bulaev.ai

Apify

Freemium

Research · GTM & content

A store of ready-made scrapers ("Actors") with an API and an MCP server your agents can call.

Open apify.com

What it is

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation. The unit of work is an Actor: a serverless program that takes JSON input, runs on Apify's infrastructure (with proxies and headless browsers handled for you) and writes results to a dataset you fetch through the API. The Apify Store lists thousands of ready-made Actors, from "scrape a LinkedIn company page" and "collect Google Maps listings" to "pull every post from a subreddit", and you can publish your own.

Two things make it relevant in an agent stack. Official JavaScript and Python clients wrap the REST API, and a hosted MCP server lets an AI client such as Claude discover Actors, run them and read the results in one conversation. The site states a free tier with no credit card, paid plans that combine a subscription with pay-as-you-go usage, and discounts for startups, universities and nonprofits.

Where it fits in the AI OS

GTM & content, the research step at the top of the pipeline: who is posting about a topic, what competitors changed on their pricing page, which podcasts had your prospect as a guest. Also the data source for lead lists and content ideas before any drafting begins.

Insider notes

members

How Serge's stack uses it

Apify appears in the project notes as one of the partner-perk candidates for members, next to Publora, Signals, Pixfaro and Cloudflare credits. How it is used inside the research tools is not documented publicly.

[SERGE: fill in]

Setup in 5 minutes

  1. Sign up, open the Store and pick one Actor (Website Content Crawler is a good first one).
  2. Run it from the console with one URL; inspect the dataset tab.
  3. Copy your API token from Settings → Integrations.
  4. pip install apify-client, then call the same Actor with client.actor("apify/website-content-crawler").call(run_input={...}) and iterate dataset.iterate_items().
  5. Add the hosted MCP server to Claude Code and ask it to "find an Actor that scrapes G2 reviews and run it for <product>".

Alternatives

  • Firecrawl — API that turns any site into clean Markdown for LLMs; narrower, simpler.
  • Browse AI / Octoparse — no-code scrapers with scheduling.
  • Playwright + your own Worker — free, full control, you maintain the selectors and the proxies.
  • Bright Data — enterprise proxy and dataset vendor.