Apify started as a web scraping product, but quickly evolved into a full-blown platform and marketplace for developers to write code, and monetise it by creating Actors, tools that simplify the scraping process for others.
Running until the end of January, The Apify $1M Challenge sees developers around the world take home their share of a million dollar prize fund by building genuinely useful Apify Actors.
Let’s take a look at some of the spotlight tools that have taken a piece of the prize, and how you could get involved, too.
Winners So Far
FEC Campaign Finance Contributions Scraper
As you’d imagine, official U.S. finance data is complex and hard to navigate. This Actor turns Campaign finance data in particular into structured, analysis-ready datasets.
Of course, the data here is quite specific, but the tool itself is interesting. For developers, it’s a great example of how Actors produce consistent outputs from incredibly complex data, structured so that it that can be fed directly into research tools, dashboards, or pipelines without additional cleanup.
BuiltWith Domain Scraper
There are a lot of dev tools out there that you can use to inspect other tools to learn about how they’re built, but it’s not always easy to get a clear picture of exactly what tech they’re using and how.
This tool automates the process of identifying the tech behind any domain. For developers, learning about how other developers solve problems will always help you improve, but it also fits naturally into competitive research or technical due diligence workflows, showing how scraping can be useful in all kinds of dev-related tasks.
Google Maps AI Reviews Analyzer
Customer data can be enlightening and hugely valuable for all kinds of organisations, and this Actor turns thousands of unstructured customer comments into structured, summarised insights.
Again, the specific use-case for this tool might be more interesting to those receiving the reviews in particular, but for developers it’s a great example of a tool that extracts data, analyses it with AI and provides useful insights back to the user, in a way that is genuinely useful.
AI Model Comparison Tool
Most developers hop from LLM to LLM, trying to different models to see which one performs better, particularly if one isn’t doing so well.
This tool takes out all the guess-work, making it so easy to runs identical prompts across multiple AI models and captures structured outputs for comparison.
Despite addressing very different problems, the projects that have won a portion of the prize of the Apify $1 Million Challenge so far all solve real problems, and provide value in often very specific kinds of ways.
The challenge is still ongoing, with new winners announced weekly. For developers, it says build something genuinely useful, publish it, and get rewarded based on how well it solves a real problem.
Start building or submit your own Actor at apify.com/challenge.