I Published 10 Web Scrapers on Apify in 2 Weeks. Here's What Actually Happened.

I shipped my first Apify actor in late February. Two weeks later, I had 10 live scrapers on the Apify Store. The one I was most excited about? Zero traction. The one I almost didn't build? It's my top performer. Here's the honest story of what happened when I went from "I should build some scrapers" to running a small portfolio on Apify's marketplace. Why Apify I'd been building scraping tools for a while, but always as one-off scripts. The appeal of Apify was simple: they handle billing, infrastructure, and distribution. You build the actor, they run it on their cloud, users pay per usage. 80% revenue share for creators. The alternative was self-hosting everything on my own server (which I also do at frog03-20494.wykr.es — free API, no signup required). But Apify gives you access to 130K+ users who are already looking for scrapers. That's a distribution channel you can't easily replicate. What I Built Ten scrapers across three rough categories: Social & Content Platforms Bluesky Posts