Building a Pay-Per-Request Web Scraping API with Apify Actors, FastAPI, and the x402 Protocol

What you'll build : A production Python service that wraps Apify community actors behind a unified async API and charges callers $0.05 USDC per request — no account, no OAuth, no API keys required from the consumer side. The Problem: Social Data Has No Unified Interface You'd think in 2026 getting posts from Bluesky, articles from Substack, or stories from Hacker News would be trivial. It isn't. Each platform has its own quirks: Bluesky (AT Protocol) — has an API, but pagination is cursor-based and the auth flow expects a DID (Decentralized Identifier). Extracting engagement metrics requires chasing multiple nested objects per post. Substack — no public API. Newsletters are behind a mix of public RSS feeds, paywalled content, and inconsistent rendering. The "just scrape it" approach breaks constantly as their markup changes. Hacker News — the Algolia search API is decent, but getting it to behave consistently in a structured pipeline requires managing rate limits, result pagination, an