How to pick an Apify Actor from 70,000+ in the Store

Contains affiliate links. Disclosure.

The Apify Store is a marketplace of prebuilt cloud programs, called Actors, that scrape a site or run an automation and hand you a dataset. What it is not is a shortlist. A search for google maps scraper returned more than 9,000 matches on 2026-09-09. Choosing between them is the actual work, and the listing page does not rank them for you.

Everything below is a signal you can check in about thirty seconds, with the number we measured on 2026-09-09 next to it.

How many Actors are in the Apify Store?

Two of Apify's own surfaces disagree. The Store page advertises "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors" (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09). Apify's public Store API returned about 57,000 listings on the same day (57,212 when checked; the figure moves daily) (https://api.apify.com/v2/store, checked 2026-09-09). The API counts listings you can page through; the marketing figure counts more than that.

Take roughly 57,000 as the floor you can enumerate yourself and 70,000+ as Apify's published headline. Both move weekly as developers publish.

Changed on 2026-09-09: this page previously understated the Store's size by more than half, and it still described monthly rental as a live pricing choice. Both are corrected below.

Which signals separate a good Actor from a dead one?

Ratings are the weakest signal in the Store and the most prominent one in the UI. In the first 30 results for google maps scraper on 2026-09-09, 11 Actors had zero reviews, and 5 more carried a perfect 5.00 rating built on one to three reviews.

Signal	Where to read it	What it tells you
Monthly active users	stats.totalUsers30Days	The only signal that reliably separates head from tail. The top Google Maps result had 596,302 all-time users; the 30th had 624.
Review count, before the rating	stats.actorReviewCount	A rating under roughly 20 reviews is noise. Read the count first, then decide whether the stars mean anything.
30-day success rate	stats.publicActorRunStats30Days	compass/crawler-google-places succeeded on 95.7% of 3,770,275 runs. microworlds/crawler-google-places succeeded on 81.2% of 3,619. Same job, same search results page.
Deprecation flag	isDeprecated	The one binary answer. It is exposed by the API and not by the listing page.
Last build	modifiedAt	Noisy. Three compass Actors all reported 2026-09-09T08:59, which is a bulk rebuild, not three fixes. Use it to spot abandonment in months, not freshness in days.
Pricing model	currentPricingInfo.pricingModel	Decides whether your bill scales with results or with runtime. See what an Actor costs.

All figures above measured 2026-09-09 from api.apify.com/v2/store and api.apify.com/v2/acts.

If two Actors do the same job, take the one with more 30-day users unless its success rate is materially worse. Adoption is a proxy for "someone else already hit the edge cases".

How do I check an Actor before I run it?

1. Search the Store, or open a category such as Google Maps or lead generation.

2. Pull the Actor's record from the public API. No API token is needed for a public Actor:

   curl -s https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/compass~crawler-google-places \
     | jq '.data | {isDeprecated, modifiedAt, users30d: .stats.totalUsers30Days,
                    reviews: .stats.actorReviewCount,
                    runs30d: .stats.publicActorRunStats30Days}'

3. Reject it on isDeprecated: true, a review count in single digits, or a 30-day success rate below about 90%.

4. Read the README for required inputs and output fields. Good Actors document rate-limit behaviour; abandoned ones document nothing.

5. Run 10 to 20 of your own URLs before you schedule anything. A global success rate says nothing about your targets, which may sit behind a login, a region gate, or infinite scroll.

Why a 200 response does not mean the Actor is alive

Apify redirects retired Actor slugs, so a link checker sees a healthy page while the reader lands on something else. Every row below was checked with curl on 2026-09-09.

URL you have	What happens	What you actually get
apify.com/apify/google-maps-scraper	308 redirect	compass/crawler-google-places — different author, different pricing
apify.com/apify/reddit-scraper	308 redirect	trudax/reddit-scraper-lite
apify.com/apify/actors-mcp-server	308 redirect	mcp.apify.com — no longer an Actor at all, but a hosted MCP endpoint
apify.com/trudax/reddit-scraper	200 OK	An Actor whose API record says isDeprecated: true

The first three still resolve, so any guide that links them looks correct and is not. The fourth returns a clean 200 on a deprecated Actor. isDeprecated is the only field that settles it.

What does an Actor actually cost?

Your bill has two layers: the platform compute units a run consumes, plus whatever the Actor's own listing charges on top.

Model	You pay for	Where you still see it
Pay per event	Defined actions — a scraped place, a result row, an Actor start	Nearly everything popular
Pay per usage	Platform resources only (CUs)	Open-source crawlers and generic extractors
Pay per result	Each dataset item, plus CUs	Older lead and product-data Actors
Monthly rental	A flat fee for one Actor	Being retired — see below

Pay-per-event has effectively won. In a 476-listing sample of the Store's default popularity ordering, 466 listings were PAY_PER_EVENT and 10 were FREE (api.apify.com/v2/store?limit=500, 2026-09-09). Read how pay-per-event billing works before you budget against it.

Rental Actors are being retired

Apify stopped accepting new rental Actors and price changes on existing ones on 1 April 2026, and retires the model entirely on 1 October 2026, migrating the remainder to pay-per-usage (docs.apify.com, checked 2026-09-09). That is 22 days from today.

The practical consequence is larger than the date. Any "rental fee plus compute versus results times per-result rate" break-even calculation you find in an older guide, including earlier versions of this one, no longer describes a choice that exists. Do not build a budget on a rental price now. If you are on a rental Actor today, find its replacement before October rather than after.

While the model still exists, a rental Actor carries a free trial, and a Free-plan account cannot keep using it once that trial ends without upgrading (docs.apify.com, checked 2026-09-09).

Store discounts by plan

Paid plans carry a discount tier that applies to participating Actors. Participation is set by each Actor's author and is optional.

Plan	Monthly	Store discount tier
Free	$0	None
Starter	$19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09	Bronze
Scale	$199	Silver
Business	$999	Gold

Plans and tiers from apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09; annual billing takes 10% off. The discount is real money on a per-event Actor: compass/crawler-google-places charges $0.004 per scraped place at the Free tier and $0.0015 at Gold, a 62% cut on the same event.

One thing the pricing page does not tell you. The API exposes two tiers above Gold — PLATINUM and DIAMOND, at $0.00126 and $0.000756 per place on the same Actor. They are not on the public pricing page, so treat Gold as the best rate you can buy off the shelf and ask sales about the rest. See Apify discounts and credits for what is publicly claimable.

When the Store is the wrong answer

Say no to an Actor in three cases.

The site publishes an official API. If the data you want is available under the site's own terms, use it. It will be more stable than any scraper, and it will not break on a redesign.

You need one small export, once. The free plan includes $5 of monthly platform usage, which is enough to test. For a few hundred rows you will need once and never again, a manual export or a browser extension can be faster than learning an input schema.

You need a schema that cannot move. Community Actors change output fields without a release note. If a downstream contract depends on the exact field names, budget for the maintenance or write your own Actor.

How to run a Store Actor

1. Open apify.com/store and pick an Actor.
2. Click Try for free or Use to open the run console.
3. Fill the Input form, or paste JSON if you already know the schema.
4. Click Start and watch the live log for the first failures.
5. Export the dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the run's Storage tab.

For a full walkthrough on a real target, see how to scrape Google Maps, or compare the options in best Google Maps scrapers.

Run the 30-second check first

Pick one Actor, read isDeprecated and its 30-day success rate from the API, then run ten of your own URLs before you schedule anything.

Browse the Apify Store →

Frequently Asked Questions

Apify's Store page advertises 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors, while Apify's own public Store API (api.apify.com/v2/store) returned about 57,000 on 2026-09-09. The two surfaces count different sets. Treat roughly 57,000 as the number you can enumerate and 70,000+ as the published headline. Both grow weekly.

Compare 30-day active users first, then the 30-day success rate, then the review count — not the star rating. In the first 30 results for 'google maps scraper' on 2026-09-09, eleven Actors had zero reviews and five showed a perfect 5.00 from one to three reviews. Then run 10 to 20 of your own URLs before scheduling.

Call https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/<username>~<actor-name> and read the isDeprecated field. The Store listing page does not show it, and the URL is not a reliable test: on 2026-09-09, apify.com/trudax/reddit-scraper returned 200 for an Actor flagged isDeprecated: true, while three retired apify/* slugs returned 308 redirects to entirely different Actors.

Some are. In a 476-listing sample of the Store's popularity ordering on 2026-09-09, 10 listings were free and 466 charged per event on top of platform compute. The Free plan includes $5 of monthly platform usage, which covers light testing. Read the Pricing tab of the specific Actor before you scale.

Only until 1 October 2026. Apify stopped accepting new rental Actors and price changes on 1 April 2026 and retires the model on 1 October 2026, migrating the remaining Actors to pay-per-usage pricing. Any rental-versus-per-result cost comparison written before 2026 no longer describes a live choice.

Free gets none, Starter gets Bronze, Scale gets Silver, and Business gets Gold, per apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09. Participation is set by each Actor's author. On compass/crawler-google-places the Gold tier pays $0.0015 per scraped place against $0.004 at the Free tier.

Structured results land in an Apify dataset attached to the run. Download them as JSON, CSV, or Excel from the Console, or fetch them through the Apify API. Binary files such as images or screenshots go to key-value storage instead, depending on the Actor.