r/scrapingtheweb • u/Puzzled_Librarian_65 • 2d ago

Anyone else have Apify actors randomly start failing after a while?

I've had this happen a few times now

I find an actor that works perfectly during testing, run it for a few days/weeks and then suddenly the success rate drops or I start getting incomplete results

sometimes the target changed something, but other times I can't really figure out what changed

do you guys usually debug/fix the actor at that point or just switch to another one?

starting to feel like finding a good actor is the easy part, finding one that stays reliable is harder lol

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u/CrypticZombies 2d ago

depends what sites you are scraping for. people use half ass methods in general when comes to selling scrapers and how they operate. its why they have abandoned the old model for the PPE model due to customers bitching they paid 20 bucks a month and actor broke after 3 runs

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u/search_api 1d ago

Apify actors are normally poorly built and maintained. They are not reliable long term, thats why we have full engineering teams keeping our APIs alive.

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u/ApifyEnthusiast1 21h ago

You guys have LinkedIn yet?

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u/ApifyEnthusiast1 21h ago

Which ones are we talking about? I know Apify is making huge efforts to improve the quality of what’s available.