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Developer reveals four billing bugs that let Apify actors charge users for nothing

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A developer running 51 web scrapers on Apify's pay-per-event billing platform documented four distinct bugs that caused users to be charged incorrectly or services to run without generating revenue. One key flaw involved counting internal bookkeeping rows as billable items, meaning a scraper returning no real data could still trigger a charge. In another case, a billing event that had not yet been registered in Apify's Console caused the platform to silently serve real data over paid residential proxies without recording any charge. A third bug stemmed from the difference between 'prefill' and 'default' in Apify's input schema, which meant programmatic callers never received required proxy settings that human testers saw in the Console. The developer has since audited all 96 actors on the account and recommends registering billing events before deployment and using 'default' instead of 'prefill' for critical configuration fields.

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