Freelancer.com Projects Scraper

Active freelance projects from Freelancer.com — title, full description, budget range, bid count and average bid, required skills, project type and posting time.

Why use this actor

• Type skill names, not ID numbers. Freelancer's own filter only accepts numeric skill ids, and there are 3,483 of them. Type PHP, Game Design or web-scraping and this actor looks the id up for you — and if the skill does not exist, it says so instead of returning an empty result that looks like "no work available".
• Bid competition on every row. How many freelancers have already bid, and what the average bid is — the two numbers that decide whether a project is worth your time.
• The full brief, not the truncated preview the listing shows.
• Paging that actually stops. Past the end of the results the API quietly serves the same last page over and over, forever. This actor detects that and stops; a naive loop would re-export the same 99 projects indefinitely.
• The whole skill taxonomy — 3,483 skills with ids, slugs and categories — available as its own output in one extra request.
• No account, no API key, no login.

How it works

1. You describe the work you want: keywords, skills, project type, budget.
2. Skill names are resolved against Freelancer's live list before anything is searched.
3. The actor pages through active projects, 99 per request, deduplicating as it goes, and stops when the results run out.
4. Results land in your dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, with a summary row describing the run.

Input

{
  "query": "python",
  "skills": ["PHP"],
  "projectTypes": [],
  "includeProjectDetails": true,
  "includeSkillTaxonomy": false,
  "maxItems": 300,
  "maxPages": 5,
  "minRequestInterval": 0.5,
  "proxyConfiguration": { "useApifyProxy": true }
}

Field	Type	Description
query	string	Free-text search. A real filter — python narrowed 5,723 active projects to 172.
skills	array	Skill name (PHP), slug (php) or numeric id (3) — all three resolve. An unknown one is reported as an error.
includeSkillTaxonomy	boolean	Also emit all 3,483 skills with ids, slugs and categories. One extra request. Default false.
projectTypes	array	fixed, hourly, or empty for both.
minAveragePrice / maxAveragePrice	integer	Bounds on the average bid for fixed-price work.
minAverageHourly / maxAverageHourly	integer	Bounds on the average hourly bid.
includeProjectDetails	boolean	Full description, skills, attachments and location rather than the short preview. Same number of requests either way. Default true.
maxItems	integer	Stop after this many unique projects. 0 = no cap. Default 300.
maxPages	integer	Request ceiling. 99 projects per page, ~5,700 active in total, so ~58 pages covers everything. Default 5.
minRequestInterval	number	Seconds between requests. Default 0.5.
proxyConfiguration	object	Apify Proxy. Datacenter is the default and is sufficient.

Currency is not normalised. Projects are posted in USD, CAD, AUD, INR and others. Each row carries its own currencyCode, and the budget filters compare raw numbers.

Output

Four record types share one dataset, told apart by recordType.

PROJECT

{
  "_input": "query='python'",
  "_source": "S1-projectsapi",
  "_scrapedAt": "2026-09-16T04:34:20Z",
  "recordType": "PROJECT",
  "id": 40714249,
  "title": "Python Script for Amazon Shift-Picking",
  "projectUrl": "https://www.freelancer.com/projects/selenium/Python-Script-for-Amazon-Shift",
  "type": "fixed",
  "status": "active",
  "frontend_project_status": "open",
  "budgetMinimum": 250.0,
  "budgetMaximum": 750.0,
  "currencyCode": "CAD",
  "bidCount": 67,
  "bidAverage": 404.33,
  "bidperiod": 7,
  "submittedAt": "2026-09-16T04:26:26Z",
  "updatedAt": "2026-09-16T04:26:26Z",
  "skillNames": ["JavaScript", "Python", "Linux", "Web Scraping", "Selenium", "… 4 more"],
  "skillIds": [9, 13, 31, 95, 116, 696, 1679, 1977, 2165],
  "preview_description": "I rely on Amazon's internal shift-picking portal and I'm tired of hammering the refresh ke…",
  "description": "(full brief)",
  "featured": false,
  "urgent": false,
  "local": false,
  "language": "en",
  "employerAvailable": false,
  "pageNumber": 1
}

All 84 of Freelancer's own fields ship alongside these.

Field	Description
id / projectUrl	Project id and a direct link.
title / description	Title and the full brief.
preview_description	The first ~100 characters of the brief, cut mid-word — a truncation, not a summary.
type	fixed or hourly.
budgetMinimum / budgetMaximum / currencyCode	The advertised budget, in the poster's own currency.
bidCount / bidAverage	How crowded the project already is, and at what price.
bidperiod	How many days bidding stays open.
submittedAt / updatedAt	ISO 8601 UTC, alongside the raw unix fields.
skillNames / skillIds	Required skills, flattened from the nested objects.
featured / urgent / local / nonpublic	Freelancer's own listing flags.
employerAvailable	Always false — see Known limits.

SEARCH_SUMMARY

Field	Description
upstreamTotal	How many active projects match your filters.
projectsReturned / pagesFetched / duplicatesDropped	What the run did.
skillsFiltered	The skills your names resolved to, with their ids.
stoppedBecause	max_items_reached, max_pages_reached, no_new_projects, no_more_results.
offsetClampsPastEnd	Always true — why paging stops on "no new ids" rather than on an empty page.
employerNotAvailableAnonymously	Always true.

SKILL

{"recordType": "SKILL", "skillId": 3, "skillName": "PHP", "skillSlug": "php",
 "categoryId": 1, "categoryName": "Websites, IT & Software"}

Paste skillName, skillSlug or skillId into skills.

ERROR

_error	Meaning
invalid_input	Refused before any request — an unknown skill (with suggestions), a bad project type, or an inverted budget range.
api_rejected	Freelancer refused the request itself.
unexpected_shape	A success response without the structure this actor depends on.
fetch_failed	Network or server trouble after retries.

Known limits

• The employer is not public. Freelancer's API accepts a user_details flag and always returns an empty users object with a null owner id to anonymous callers, so who posted a project is not available. Every row is flagged rather than carrying a field that is permanently empty.
• Bids are counted, not listed. You get how many and the average; the individual bids are behind the same boundary.
• Active projects only. There is no public archive of completed work.
• 99 projects per request is the site's cap, and asking for more returns 99 without saying so.
• Currency is not converted.