Building 109 Store-Ready Apify Actors with the Pry Actor Factory
Pry ships 109 store-ready Apify Actors. Hand-writing 109 actor packages — each with spec files, a Dockerfile, pay-per-event wiring, and a store listing — would be a maintenance nightmare. So we didn't. Every actor is generated from a single declarative spec by the open-source Actor Factory.
One spec, a complete actor
An ActorSpec describes what the actor does and how it's priced.
The factory generates everything else:
from pathlib import Path
from actor_factory import ActorSpec, PricingEvent, generate_actor
spec = ActorSpec(
name="price-watcher",
title="Price Watcher",
description="Track e-commerce prices with change detection.",
version="1.0",
pricing_events=(
PricingEvent(
name="price-captured",
title="Price captured",
description="One product price captured.",
price_usd=0.001,
),
),
)
generate_actor(spec, Path("actors/price-watcher"))
The output is a complete .actor package: Apify spec files, Dockerfile,
PPE runtime that emits events only on successful processing, and a
store-ready README. Generated actors pass Apify's automated quality
gates on the first publish.
PPE pricing with an economics model
Pay-per-event pricing is easy to get wrong: price too high and nobody runs the actor; too low and every run loses money. The factory includes an economics model that computes break-even pricing from real inputs — proxy bandwidth, browser minutes, LLM tokens, and Apify's platform fees — then applies a margin.
Two synthetic events (apify-actor-start, apify-default-dataset-item)
are billed by the platform automatically; the model accounts for them so
the listed per-item prices stay honest. The result: prices from
$0.001 to $0.003 per event, verified against cost, not guessed.
The 15 new market-gap actors
The latest batch targets niches with no first-class Apify coverage — places where demand exists but the store has nothing good:
- App store ranks — Apple App Store + Google Play rankings, reviews, ASO signals
- AI model pricing — LLM API price tracking across providers
- GPU cloud prices — GPU instance pricing across cloud providers
- EV charging stations — locations, pricing, availability
- Insurance rates — public quote and rate signals
- Ticket resale — secondary-market event ticket price monitoring
- …plus market-intel, pricing/rate, and data-pipeline niches
Each of these went through the same pipeline: define the spec, let the economics model set PPE prices, generate, and publish. Total authoring cost per actor: one spec file.
Generate and publish
The full loop:
# 1. Define your spec (see above), then generate
python -m actor_factory.cli generate actors/price-watcher
# 2. Test locally
cd actors/price-watcher && apify run
# 3. Publish to the Apify Store
apify push
Because every actor shares the same generated skeleton, a fix to the PPE runtime or the anti-bot tier selection propagates to the whole catalog with a regeneration — 109 actors, one source of truth.
Build your own
The Actor Factory is open source under the Pry repo. If you need an actor we don't ship, define a spec and generate it — or email us and we'll add it to the catalog.