AppHitlist App Intelligence

What is AppHitlist App Intelligence?

AppHitlist App Intelligence returns App Store research from AppHitlist: which apps climbed or entered a daily chart, which new apps already earn money, which apps earn the most, what one app looks like, which Meta ads have been running, and what 1-star and 2-star reviews complain about.

Apify customers do not create an AppHitlist account. The Actor calls AppHitlist with the owner's key, stored as the Apify secret APPHITLIST_API_KEY. There is no public REST API. The only programmatic path is the remote MCP server at https://apphitlist.com/api/mcp (streamable HTTP).

When that key is Pro, rows carry one monthly figure (latestRevenueUsd, latestDownloads) instead of a range, and the ads and complaint operations are included. When the key is Free, revenue and downloads come back as ranges, and ads and complaints come back as subscription_required.

Before the first run

Muhammet must set APPHITLIST_API_KEY in the Apify Console for this Actor (Settings → Environment variables) and mark it as a secret, before running or publishing.

• The value is an AppHitlist key from the owner's account. Keys start with ahl_.
• Customers never paste a key. The input has no key field. A key in the input is rejected.
• The Actor does not log the key, does not write it to the dataset, and does not call AppHitlist until the secret is set.
• Do not publish while the secret is missing. Every run fails closed with a message that names the Console setting.

Quick answer: when should you pick this Actor?

Pick this Actor when you want AppHitlist's chart movement, modeled revenue and downloads, Meta ad runtime or low-star complaint themes as dataset rows, billed on Apify, without your own AppHitlist login.

Pick something else when you want a cheap copy of the public App Store page (name, icon, public chart position, reviews). Those are a different product. This Actor does not scrape Apple, and it does not return keyword ranks.

A useful first input is chart movers for us / grossing with limit 20. Twenty stored rows on the Free plan are $3.00 plus the $0.01 start.

At a glance

Does	Chart movers (36 countries, grossing / free / paid), new apps already earning, top earners, search, one app, longest-running Meta ads, ads for one app, complaint themes.
Input	One operation, plus the fields that operation uses. No API key.
Output	One dataset row per app, movement, ad or theme. Error rows for calls that failed. RUN_SUMMARY in the key-value store.
Needs	The owner's APPHITLIST_API_KEY secret in the Apify Console.
Account	Customers use the owner's AppHitlist account. A Pro key returns exact figures and unlocks ads and complaints.
Pricing	Pay per event. Free plan: $0.01 to start and $0.15 per stored row.
Does not	Take the customer's AppHitlist key, scrape the App Store, or return Apple's official revenue.

Key terms

• Operation: which of the nine AppHitlist tools this run calls. One run does one operation. Several countries, apps or queries are several calls of that same tool.
• Exact figures: latestRevenueUsd and latestDownloads, one monthly number each. Returned when the stored key is Pro. revenuePresentation is exact.
• Ranges: revenueRange and downloadsRange, bands such as $10K–$25K or 5K–10K. Returned when the stored key is Free. A null range means the app is below the lowest band, or no figure is shown. revenuePresentation is range.
• subscription_required: the stored key is Free and the operation needs Pro. The row says so. Later calls in that run are not sent.
• Chart mover: an app that climbed (chart_riser: rank, previous rank, places climbed) or entered the list (chart_new_entry).
• Estimate: revenue and download numbers come from AppHitlist's own model. They are directional. They are not Apple's reported sales or downloads.
• Ad Library: Meta ads are the public Facebook and Instagram ads AppHitlist has indexed. Coverage is the EU/UK coverage AppHitlist documents for the Ad Library. daysRunning is how long the ad has been active, not a spend or a result.

What you can use it for

Who moved on today's grossing chart

operation: "find_chart_movers", countries: ["us"], chart: "grossing", days: 1. Add category: "Finance" for that list, or days: 7 for a week. Up to 8 countries in one run. Category charts exist for every list in us, gb and de; many other countries have grossing and free; the rest have grossing only. An unavailable chart is an error row with chart_not_available, the hint, and latestChartDate.

New apps that already earn

find_new_winning_apps with an optional category. These are apps released in the last 6 months at $10K or more a month, highest first. Games are left out unless category is Games.

The top of a category

find_top_earning_apps with category: "Health & Fitness". Pro rows add price and ratings.

One app, its ads, its complaints

search_apps when you only have a name. Then get_app with the numeric id or the App Store URL. Pro app details add price, currency, ratings, the in-app purchase flag, the store URL, the start of the description, and a 30-day rankSummary. get_app_ads and get_app_complaints need Pro.

What a category complains about

get_category_complaints with category: "Finance". Optional kind: product, billing or price. reviewCount counts 1 and 2 star reviews that mention the theme, not all reviews.

How it works

1. The Actor reads APPHITLIST_API_KEY from the environment. If it is missing, or it does not start with ahl_, the run stops before any request. The value is not logged.
2. It opens one MCP session on https://apphitlist.com/api/mcp (initialize, then notifications/initialized, then tools/call). Redirects off apphitlist.com are refused, so the key is not sent anywhere else.
3. Each country, app or query is one tools/call. Calls in flight default to 2, and a shared pace starts a call at most once every 1.1 seconds (under Pro's 60 calls a minute). HTTP 429 and a "Rate limit reached" tool result wait (Retry-After, or the time in the message, otherwise 5s, 10s, 20s) and retry that call up to three times.
4. The JSON text inside the tool result is flattened into dataset rows. The MCP envelope is not stored. Unknown objects become an error row that names the top-level keys, not the raw payload.
5. Each stored app, riser, new entry, ad or theme is one intelligence-record charge, via Actor.charge, after which only the accepted rows are saved. pushData is called without an event name, so a row is not billed twice. Error rows are free.
6. A rejected key, the Free monthly cap (20 calls), subscription_required, or a category AppHitlist does not recognise stops calls that have not been sent. One unknown app, one missing chart, or one rate limit does not cancel the other items.
7. A spending limit is checked before a call. If it cannot cover one more row, AppHitlist is not called for that item. Rows fetched but refused by the limit are not written.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Meaning
operation	enum	find_chart_movers	One of the nine tools.
countries	list	us	Chart movers. Up to 8 of the 36 countries. uk → gb.
chart	grossing | free | paid	grossing	Chart movers.
date	YYYY-MM-DD	latest day	Chart movers, UTC.
days	integer 1–28	1	Chart movers. 1 is day over day, 7 is week over week.
category	string	empty	Optional list filter. Required for category complaints.
apps	list	empty	URL, numeric id or name. Up to 20. Required for app details, app ads and app complaints.
queries	list	empty	Search text, 2–80 characters. Up to 10.
kind	product | billing | price	empty	Category complaints only.
limit	integer	per operation	Caps above. Chart movers apply it to risers and new entries separately.
concurrency	integer 1–4	2	In-flight calls. The 1.1s pace still applies.

There is no key field.

Operations and limits

Operation	Required	Limit
find_chart_movers	country (default us)	1–50, default 20, per side of the result
find_new_winning_apps	—	1–50, default 20
find_top_earning_apps	—	1–50, default 20
search_apps	queries	1–10, default 5
get_app	apps	—
find_longest_running_ads	—	1–20, default 10
get_app_ads	apps	1–20, default 10
get_app_complaints	apps	—
get_category_complaints	category	1–30, default 15

Countries: us, gb, de, fr, ca, au, jp, kr, br, tr, es, it, mx, tw, nl, se, ch, sg, hk, ae, sa, no, dk, pl, ru, in, id, th, nz, ie, at, be, za, il, cl, co.

The form prefills limit 20. Search accepts at most 10, so a search left at 20 uses the search default of 5. Set the limit yourself when you want a different number inside that operation's range.

Output

Filter the dataset on recordType. Views: Apps, Chart movers, Ads, Complaints, Errors.

assets/sample-run-data.json is an illustration, not a live run. Revenue numbers there are made up.

App rows (recordType: "app")

From new winners, top earners, search and app details. Fields include appId, name, publisher, category, releasedAt, profileUrl, and either revenueRange / downloadsRange or latestRevenueUsd / latestDownloads. revenuePresentation says which. Pro may also include price, currency, rating, ratingCount, hasInAppPurchases, storeUrl, description (500 characters) and rankSummary (JSON text of the 30-day rank summary).

figuresAreEstimates is true. Read the figures as AppHitlist's model.

Chart rows

chart_riser has rank, previousRank and change (places climbed). chart_new_entry has rank. Both carry the app fields, country, chart, chartCategory, chartDate, comparedWith, days, listSize and chartWarning when AppHitlist sent one. A warning means there was nothing to compare with, or a new entry may only be new to the catalog.

Ad rows (recordType: "ad")

title, body, format, cta, linkUrl, platforms, startedAt, endedAt, daysRunning, copies, and the app when it was included. totalAds is set for ads of one app. These rows are not revenue estimates. They are public Ad Library creatives with a runtime. They do not include spend or results.

Complaint rows (recordType: "complaint_theme")

theme, themeSummary, complaintKind, reviewCount, and for a category appCount, exampleApps and appsAnalyzed. reviewCount is low-star mentions, not all reviews.

Error rows (recordType: "error")

errorCode	Meaning
subscription_required	The stored key is Free. This operation needs Pro.
free_quota_exhausted	The Free key has used its 20 calls this UTC month.
unauthorized	The stored key was rejected. Fix the Console secret.
app_not_found	No app for that URL, id or name.
category_not_found	categories lists names to retry. Later calls in the run are not sent.
chart_not_available	hint and latestChartDate say what to change. Other countries still run.
rate_limited	Still over the pace after retries.
charge_limit	The spending limit could not cover another row, so the call was not sent or the extra rows were not stored.

Key-value store

RUN_SUMMARY holds the operation, calls planned and made, rows delivered, rows held back, revenuePresentation (exact if any row had exact figures), sourceNote (AppHitlist's note, when it sent one), warnings, and finishedReason.

finishedReason is completed, empty (a real empty answer), item_errors, subscription_required, free_quota_exhausted, unauthorized, charge_limit, failed or aborted.

Pricing

Pay per event. US dollars. Apify's margin is 20%. This is not a rental.

Event	Free	Bronze	Silver	Gold	Platinum and Diamond	When
Actor start	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01	$0.01	Once per run (one event per GB of memory, minimum one)
Intelligence record	$0.15	$0.13	$0.12	$0.11	$0.10	One stored app, riser, new entry, ad or theme

The charge in the code is Actor.charge({ eventName: 'intelligence-record', count }). Only accepted rows are then stored. pushData has no event name.

Not charged: error rows, an empty list, a call skipped because the key was rejected or the Free cap was hit, a Pro-only refusal, and rows the spending limit refused. A charge result of zero events is a spending limit only when eventChargeLimitReached is true. A run that is not on pay-per-event still stores the rows it received.

Why this price

Public App Store actors on the Apify Store sell a page scrape: about $0.002 to $0.003 per app (charts, metadata) and about $0.0001 per review. A public-signal revenue estimator on the Store charges about $0.02 to turn rank and ratings into a band. Those are not this dataset.

This Actor sells AppHitlist's own monthly revenue and download model (an exact USD figure on Pro, not a band scraped from the chart), plus chart movement, Ad Library runtime and complaint themes. AppHitlist Pro is $19.99 a month for interactive use of that same model. Sensor Tower and data.ai sell this class of figure as a subscription, not as a fraction-of-a-cent scrape.

$0.15 a row on the Free plan is about 130 rows for the price of one Pro month. One category of 20 apps is $3.00 plus the $0.01 start. A heavy chart pull is the expensive path on purpose: chart movers charge risers and new entries separately, so one country at the default limit can be up to 40 rows ($6.00), and 8 countries can be up to 320 rows ($48.00). Occasional programmatic reads cost a few dollars. Replacing an unlimited Pro login with bulk export costs more than Pro.

The start fee is $0.01 rather than the fraction of a cent used for a public-page scrape, because every run spends the owner's AppHitlist quota. Prices are proposed in pricing-ppe.json. They are not set on the platform until someone applies them.

Store prices above were public list prices on 5 November 2026.

Comparison

	This Actor	automation-lab App Store scraper	seibs.co revenue estimator	sourabhbgp App Store scraper	AppHitlist Pro
What you get	AppHitlist model, chart movement, ads, complaints	Public app, chart and review pages	Public metadata plus a modeled band	Public apps, charts, reviews	The same model, in the product
Revenue	Exact USD on a Pro key, else a range	No	About $0.02 for a low/mid/high band	No	Exact USD
Ads and complaints	Yes, Pro key	No	No	Reviews, not these themes	Yes
Who logs in	Nobody. The owner's key.	Nobody	Nobody	Nobody	The subscriber
Price signal	$0.15 per stored row on Free	About $0.003 per app	About $0.02 per estimate	About $0.002 per row	$19.99 / month

Data notes

Revenue and downloads are AppHitlist's model. Treat them as directional estimates. Do not describe them as Apple's official numbers, as the developer's reported revenue, or as an audited figure. A Free key's range is a band. Do not turn a band into a midpoint.

Meta ads come from the public Meta Ad Library, with the EU/UK coverage AppHitlist documents. A long daysRunning means the ad is still active, which usually means it pays for itself. It is not a measurement of spend or installs.

The Actor is not affiliated with Apple or Meta.

FAQ

The run failed immediately and nothing was called. APPHITLIST_API_KEY is missing or does not look like an AppHitlist key. Set the owner's key in the Apify Console and mark it secret.

I passed my own AppHitlist key in the input. That field is rejected. Customers use the owner's account. Do not put a key in the input.

Revenue is a range, not a number. The stored key is Free. Pro returns latestRevenueUsd and latestDownloads. Ranges stay ranges.

The error code is subscription_required. The stored key is Free and this operation (ads or complaints) needs Pro. The call was not retried.

The first chart country failed and the others did not run. A missing category stops the rest of the run, because every call would use that same category. A missing chart does not: other countries still run. chart_not_available includes the hint.

Will this hit a monthly cap? Pro: no monthly cap, 60 calls a minute. The Actor stays under that pace and backs off on 429. Free: 20 calls a month. The stored key is expected to be Pro. A Free key that has used its 20 calls stops the run with free_quota_exhausted.

Are the sample numbers real? No. assets/sample-run-data.json is an illustration.

Local tests

From actors/apphitlist-app-intelligence after npm install:

$npm test

A live call needs APPHITLIST_API_KEY in the environment. The tests do not call AppHitlist.