Skip to main content

One post tagged with "Announcements"

Product news and releases

View All Tags

Introducing Pry โ€” Self-Hosted Web Scraping with x402 Crypto Payments

ยท 4 min read
The Pry Team
Pry Engineering

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 โ€” so you can run it yourself, rent it per call, or let AI agents pay for it autonomously.

What is Pry?โ€‹

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 โ€” 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 โ€” 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 โ€” 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 engineโ€‹

Most scrapers have one strategy. When it fails, the scrape fails. Pry escalates through 15 adaptive tiers โ€” 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 Actorsโ€‹

If you'd rather not run infrastructure at all, Pry ships as 109 store-ready Apify Actors โ€” 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 โ€” break-even math, not vibes. Browse the catalog in the Apify Actors docs.

x402: pay per call, across 7 chainsโ€‹

The third lane is x402 โ€” 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 โ€” Base, Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon (EVM USDC/USDT), Solana (SPL), and TRON (TRC-20) โ€” 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 hostingโ€‹

Self-hostedHosted (Pro / Team)
CostFree (MIT core)Pro $49/mo, Team $199/mo
DataYours, on your infraManaged, isolated
Anti-botFull 15-tier engineFull 15-tier engine
Best forPrivacy, scale, custom logicTeams 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 startedโ€‹

Questions or commercial licensing: [email protected].