May 5 · 6 min read · I pulled up my Apify dashboard this morning before coffee. The number I was hoping for was a positive margin. The number I got was negative 33 percent. $20.94 in compute and proxy cost. $15.63 in revenue. I was paying users to run my actor. The actor...
Join discussionApr 25 · 6 min read · Yesterday I posted about losing $540 a month to silent user churn. The day after, I went looking at why my LinkedIn scraper itself was bleeding compute every run. Found three bugs that were quietly eating margin. Shipped fixes today. If you missed it...
Join discussionApr 24 · 7 min read · My Apify portfolio went from $268 rolling 30 day profit to $50 over about three weeks in April, and I spent most of that stretch assuming it was a reporting glitch. It wasn't a glitch. Two agency buyers who'd been running my Google Maps Lead Intel ac...
Join discussionApr 23 · 2 min read · Was building a training set from AI podcast transcripts and hit YouTube API's 10,000/day quota immediately. Here is how I worked around it. The problem YouTube Data API v3 has a 10,000 unit daily quota per project. A transcript pull costs about 1-3 u...
Join discussionApr 23 · 3 min read · I run a LinkedIn employees scraper on Apify that had a 62% false positive problem. Here is how we fixed it. The false positive problem The first version was a Google dork. Query site:linkedin.com/in/ "TargetCompany" and parse the SERP. Fast, cheap, a...
Join discussionApr 22 · 9 min read · How to Scrape Google Scholar for Academic Research at Scale in 2026 If you've ever spent an afternoon clicking through Google Scholar pages, manually copying citations into a spreadsheet, or trying to track down all the papers a researcher has publis...
Join discussionApr 2 · 8 min read · A year ago, I had zero scrapers on Apify. Today, I have 30 published actors, with 9 of them ranking in the top 3 of their niche. Here is what that journey looked like — and why I think building data tools is one of the most underrated side businesses...
Join discussionApr 2 · 11 min read · My Apify bill arrived last Tuesday. I expected around $60 for the month. The actual charge was $312. No alert fired. No email warning. Just a charge on my card and a spike in the compute units graph I hadn't thought to check mid-cycle. This guide is ...
Join discussionApr 2 · 5 min read · How I Built a Cross-Country Vinted Scraper Without Getting Blocked in 2026 When you need to track vintage streetwear across six different European countries at the exact same time, you realize quickly that normal web scraping does not work anymore. I...
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