Apify

Apify is a platform for running web automation jobs, usually called actors, that visit websites, extract data, and return structured results. For a solo founder, that means you can turn messy public web pages into a spreadsheet, a lead list, a monitor, or a research dataset without building your own scraping infrastructure.

The most useful jobs are the unglamorous ones: gather public company data, monitor competitor pages, pull directory listings into a clean table, scrape search results for research, or schedule a repeat crawl that feeds an automation. The actor marketplace matters because many common targets already have a maintained starting point, so you are not always staring at a blank script.

It is not magic. When a site changes, blocks automation, or has strict terms, you still need judgment and sometimes developer help. But compared with hand-copying data or hiring a scraper from scratch, Apify gives a one-person operation a serious data machine with a free tier to test and paid plans once the workflow is worth keeping.