What problems is Apify solving and how is that benefiting you?
My experience with Apify has been shaped by my role at Pin Wei, where I'm the sole data analyst building and maintaining everything from data pipelines to reporting dashboards. Apify came in to fill a specific gap: my internal stack (Make + Google Apps Script processing iPOS sales data) had no way to capture what was happening outside our own systems — customer reviews, competitor pricing, and our visibility on delivery platforms.
Getting started took some ramp-up. Coming from an Apps Script background, the core concepts — Actors, datasets, key-value stores — weren't intuitive at first, and I leaned on marketplace Actors rather than writing my own to move faster. Once I understood the model, the real value showed up in how cleanly it integrated: I wire Apify's output via webhook into Make, which lands structured review and competitor data into Google Sheets in the right schema for Looker Studio blending. That meant external web data and internal iPOS data finally sit in one weekly reporting view.
Day to day, the strongest part is reliability on hard targets. Google Maps and Foody are JavaScript-heavy and block scraping aggressively, and Apify's headless browsers and managed proxies handle that without me babysitting runs — important when I'm the only person maintaining the pipeline.
The friction has been cost predictability and Actor fragility. Compute-unit pricing means I keep an eye on volume to avoid creep, and when platforms change their layout, community Actors sometimes break and I wait on a fix. But at our scale the automation and integration benefits clearly outweigh those, and it's become a dependable part of how I turn scattered public data into something management can actually use. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.