How I Built 7 Apify Actors and Started Earning Passive Income from Web Scraping
How I Built 7 Apify Actors and Started Earning Passive Income from Web Scraping A few weeks ago I had zero Apify actors. Now I have seven, all published on the Apify Store, monetized with pay-per-event pricing, and slowly building a passive income stream. Here's exactly how I did it — the strategy, the tech stack, the mistakes, and what I'd do differently. The Strategy: Zero Competition Most new Apify developers go after hot categories. LinkedIn scrapers, Amazon product extractors, Twitter data. Makes sense — those have demand. But they also have dozens of established actors with hundreds of reviews. I took the opposite approach. Find niches with zero existing actors. This means lower total addressable market, but 100% of whatever traffic exists goes to you. No competing on price, no fighting for reviews, no SEO war against actors with years of history. How I found the niches: Browsed Apify Store categories sorted by actor count Searched for common developer pain points with no existing Apify solution Checked search volume for "[keyword] API" and "[keyword] scraper" Verified zero results on Apify Store for each candidate The winners: domain intelligence, screenshot comparison, Swedish company registry, IP geolocation, QR code generation, and link metadata extraction. The Tech Stack Every actor uses the same foundation. Apify Python SDK v3.4 handles input/output, storage, proxy, and deployment. Playwright for JavaScript-heavy sites and screenshots. aiohttp for lightweight API scraping (way faster than a full browser). Pillow for image processing. Deployment is one command: apify push The Actors {{domain-intel}} WHOIS, DNS, SSL, and tech stack in one API call. Uses socket + ssl + python-whois for data collection, no external API dependency. $0.005 per run. {{screenshot-api}} Full-page screenshots via Playwright. Handles lazy-loading, infinite scroll, and viewport sizing. $0.003 per run. {{metadata-extractor}} Open Graph, Twitter Cards, JSON-LD, and meta tags from any