PeoplePerHour Freelance Jobs Scraper

$3.20 / 1 000 results — pay only for results that land, no credit card to try.

Search PeoplePerHour's freelance jobs board by keyword and/or category and get back structured job postings — budget, project type, proposal counts, client details, and a canonical URL — instead of hand-rolled HTML scraping that breaks the moment PeoplePerHour tweaks a class name.

🔍 What this scrapes

PeoplePerHour (peopleperhour.com/freelance-jobs) is a UK-based freelance micro-job marketplace. This Actor reads the same JSON payload the listing page itself renders from — a full Redux state blob embedded in the HTML — and turns it into clean dataset rows:

• Job title, description, canonical URL
• Category + sub-category (name and slug)
• Budget amount, currency, and USD-converted amount
• Project type (fixed price / hourly) and location type (remote / on-site)
• Client name, country, city, and public profile URL
• Proposal counts (total and unread), posted/expiry timestamps
• Urgent / featured / pre-funded flags and client experience band

⚙️ Features

• 🛡️ We rotate browser fingerprints (curl-cffi impersonation — Chrome and Firefox profiles) so the target sees a real-browser TLS handshake, not raw Python.
• 🔁 We retry with exponential backoff on 403 / 408 / 429 / 5xx responses, minting a fresh Apify Proxy exit IP on every retry.
• 🧱 Per-query fault isolation. Run multiple keyword/category combinations in one job — one blocked or malformed query never aborts the others.
• 🧊 We keep the dataset clean — Pydantic-validated rows, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable job ids.
• 💰 You pay only for results that land. No data → no charge beyond the small actor-start warm-up fee.

💡 Use cases

• Freelance market research — track budgets, project types, and demand by category over time.
• Lead generation for freelancers — build a keyword-filtered feed of fresh jobs to bid on, refreshed on a schedule.
• Competitive/staffing intelligence — monitor which categories and budget bands are trending on a major micro-job marketplace.
• Aggregator/feed builders — pull a normalized job feed into your own job board or Slack/email digest.

🚀 How to use it

1. Click Try for free (or Run) on the Apify Store page.
2. Add one or more queries — each is a {"keyword": "...", "categorySlug": "..."} pair. Leave both blank in an entry to browse the unfiltered latest-jobs listing.
3. Set maxResultsPerQuery and sort, then start the run.
4. Read results from the run's Dataset tab, or export as JSON/CSV.

{
  "queries": [
    { "keyword": "logo design" },
    { "categorySlug": "digital-marketing" }
  ],
  "sort": "latest",
  "maxResultsPerQuery": 45
}

📥 Input

Field	Type	Description
queries	array	One or more {keyword, categorySlug} pairs. Required, at least one entry.
sort	string	latest (default) / relevance / popularity / ending / budget.
maxResultsPerQuery	integer	Hard cap on rows per query. Default 45.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy config. Plain Apify Proxy is enough — no anti-bot signal was found on this target.

📤 Output

Field	Description
job_id	PeoplePerHour's internal project id.
title	Job posting title.
url	Absolute URL to the job listing.
category / category_slug	Top-level category.
sub_category / sub_category_slug	Sub-category.
project_type	fixed_price or hourly, verbatim from the site.
budget_amount / budget_currency / budget_converted_usd	Budget, native currency, and USD conversion.
proposal_count / unread_proposal_count	Bidding activity.
client_name / client_country / client_city / client_url	Client details.
posted_at / expires_at	Listing lifecycle timestamps.
scraped_at	ISO-8601 wall-clock time this row was recorded.

{
  "job_id": "4522054",
  "title": "PPC Campaigns - Google Ads & Instagram / Tiktok Ads",
  "url": "https://www.peopleperhour.com/freelance-jobs/digital-marketing/sem-google-ads-ppc/ppc-campaigns-google-ads-instagram-tiktok-ads-4522054",
  "category": "Digital Marketing",
  "category_slug": "digital-marketing",
  "project_type": "fixed_price",
  "budget_amount": 300,
  "budget_currency": "GBP",
  "proposal_count": 0,
  "client_name": "Kevin B.",
  "client_country": "United Kingdom",
  "scraped_at": "2026-09-18T12:00:00+00:00"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-per-event pricing — you only pay for what actually happens.

Event	Price	When it's charged
Actor start	$0.20	Once, the first time a query completes (not at boot, and never for a run that never reached the target).
Job scraped	$0.003	Once per unique job posting written to the dataset.

$0.20 start fee + 1,000 × $0.003 job fee = $3.20 per 1,000 results. A run whose search legitimately matches nothing still finishes SUCCEEDED and bills only the $0.20 start fee — never the per-row charge.

🚧 Limitations

• Public listing data only — no bidding, messaging, or account actions.
• budget_converted_usd reflects PeoplePerHour's own currency conversion at scrape time and may drift from the live rate.
• Very deep pagination (thousands of results per query) takes proportionally longer; maxResultsPerQuery bounds both cost and runtime.

❓ FAQ

Does this need a PeoplePerHour login? No — the listing pages this Actor reads are fully public.

What happens if PeoplePerHour rate-limits a request? We back off exponentially and rotate to a fresh Apify Proxy exit IP automatically. A block on a later page ends that query with whatever it already collected — a partial success, clearly noted in the run's status message — rather than losing the whole run.

Can I run multiple searches in one job? Yes — pass multiple entries in queries. Each is scraped independently, so one bad query never blocks the others.

Why do some optional fields come back null? PeoplePerHour doesn't populate every field on every listing (e.g. some jobs have no sub-category). Rows still validate — only the always-present fields (job_id, title, url, proposal_count, scraped_at) are required.

🙋 Your feedback

Found a bug, a wire-format drift, or a field you need that's missing? Message us through the Apify Console — we read every report and this Actor gets fixed fast.