OSM POI Scraper — Leads by Category & Area

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Quick answer: The OSM POI Scraper pulls business points of interest — dentists, restaurants, gyms, hotels, car repair shops, pharmacies, EV charging stations, supermarkets and cafés — out of OpenStreetMap for any place name or bounding box, returning name, street address, phone, website, email, opening hours and coordinates as flat rows in JSON, CSV or Excel. It uses two keyless public endpoints (Overpass for the query, Nominatim to turn a place name into a bounding box), paces itself to at least one second between requests to stay inside Overpass's shared fair-use budget, and covers nodes, ways and relations via out center so building-outline POIs aren't silently missing. Pricing is pay-per-result — $5.20 per 1 000 POIs, no subscription, no card required to try it.

🎯 What this scrapes

Point this Actor at a place name or a bounding box, pick a business category, and get a flat lead list pulled straight from OpenStreetMap's Overpass API — name, street address, phone, website, email, opening hours and coordinates for every matching dentist, restaurant, gym, hotel, car repair shop, pharmacy, EV charging station, supermarket or café in the area. No API key, no map-tile scraping — just the business records local lead-gen agencies, franchise-siting analysts and field-sales teams actually need.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🌐 Two verified public endpoints — Overpass API for the POI query, Nominatim for place-name-to-bbox resolution — both keyless, no account or API key to manage.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 429 (rate-limited) and 504 (query timeout) — up to 5 attempts, Retry-After honoured, other 4xx failures reported immediately instead of retried blind.
• 🧱 Self-throttled pacing — at least 1 second between outbound requests, so we stay inside Overpass's shared fair-use budget instead of getting rate-limited in the first place.
• 🏷️ Category-aware tag mapping — plain-English categories (dentist, gym, car_repair, ...) translate to the right OSM tag combinations, including the ones a naive query would miss.
• 🧊 Node, way and relation coverage — building-outline POIs (not just point nodes) are included via out center, so results aren't silently missing half the map.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that land in your dataset. No data, no charge beyond the small warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Local lead generation — pull every business of a category in a city or neighborhood as a ready-to-dial list.
• Franchise siting — map competitor and complementary-business density before picking a new location.
• Field-sales territory planning — export addresses and coordinates for route mapping.
• Market research — count and profile businesses by category across regions without a maps API key.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
placeName	string	no	'Helsinki, Finland'	Named area resolved to a bounding box via Nominatim, e.g. "Helsinki, Finland". Used only when bbox is not set.
bbox	array	no	[60.15, 24.9, 60.2, 24.98]	Explicit bounding box as [south, west, north, east]. Takes precedence over Place name when both are set.
category	string	no	'dentist'	Plain-English business category, translated to the matching OpenStreetMap tag filter(s).
maxResults	integer	no	50	Server-side cap passed to Overpass as out N; — never fetched-then-truncated. Each result is one billed dataset row.
timeoutSeconds	integer	no	25	Overpass [timeout:NN] setting — how long the Overpass server is allowed to spend building the response.
rawOverpassQuery	string	no	'—'	Advanced escape hatch: full Overpass QL, sent verbatim. Bypasses category/bbox/place translation entirely. Must contain…
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': False}	Overpass and Nominatim are public keyless APIs and do not need a proxy. Leave this off unless your account requires…

Example input

{
  "placeName": "Helsinki, Finland",
  "bbox": [
    60.15,
    24.9,
    60.2,
    24.98
  ],
  "category": "dentist",
  "maxResults": 3,
  "timeoutSeconds": 25,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
name	string	Business name, from tags.name.
category	string	Echoed input category, e.g. dentist.
street	string	Street name, from tags["addr:street"].
housenumber	string	House/building number, from tags["addr:housenumber"].
city	string	City, from tags["addr:city"].
postcode	string	Postal code, from tags["addr:postcode"].
country	string	Country, from tags["addr:country"].
phone	string	Phone number — tags.phone, falls back to tags["contact:phone"].
website	string	Website URL — tags.website, falls back to tags["contact:website"].
email	string	Email address — tags.email, falls back to tags["contact:email"].
opening_hours	string	Opening hours string, from tags.opening_hours.
latitude	number	Latitude — element.lat, or element.center.lat for ways/relations.
longitude	number	Longitude — element.lon, or element.center.lon for ways/relations.
osm_id	integer	OpenStreetMap element ID.
osm_type	string	OpenStreetMap element type: node, way or relation.
osm_link	string	Link to the element on openstreetmap.org.

Example output

{
  "name": "Hammaslaakariasema Esplanadi",
  "category": "dentist",
  "street": "Pohjoisesplanadi",
  "housenumber": "31",
  "city": "Helsinki",
  "postcode": "00100",
  "country": null,
  "phone": "+358 9 1234567",
  "website": "https://example-dental.fi",
  "email": null,
  "opening_hours": "Mo-Fr 08:00-18:00",
  "latitude": 60.1682,
  "longitude": 24.9457,
  "osm_id": 123456789,
  "osm_type": "node",
  "osm_link": "https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/123456789"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.20	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.005	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $5.20. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

• Coverage depends entirely on OpenStreetMap's own tagging density in the target area — well-mapped cities return rich results, sparsely-mapped regions return fewer than a proprietary maps API would.
• No reverse-geocoding or address enrichment when addr:* tags are missing on the source OSM element — the field comes back null rather than guessed.
• The category list is a fixed 9-item enum in v1 (dentist, restaurant, gym, hotel, car_repair, pharmacy, ev_charging, supermarket, cafe). The advanced rawOverpassQuery field is available for anything outside that list.
• Only bounding-box and place-name area input is supported — no custom polygon shapes.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key or OpenStreetMap account?

No. Both the Overpass API and Nominatim place-name lookup this Actor uses are free, public and keyless.

Why did I get fewer results than I expected?

OpenStreetMap coverage varies by region — a category with no matching tags in that bounding box returns zero rows, which is a real answer, not an error. Try a larger bbox or check the category's OSM tag mapping in the README.

Can I write my own Overpass query?

Yes — set rawOverpassQuery to bypass the place/category/bbox translation entirely and send your own Overpass QL. It must include out:json.

How do I find a bounding box for my area?

Use placeName instead — the Actor resolves it to a bbox via Nominatim automatically — or pull one from a tool like bboxfinder.com and paste it into bbox as [south, west, north, east].

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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🗺️ Data credit

Every row traces back to OpenStreetMap contributors, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Place-name lookups use the OSM Nominatim service. We stay well inside both services' fair-use limits — see "What we handle for you" above.

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