Hire Apify freelancers
Get an affordable custom web scraping, data extraction, or web automation solution developed on the Apify platform by external developers. Post your project to our developer community on Discord and get offers from expert web-scraping engineers.
Specify what you need
Post details of your project to the #hire-freelancers channel of Apify’s Discord community. Provide as much information as you can and describe the steps you would take if you were doing the task manually. Freelancers might reach out with a few additional questions.
Receive and review proposals
Freelancers will send you their project proposals with a timeline for delivery. You can also reach out to some of the freelancers yourself. You can find them on Discord via the @ tag with the role Freelancer.
Track development
The selected developer should be in close contact with you throughout the process to make sure everything stays on track.
Receive your solution
When the solution is ready, you should have the opportunity to thoroughly test it before approving delivery. The source code, project details, and other information you share during the process shouldn’t be accessible to others. Enjoy, and start planning your next project! 🙂
Apify Freelancers (also known as Apify Marketplace) was a moderated marketplace where we connected customers with a pool of Apify-vetted external web scraping developers and managed the whole project lifecycle as well as deposits. On September 29, 2022, we have decided to discontinue this service. Moving forward, you can submit your projects on the new dedicated Discord channel we have created to help facilitate direct negotiations with freelancers. You can also directly liaise with the Apify freelancer who has developed your solution in the past.
Apify freelancers are external developers who can deliver smaller web scraping and web automation projects on the Apify platform.
To help you identify experienced developers, look out for a “Freelancer” tag on Discord. Ask developers to share their Apify profile with you where you can check their experience, the tools they have developed on the Apify platform, and their previous projects.
Yes, we can. Here are some experienced Apify freelancers we have vetted before:
The best way is to explain the task to be automated as if you were explaining it to someone who would perform it manually. The better the specification, the faster you will get your results. Find out how to write excellent project specifications, including examples.
Once you receive the proposals, consider the developer's track record, the quoted price, and the number of days until delivery. Ask developers for their Apify profile, where you can read what our customers have to say about them and see their current rating, number of reviews, and experience level. Typically, developers with higher ratings place higher bids. Also, shorter time-to-delivery commands a higher price.
The solution should be delivered to your Apify account as an actor - a serverless cloud program running on top of the Apify platform. You can invoke the actor manually on the Apify platform as needed, schedule it to run periodically, or integrate the actor with other systems using Zapier, Make, webhooks or API. You can use the Apify platform with our free plan or subscribe to a paid plan to get higher service limits. The actor’s output is available in various formats, such as JSON, CSV, Excel, HTML, XML, or RSS.
The setup of a custom web scraper or automation tool is, on average, 200-800 USD. The exact price depends on the complexity of the projects. Projects with more precise specifications are usually cheaper because the developers know exactly what needs to be developed. This one-time setup fee must be paid before the developers start their work. It can be paid using a credit card or PayPal. On top of the one-time setup fee, you might also need to subscribe to one of Apify’s paid plans to run your solution regularly on top of the Apify platform. The size of the plan depends on how many computing units your actor will need. Crawling the web requires a certain amount of resources. The delivered solutions require modern and scalable hardware, a reliable large-bandwidth network, and many hard-to-detect IP addresses. The Apify platform was built with all that in mind. It integrates all the features needed to scrape the web in a user-friendly package. Most modern websites have some sort of anti-bot mitigation system in place which means that you will need access to proxy servers to obfuscate the origin of the queries (for example, by rotating IP addresses). Proxy servers are a costly infrastructure to maintain, so they do not come free (you get a month's trial of 30 datacenter proxies on the free plan). Proxy server access is standard on all of our subscription plans. In addition, our plans come with a certain amount of platform usage credits. The actors that run on the platform will consume these resources as they go. You can choose your plans based on your expected consumption.
No. Apify freelancers are suitable for one-time development projects and smaller web scraping projects. If you’re looking for a project with ongoing monitoring & maintenance, an SLA, a custom NDA, or a contract, check out Apify Professional Services.
Looking for a fully-managed solution?
If you're looking for a web scraping or automation solution with ongoing development, maintenance, and monitoring covered by a service-level agreement (SLA), please consider Apify Professional Services.