Developer builds 11 Apify scrapers in 3 days, documents real costs and critical bugs

A developer launched an experiment on September 10 to build pay-per-event web scrapers on Apify Store, producing eleven actors in three days with eight already live. Despite zero revenue so far, the project surfaced two significant bugs: charging buyers before confirming data delivery, and marking items as seen before they were successfully pushed — both of which could cause data loss or incorrect billing. The builder documented real platform costs, showing that JSON-API-based scrapers cost as little as $0.0000014 to $0.0000076 per row at 256 MB, while browser-based scrapers requiring Cloudflare bypass cost around $0.0046 per row — roughly 460 times more expensive. The key takeaway is that spending ten minutes in DevTools to find a site's underlying JSON endpoint can eliminate the need for a browser entirely, as most platforms like Eventbrite, Kalshi, and European company registries serve clean JSON directly. Substack was a notable exception, returning no data to non-browser fetch requests.