Introducing Pry — Self-Hosted Web Scraping with x402 Crypto Payments
Today we're announcing Pry: an adaptive web scraping and browser automation API that refuses to break. Pry pairs a 15-tier anti-bot escalation engine with 109 store-ready Apify Actors and an x402 crypto pay-per-call payment lane — so you can run it yourself, rent it per call, or let AI agents pay for it autonomously.
What is Pry?
Pry is a self-hostable scraping engine with a clean REST API and Python SDK. Point it at a URL and it returns clean markdown, structured extraction, screenshots, PDFs, or LLM-ready corpora — across 15 data domains including e-commerce, SEO, crypto market data, jobs, real estate, and compliance screening.
pip install "pry-scraper @ git+https://codeberg.org/RugMunchMedia/pryscraper.git"
from pry import Pry
client = Pry(api_key="your-key") # you set the key — fail-closed auth
result = client.scrape("https://example.com/pricing", render=True)
print(result.markdown)
Because it's self-hosted, you own the data and the infrastructure. There are no per-call fees in the self-hosted lane — you bring your own proxy pool and API keys, and Pry handles the hard part: getting past the bot defenses.
The 15-tier anti-bot engine
Most scrapers have one strategy. When it fails, the scrape fails. Pry escalates through 15 adaptive tiers — from plain HTTP, through header and TLS fingerprint rotation, browser rendering, stealth browser profiles, and CAPTCHA-solving, up to distributed residential-proxy strategies. Each tier is tried in order; the engine learns which tier a target requires and remembers it.
The practical effect: a scrape that would break a single-strategy scraper instead costs a few extra seconds, not a failure. The stealth module is licensed under BSL 1.1 (free for personal, academic, and non-commercial use; converts to MIT in 2029) while the core engine is MIT.
109 store-ready Apify Actors
If you'd rather not run infrastructure at all, Pry ships as 109
store-ready Apify Actors — from universal-scraper and
site-crawler to price-watcher, lead-harvester, sanctions-screener,
and niche monitors like EV charging stations and AI model pricing.
Every actor uses pay-per-event (PPE) billing: you're charged per successfully processed item, never for idle time. Pricing is set by an economics model that verifies margins against real infrastructure costs — break-even math, not vibes. Browse the catalog in the Apify Actors docs.
x402: pay per call, across 7 chains
The third lane is x402 — the HTTP 402 Payment Required protocol
that lets clients (especially AI agents) pay for API calls directly from
a crypto wallet. No account, no API key: in the x402 lane, the payment
is the credential.
Pry accepts payments across seven chains — Base, Ethereum,
Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon (EVM USDC/USDT), Solana (SPL), and TRON
(TRC-20) — each with its own CAIP-2-keyed treasury wallet. Settlement is
verified on-chain via EIP-3009 transferWithAuthorization, Permit2, or
an external facilitator.
curl https://api.pryscraper.com/v1/x402/pricing
# {"scrape": {"price_usd": 0.001, ...}, "crawl": {"price_usd": 0.01, ...}}
An agent that needs one page pays one tenth of a cent. An agent that needs a thousand pays for a bulk crawl. Read the full x402 pay-per-call guide.
Self-host vs cloud hosting
| Self-hosted | Hosted (Pro / Team) | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free (MIT core) | Pro $49/mo, Team $199/mo |
| Data | Yours, on your infra | Managed, isolated |
| Anti-bot | Full 15-tier engine | Full 15-tier engine |
| Best for | Privacy, scale, custom logic | Teams that want zero ops |
Self-host if you care about data ownership or need deep customization. Subscribe if you'd rather not run proxies and browsers. Either way, the x402 lane is available per-call with no subscription at all.
Get started
- Read the quick start
- Browse the 109 Apify Actors
- Wire up x402 payments
- Source code: Codeberg
Questions or commercial licensing: [email protected].