Apify

Apify operates a marketplace of ready-to-run automation tools called Actors, and publishes the official Apify MCP Server at mcp.apify.com. An Actor is a serverless cloud program that accepts JSON input, runs on Apify's infrastructure, and returns structured output — users can draw on thousands of pre-built Actors or build and monetize their own through the marketplace.

Multiple integration paths are available: an interactive MCP server connection, the apify-client SDK package, traditional token-based REST API access, and a payment system built specifically for autonomous agents. The platform also provides cloud storage for results, proxy services to avoid IP-based blocking, and scheduling and monitoring capabilities for automated tasks.

Through the MCP server, AI assistants such as Claude can independently discover, run, and retrieve results from Actors and platform tools without manual authentication for every call.

The business model is freemium: a free tier with $5 of monthly usage credit requires no credit card, with usage-based tiered pricing above that. Apify positions itself as building "the world's largest platform for web data and tools for AI builders," used for cases such as lead generation, market research, competitor monitoring, and chatbot training data.

Apify was founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada in Prague, initially under the name Apifier, and went through the Y Combinator Fellowship program in Mountain View, California. Originally built around headless browsers for extracting data from increasingly JavaScript-heavy websites, the company has since grown into broader infrastructure for web data and AI tooling.