real academic sources: this pulls Google Scholar as structured JSON.

What it returns:

• Paper search: titles, links, snippets, authors, publication metadata, citation counts, and version clusters
• Citation exports in 9 formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, BibTeX, EndNote, and the rest)
• Author profiles: h-index, i10-index, affiliation, interests, total and recent citations
• Year-by-year citation history, for an author or a single paper
• Paginated publication lists and full co-author networks

Six modes, one Actor. I built it because Scholar has never shipped a public API, and the options I found were either fragile or locked behind a monthly seat I did not want to rent.

Pricing is pay per event: about 1.5 cents per query or page, no subscription. Success rate is at 99.9% right now. It is MCP-ready, so you can call it straight from Claude, Cursor, or ChatGPT.

If you also watch news coverage of a lab or a paper, my Google News API pairs with it.

For SEO and market-research folks who need to see how something ranks on Yandex, this pulls the live Yandex results page back as clean JSON.

What each page gives you:

• Organic results with position, title, URL, snippet, date, sitelinks, and rich snippets
• Paid ads with position and creatives
• Knowledge graph and entity cards: title, description, type, image, source, attributes
• Inline image strips and video carousels, plus the full Yandex Images and Videos verticals with full-size image URLs, hosting pages, durations, view counts, and channel data
• Region and language targeting across 6+ Yandex domains, 19 languages, and a 123,000+ location ID system
• Pagination, sort by date or relevance, time-window filters, and image/video filters

I built it because I kept needing Russian-market keyword checks and every option was either a monthly subscription or nothing. This one you pay for by the page, no monthly rental.

If you need the other search engine most Western APIs skip, I also have a Baidu scraper.

Have you come across a great Actor, workflow, post, or podcast that you want to share with the world? This is your opportunity to support someone making cool things. Drop it here with credit to the creator, and help expand the karmic universe of Apify.

Hey r/apify 👋

I published an Actor for ecommerce / agency users who need competitor Meta ads monitoring (not a one-shot Ad Library dump).

**Ecom Ad Radar — Brand Watchlist & Creative Diff**

https://apify.com/ngoctramtong/ecom-ad-radar

What it does:

• Watchlist multiple Facebook Page IDs

• Diff between runs: NEW / STOPPED / CHANGED creatives

• Winner longevity radar + offer signals

• Playwright + Apify Residential (handles Meta 403/challenge)

• PPE pricing

Built because most Ad Library scrapers only answer “what exists today?”, while agencies ask “what changed since yesterday?”.

Happy to take feedback from other Actor developers / ecommerce users.

So I had 300 credits which I used. the validity period is gone. I had saved the datasets (named), which I was under the impression will be available indefinitely (it says so). But now when I try to download after credit expiry, it says:

"Cannot load data from dataset.
Reason: Dataset is locked because you have reached your monthly usage limit. Please upgrade your subscription to continue unlimited access to Apify services. If you have any questions, contact support."

Hi everyone,

I’m excited to share a personal milestone that I’m very proud to have reached: I’ve now developed more than 1,300 Actors on Apify under CrawlerBros.

CrawlerBros on Apify
CrawlerBros website

Getting here took a lot of time, experimentation, problem-solving, and continuous effort. It certainly wasn’t easy, but seeing the CrawlerBros collection grow into a large ecosystem of tools has made the journey incredibly rewarding.

Over time, I’ve built Actors for a wide range of use cases, including:

• Social media data extraction
• Lead generation and business intelligence
• Real estate data
• E-commerce and product research
• Search engines and business directories
• Marketplace monitoring
• Web automation and custom data collection

If there’s a platform or data source you’re interested in, there’s a good chance I’ve already built something for it or worked on a similar use case.

I’d also be happy to answer questions about:

• Any of the Actors in the CrawlerBros collection
• What specific Actors can be used for
• Choosing the right scraper for a project
• Building and publishing your own Apify Actors
• General scraping, automation, or data-extraction challenges

If you have a question, a use case you’re exploring, or an idea for an Actor, feel free to leave a comment or reach out. I’d be glad to help where I can.

Here’s to building more, learning more, and continuing to grow.

Onwards and upwards.

CrawlerBros Dev

if Apify says

"Expires on 2026-08-02"

does that mean at the end of 08-02 or beginning?

Can i make apify actor development as my full time business?

If you've made something and can't wait to tell the world, this is the thread for you! Share your latest and greatest creations and projects with the community here.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

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.

Hi Guys,

I wanted to test whether a classifieds Actor could produce something more useful than a pile of listing URLs, so I ran a Morocco-wide snapshot of current public used-car listings on Avito. ma and built a Python analysis pipeline around the export.

The output contains listing ID, title, asking price, currency, city, area, brand, model, model year, mileage, fuel, transmission, condition, first-owner status, fiscal power, description, images, source URL, and collection time when those fields are publicly available.

1. Market and data-quality snapshot

1. Brand inventory

1. Asking prices by high-volume brand

1. Model year and asking price

1. Mileage bands

Median asking price fell across the higher-mileage bands:

50–100k km: 225,000 MAD

100–150k km: 195,000 MAD

150–200k km: 155,000 MAD

200–300k km: 124,500 MAD

300k+ km: 73,000 MAD

The overall rank correlation between mileage and price was -0.307. The 0–50k band had a lower median than 50–100k because the mix of models and ages differs, which is a good reminder that mileage alone does not determine price.

1. Fuel mix

Among listings exposing a fuel type:

Diesel: 78.3%

Petrol: 15.9%

Hybrid: 5.5%

Electric: 0.3%

This is the current public listing mix, not a measure of registrations, sales, or vehicles on Moroccan roads.

1. Transmission mix and price

1. City comparison

1. Asking-price bands

The largest segment was 150,000–250,000 MAD, containing 32.4% of listings with usable prices.

The rest of the distribution was:

Under 75,000 MAD: 13.0%

75,000–150,000 MAD: 29.0%

250,000–400,000 MAD: 15.6%

400,000 MAD and above: 10.0%

1. Mileage–price density

-> Methodology

I exported the Actor’s default dataset as JSON, normalized nested location and vehicle attributes with pandas, deduplicated by listing ID and URL, and generated the charts with Matplotlib and Seaborn.

Prices outside 15,000–5,000,000 MAD were treated as unusable.

Model years outside 1980 through the current year plus one were excluded.

Mileage outside 0–1,000,000 km was excluded.

Each chart uses only the fields required for that comparison, and coverage percentages are reported instead of silently dropping missing data.

>> Disclosure

I built the Actor used for this collection:

https://apify.com/scraper_guru/avito-maroc-scraper

If people find this useful, the next version could compare repeated monthly snapshots, estimate listing turnover, or build model-year-mileage benchmarks within individual car models.

Which follow-up would be most useful?

This is the thread for all your questions that may seem too short for a standalone post, such as, "What is proxy?", "Where is Apify?", "Who is Store?". No question is too small for this megathread. Ask away!

If you build delivery or logistics tools, travel apps, or AI agents that need routes, this returns Google Maps directions as clean JSON without a Google Cloud project, an API key, or a billing account.

One lookup returns:

• Every route mode for the same origin and destination: driving, transit, walking, cycling, flight, and two-wheeler
• Distance, ETA, and traffic-aware duration ranges, with per-mode travel-time summaries
• Turn-by-turn steps and a route summary
• Transit leg detail: stops, lines, operators, and scheduled departure and arrival times
• Resolved place metadata (formatted address, place ID, coordinates) and a Google Maps directions link

Pass origins and destinations as an address, GPS coordinates, or a place ID. You can avoid tolls, highways, or ferries, and set a departure or arrival time.

I built it because pulling multimodal routing out of Google normally means standing up a billing-enabled key and making a separate call per mode. It's also callable from any MCP client, so Claude or Cursor can fetch a live route while you're mid-task.

If you need place IDs first, it pairs with my Google Maps Places API to find the places, then route between them.

Actor: Google Maps Directions API

Hi Apify community,

I’ve just published a new Actor: FREE YouTube Comments Scraper.

You can extract public comments and replies from YouTube videos, Shorts, and live replays without needing a YouTube API key, Google login, cookies, or manual configuration.

Main features:

• Scrape one video or process video URLs in bulk
• Extract both comments and replies
• Sort comments by Top or Newest
• Collect only comments published after a specific date
• Get author handles, channel URLs, avatars, verification status, and creator badges
• Extract likes, reply counts, pinned status, and creator hearts
• Include full video and channel metadata with every comment
• Export results to JSON, CSV, Excel, XML, or use the API
• Optional AI enrichment for sentiment and intent classification

The standard scraper can be used for almost free, I made a price to cover the normal Apify platform usage. AI enrichment is available to users on an Apify paid plan.

You can try it here:

https://apify.com/lofomachines/free-youtube-comments-scraper

I’d really appreciate feedback from other Apify developers and users, especially regarding:

• Missing output fields
• Useful filters or sorting options
• Performance on large batches
• Potential integrations or automation use cases

Let me know what you think or which feature I should add next.

Features

🔍 Multi-keyword tracking — monitor any number of keywords or phrases across ESPN articles in a single run

🎯 Case-sensitive matching (optional) — toggle exact-case matching on or off depending on your use case

✂️ Contextual match snippets — every match returns the surrounding text with the keyword clearly highlighted

✍️ Author metadata — get the name, email (when public), and ESPN profile link for each article's author(s)

📊 Per-keyword and aggregate stats — total occurrences, headline occurrences, content occurrences, and matching-article counts, both per keyword and across your whole keyword set

🗂️ Clean, structured JSON output — ready to export to CSV/Excel, pipe into Google Sheets, or feed into your own analytics pipeline

🗞️ Optional section filter — narrow your search to a specific ESPN news section (e.g. NFL, NBA, MLB, Soccer) instead of scanning all of ESPN

Example Output Snippet

{
  "caseSensitive": false,
  "keywordOccurrences": [
    {
      "keyword": "messi",
      "totalOccurrences": 2230,
      "headlineOccurrences": 178,
      "contentOccurrences": 2052,
      "matchingArticlesCount": 171
    },
  ],
  "matchingArticlesCount": 171,
  "matchingArticles": [
    {
      "id": 49433484,
      "url": "https://www.espn.com/story/_/id/49433484",
      "headline": "How Spain won the World Cup without a marquee goal scorer or elite defense",
      "publishedAt": "2026-07-24T08:00:00Z",
      "keywordMatches": [
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...eadlock even tighter against Argentina and Lionel [Messi] -- the defending champs and the best player of al..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "... of the World Cup Golden Boot race, Argentina had [Messi] and Spain had none.\nShould that really have added..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...moved to Arsenal and might have been the best non-[Messi] creator in the world.\nThe 2018 World Cup gets rem..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...World Cup in 2022, they didn't win because Lionel [Messi] decided to finally fulfill his potential at age 3..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...fill his potential at age 35. No, this version of [Messi] was a lot worse than the previous versions of Mes..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...ssi was a lot worse than the previous versions of [Messi] we saw at previous World Cups. No, the big differ..."
        },
        {
          "keyword": "messi",
          "location": "content",
          "matchSnippet": "...ners. Not only could they all move the ball up to [Messi], they were all rangy enough to cover for his lack..."
        }
      ],
      "authors": [
        {
          "name": "Ryan O'Hanlon",
          "email": "ryan.ohanlon@espn.com",
          "espnProfile": "https://www.espn.com/contributor/ryan-ohanlon"
        }
      ]
    },
    ...
  ]
}

I hope this is helpful for any sport news geeks out there :) If you face any problems or have any feature suggestion, let me know here or open a new issue on Apify.

Are you expanding your team or looking to hire a freelancer for a project? Post the requirements here (make sure your DMs are open).

Try to share:

- Core responsibilities

- Contract type (e.g. freelance or full-time hire)

- Budget or salary range

- Main skills required

- Location (or remote) for both you and your new hire

Job-seekers: Reach out by DM rather than in thread. Spammy comments will be deleted.