I Built 77 Web Scrapers on Apify — Here's What Nobody Tells You About Cloud Scraping

Over the past 3 months, I built and published 77 scrapers on Apify's platform. Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, Google News, Trustpilot, Bluesky — you name it. Here's what I learned that the marketing pages don't tell you. The Good Parts (Why I Keep Using It) 1. Free Tier Is Actually Generous Apify gives you $5/month free credits . For lightweight scrapers, that's enough to: Run 10-20 scraping jobs per day Store 100K+ results in their dataset Use their residential proxy pool For comparison, running the same scrapers on a VPS would cost $5-20/month just for the server. 2. Infrastructure Is Solved The biggest time sink in scraping isn't writing the scraper — it's: Managing browser instances (memory leaks, crashes) Rotating proxies (blocked IPs, rate limits) Handling retries (network errors, timeouts) Scheduling (cron, monitoring, alerts) Apify handles all of this. My scraper code is 100-200 lines. The infrastructure code I'd need otherwise is 500-1000 lines. 3. The Actor Model Is Clever Eac