Apify

Apify is a Prague-founded (2015) cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation, used by over a million developers. Its core concept is Actors: serverless programs — thousands of them pre-built in a marketplace — that scrape sites like Amazon, Google Maps, TikTok, or Zillow and return structured data. The platform handles proxies, scheduling, storage, and webhooks, so AI teams use it to keep search indexes fresh, monitor retailers, and feed real-time web context into RAG pipelines and agents. It integrates with LangGraph, CrewAI, and MCP servers.

The honest picture: pricing is usage-based around compute units and can get expensive fast for heavy continuous scraping if your actors are not optimized. It is developer-leaning — truly custom scrapes still need JavaScript or Python knowledge — and it is not self-hostable. For pure LLM-ready markdown extraction, newer AI-first tools like Firecrawl are simpler; Apify wins when you need the actor marketplace and full automation control.

Sign up at apify.com — the free tier includes $5 in monthly credits with no card required. Pick an actor from the store, configure inputs, and run or schedule it; integrate via API, webhooks, or MCP.