Apify is a cloud platform and marketplace for web scraping and automation, made by the company Apify. Web scraping means that a program opens web pages and copies data out of them in a structured form. On Apify each such program is an Actor: code packaged so that it is easy to run, share and connect to other software.
Apify Store lists thousands of ready-made Actors, for example scrapers for TikTok, Google Maps and Instagram, and a crawler that collects the content of a whole website. A user starts an Actor from the web console, the API or a schedule; it runs on Apify's servers and stores the results, which can be exported in several formats. The platform rotates datacenter and residential proxy IP addresses so that target sites block fewer requests, and offers an MCP server through which AI agents can call Actors. Developers write their own Actors in JavaScript, TypeScript or Python and can sell them in the store.
Apify is a hosted service. Each plan includes prepaid monthly usage; use beyond it is billed per use, mainly per compute unit (1 GB of memory for one hour).