Apify Review: Where a Directory Gets Its First 5,000 Listings

Apify's Google Maps scraper starts at $1.50 per 1,000 places.

For that you get business name, address, phone number, website, coordinates, star rating, review count, opening hours and category, for every place it returns.

So the raw data behind a 5,000-listing local directory costs about $7.50.

I want to sit on that number for a second, because it reframes the whole problem. Most people starting a directory think their bottleneck is the website. It isn't. Every platform in this directory will get you a working site in a weekend. The bottleneck is that an empty directory is worth nothing, and filling it by hand is the thing that kills the project somewhere around listing 40.

$7.50 is what it costs to skip that.

What Apify actually is

Apify is not a scraper. It is a marketplace of scrapers.

The things you run are called Actors. Someone else has already written them, tested them against a specific site, and kept them working as that site changed its markup. You supply the inputs and press start. You get a CSV, a JSON file, or an API response back.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Writing a scraper is easy. Maintaining one is not. Google changes its Maps markup regularly, and when it does, a scraper you wrote in March silently returns empty rows in April. On Apify, that is the Actor author's problem, and they fix it because their revenue depends on it.

You are renting maintenance, not code.

The Google Maps Actor, which is the one you came for

If you are building a local directory of any kind, this is the Actor that matters.

Feed it a search term and a location. It walks the results and returns structured rows. The core fields cover almost everything a listing page needs: name, full address, phone, website URL, latitude and longitude, rating, review count and distribution, opening hours, price bracket, categories, images, service options and accessibility information.

That is a populated listing page, not a stub. Coordinates mean you can render a map. Opening hours and categories mean you have something to filter on. Review counts give you a defensible sort order on day one.

The pricing is pay per event rather than a flat per-1,000 rate, which is worth understanding before you run it. The $1.50 covers scraped places. Extra detail, reviews, and enrichment are charged as separate events on top.

The enrichment add-ons, and when they are worth it

Three add-ons sit on top of the base scrape.

Company Contacts enriches each place with business emails and social profiles pulled from the business's own website, including Meta, LinkedIn and X.

Business Leads goes further and returns named people at the business: full name, work email, phone, job title and LinkedIn profile.

Email Verification checks the addresses it found and sorts them into valid, invalid and disposable.

Here is when this actually pays for itself. If your monetization plan is "claim your listing," you need a way to reach the business owner. A directory of 5,000 restaurants with no contact data is a content site. The same directory with verified owner emails is an outreach list, and outreach is what turns free listings into paid ones.

If you are running a pure affiliate or ad directory and never plan to contact anyone, skip all three. They are the expensive part.

Pricing

The model is simpler than it looks. Your plan gives you a credit balance equal to its price, and Actor runs draw down against that balance. A $19 Starter plan is $19 of scraping.

The free tier gives you $5 in credits every month with no credit card. That is roughly 3,000 places from the Maps Actor, which is enough to seed a genuinely usable niche directory without paying anything.

Free is capped at 5 concurrent runs and 16 GB of RAM per Actor, and its proxy access only works inside the platform. None of that will bother you on a directory build.

Where Apify beats writing your own scraper

Say you are technical enough to write Python. You still shouldn't, and here is the chain of reasoning.

You write a Maps scraper. It works. Then Google serves you a CAPTCHA, so you add proxy rotation. Then the layout shifts and your selectors break, so you rewrite them. Then you get rate limited, so you add backoff. Each of those is a day, and none of them added a single listing to your directory.

Apify has already absorbed all of it. Proxy rotation, retries, CAPTCHA handling and markup changes are the Actor author's job.

The honest framing is this: your competitive advantage is your niche and your content, not your scraping infrastructure. Every hour spent on the plumbing is an hour not spent on the thing that ranks.

Where it does not fit

It is genuinely metered, and that surprises people. If you leave a large scrape running against a broad query, you can burn through a Starter plan's credits in one afternoon. Set result limits on your first few runs until you have a feel for the cost per row.

The Actor quality varies. The popular ones are excellent and actively maintained. The long tail is a marketplace, so some Actors are abandoned. Check the last update date and the run count before you commit a project to one.

And it is a platform, not a file on your machine. If your entire data pipeline lives in Apify, you have a dependency. Export your data out to your own database rather than treating Apify as storage.

Common questions

Is scraping Google Maps legal?

Business facts like name, address and phone number are not copyrightable, and scraping public data has generally held up in US courts. Where people get into trouble is republishing creative work, which is why you should not lift review text or photos wholesale and present them as your own. Scrape the facts. Write your own descriptions.

Do I need to code?

No. Actors run from a web form. You fill in fields and click start. The API is there if you want to automate it later, but nothing about the first run requires it.

How does this compare to Outscraper?

Both do the Maps job well. Outscraper is more focused and slightly simpler if Maps is all you want. Apify is a marketplace, so the same account also scrapes Instagram, LinkedIn, Amazon, TripAdvisor and a few thousand other sources. If you plan to build more than one directory, the marketplace is worth more than the focus.

What do I do with the CSV?

Import it into whatever your directory platform uses. Most of the tools in this directory take a CSV or connect to Airtable or Google Sheets. Clean the data first. Deduplicate, strip the places with no website, and cut anything with under a handful of reviews.

Verdict

Apify solves the expensive half of building a directory, and it solves it for less money than most people expect.

The reason to start here rather than with a website builder is ordering. If you scrape first, you find out in an hour whether your niche has 200 businesses or 20,000, and that number should decide what you build. Plenty of directory ideas die on contact with the data, and finding that out for $5 is a good outcome.

Start on the free plan. Run the Maps Actor against your niche with a 500 result cap. Look at what comes back. If the rows look like listing pages, you have a directory. If they don't, you saved yourself a month.