Publishing and monetization
Learn about publishing, and monetizing your Actors on the Apify platform.
Sharing is caring but you can also make money from your Actors. Our blog post contains all the information you need.
There are four main stages of building a public Actor:
- Development.
- Publication and set up of monetization.
- Testing.
- Promotion.
While you don't necessarily have to maintain your private Actors, public Actors require a higher degree of responsibility.
As the name implies, Public Actors are available to the public on Apify Store, which means that an unmaintained public Actor could negatively affect all the other users that depend on it for their own activities on the platform.
Public Actors are regularly submitted to automated tests to ensure they are functioning properly. So, before making an Actor public, we recommend you reserve enough time to maintain the project (~2 hours weekly). This will ensure that your Actor maintains its long-term quality, improving your chances of successfully monetizing your Actors.
If you decide to make your Actor code publicly available on GitHub, its quality becomes a priority since your Actor could be a new user's first experience with Apify.
Naturally, your Actor's code should be open to changes and updates, so don't be afraid of refactoring. However, beware of making changes that could potentially break the Actor for its existing users.
If you plan on making a breaking change, please get in touch with us ahead of time at community@apify.com, and we will help you to communicate the change to your users.
Also, pay special attention to your Actor's documentation (README). It should be clear, detailed, and readable. Think of the users, who might not be developers, so try to use simple, easy-to-understand language and avoid technical jargon.
Ensure periodic testing. You can either do it yourself or set up automatic testing / monitoring. Try to prevent your users from coming to you with the issues.
Inspiration
To come up with ideas for new Actors, you can use your own experience with friends, colleagues, and customers. Alternatively, you can use SEO tools that might help you find the right search terms, websites related to web scraping, web automation, or web integrations. See the SEO article for more details. Finally, you may take a look at our Actor ideas page to find out which Actors are most in demand by the Apify community.
To better understand the context and practical usage of public Actors, check out our blog. Get familiar with how we think and write about Actors, e.g. Content Checker (short), Kickstarter scraper (mid-size), and Google Sheets Actor (long one).