Year End feedback and Giveaway :tada:
Hey @Public actor developer Year End feedback :alert: @here
First of all I want to say thanks to everyone for being the best developer community out there and for shaping our product into its best form with your feedbacks and participation.
As the year end is approaching, I want to ask each one of you two things:
1. What change made you happy about the platform?
2. What are the things we can still improve?
The second question is very important for us as we move towards the new year with a mindset of focusing on your needs more and make the paltform as easy as it can be for y'all.
Please drop your suggestions in this thread ⬇️
Also I got to know that not many of you have our Apify Limited Edition Merch, so top 3 feedbacks from this thread will get an Apify Limited edition T-Shirt. :LOVE:
It is valid till friday.
14 Replies
like-gold•6mo ago
drop here.
Hey 👋
What changes have made you happy about the platform?
1- I'm excited to the release of the PPE pricing model! Some of my scrapers use a renting model and rely on third-party services that I pay for. A very great addition. Will be testing this soon!
2- The Apify Actor Marketing Playbook is incredibly rich and well-organized—kudos to the team for such a helpful ressource!
3- Looking forward to the actors review feature release!
What are the things we can still improve?
1- One thing to consider is how often actors READMEs get indexed on Google. Sometimes it takes several days. If there could be a button to force re-indexation (e.g., submitting the URL to Google Search Console on your end) or something similar, that would be fantastic!
2- While I’m currently using a browser extension to address this, the lack of a dark theme for the website (unlike the console) is a bit inconvenient. Adding a dark theme would be a cool improvement.
3- As developers, we invest time and effort into creating actors for websites we believe are worth it. However, after publishing, we often wait days or months for the first user to arrive—if they ever do. I think having some sort of analytics for the store's search bar, available to qualified developers (qualification would be based on certain criteria) could help us build actors with more potential. (I understand the Ideas tab exists, but many potential clients may not have the time to submit their ideas.) I'll leave this idea with you for brainstorming.
4- Adding Payoneer as a payout method
5- When I change my actor's pricing, which takes effect in 2 weeks, it would help to display both the current and future prices in the store. This is important because a price reduction can attract more users, and showing this on the actor store page could catch users who find the current price too high but the future price affordable
extended-salmon•6mo ago
What change made you happy about the platform?
The ability to integrate saved datasets into the input schema allowed users to make easy choices.
What are the things we can still improve?
Developers should be able to customize the profile page even more (Pinning, changing the order, etc.)
More diversification for payment methods.
Timeout can be limited like memory.
like-gold•6mo ago
@memo23 @Danek @prakashgp @Pratik Dani @anchor (guillim) @gtry @Gustavo Silva any comments?
What change made you happy about the platform?
1. AdaptivePlaywrightCrawler
2. PPE pricing model
3. https://dev.to/crawlee/optimizing-web-scraping-scraping-auth-data-using-jsdom-3cji
What are the things we can still improve?
1. Analytics page, for each day which users (usernames) are paying for service/actor, distinguish old users (customers) and new (customers) ones, possibility to contact them (maybe with their approval) so we can try to 'sort the issues' or something, I know there is email option to reach them but more engagement for interaction would be good
2. AdaptivePlaywrightCrawler, I use for some actors, more control over it would be great like scrolling, page interactions and etc, also a way to use browser for each request but explicitly I can choose browser or 'HttpCrawler' or something
3. Someone mentioned this package: https://github.com/ZFC-Digital/puppeteer-real-browser, can this be implemented for CF bypass and etc, also I saw somewhere in some threads more talk about bypassing certain antibots, so in general, how to improve the scraping
4. The way developers get on 'Homepage Developers Selection'...
5. Saurev and Zuzka are great support, but support could generally need some...
6. Also I am for: 'Adding Payoneer as a payout method'
7. More tutorials on advanced topics like Storage, FingerPrinting and etc, this blog was great: https://dev.to/crawlee/optimizing-web-scraping-scraping-auth-data-using-jsdom-3cji ...
8. Maybe one channel for new blog posts or anything that is related to Apify so we can follow
I'll probably keep adding to this post later, but that is what comes to my mind rn
wise-white•6mo ago
Thanks for mentioning!
What change made you happy about the platform?
- some movement with analytics
- I'm open to check PPE model
What are the things we can still improve?
- more details in analytics like easier split between actors in sumary (now it's just one number), some metrics about users like new users, churned users etc.
- more live update about users chargeback
- more monetisation options like different tiers or different modes for one actor
like-gold•6mo ago
What change made you happy about the platform?
1. New analytics page: previously the stats was not very reliable as compared to what it has been in the past few months.
2. Developments tab: One place where I can see all my actor related screens.
3. Pricing model: PPE pricing model
4. Actor standby modes.
What are the things we can still improve?
1. Analytics page: This is specially for rental actors, when a users unsubscribes from using an actor, can you add a feedback form to gauge why the user is unsubscribing, is it something because of the actor not working or something else entirely.
It would also be helpful to check for how long a users rents our actors before cancelling, a couple of days, after a couple of months, etc. This would help developers in gauging was it because of a particular build after which users started un-subscribing.
2. User runs: Devs cannot see user runs for all their actor at once and we have to select at max 3 actors to see user runs.
These are what I can think of. I will keep updating these if I will find any.
correct-apricot•6mo ago
What change made you happy about the platform?
- Analytics chart with current paying/free users is back.
- PPE.
- Ability to view run logs of users that decided to share them.
- Marketing Playbook.
- Being able to know from which referral URLs users are coming from.
What are the things we can still improve?
- Tooling or a tutorial on how to combat trial abusers who create multiple accounts to avoid paying Apify and community creators. For example, make it easier to limit the number of dataset results for trial users. For this it could help to have a reliable way of knowing if the user is still in the trial for the current actor.
- Whenever a customer requests a refund I would like to be informed on the reason for it, namely if it is related to my actor's functionality or something else in the Apify platform.
- When selecting a payout method there could be more information on the expected fees, as well as an indication of Wise support.
like-gold•6mo ago
BTW @azzouzana we do have wise, just mention in your bank details on console that you want it through wise by adding "wise id: xyz"
apify blogs and crawlee blogs
extended-salmon•6mo ago
I was told in support team that payoneer is not supported?
@Saurav Jain as you remember last time when we tried it didn't work out, so there is some progress made on this or?
like-gold•6mo ago
my bad it was wise, we dont support payoneer :facepalm:
just added one more thing we can improve to my above post, basically :
* When I change my actor's pricing, which takes effect in 2 weeks, it would help to display both the current and future prices in the store. This is important because a price reduction can attract more users, and showing this on the actor store page could catch users who find the current price high but the future price affordable*
exotic-emerald•5mo ago
What are the things we can still improve?
A way to see what terms folks are searching for in the store
https://discord.com/channels/801163717915574323/1320181943358455993/1320181943358455993