Devil Scrapes FAQ — Buyer Questions Answered

Straight answers to the questions we hear most before and after someone runs a Devil Scrapes Actor for the first time.

FAQ

Is web scraping legal?

We’re not lawyers and this isn’t legal advice for your specific situation. What we can say generally: our Actors extract publicly accessible data — pages and information that don’t require you to log in with credentials you don’t have or bypass a paywall. Scraping law varies by jurisdiction, by target, and by what you do with the data afterward (a target’s own terms of service, copyright on the underlying content, and data-protection rules like GDPR can all apply independently of whether the data was “public”). If your use case is commercially or legally sensitive, get advice from a lawyer familiar with your jurisdiction and your specific target before relying on any scraped dataset at scale.

Will I get rate-limited if I run an Actor too often?

You can hit Apify’s own account-level API rate limit if you’re calling the REST API very frequently (see Run any DevilScrapes Actor via the API), but that’s separate from the target site’s rate limits, which we handle inside each run — pacing requests, backing off, retrying with Retry-After honored. Running the same Actor many times in quick succession against the same target can still trigger a slower response from that target over time, since our pacing is deliberately conservative rather than aggressive.

How fresh is the data an Actor returns?

As fresh as the moment the run executes — every run hits the live target at request time, there’s no cached snapshot served back to you. If you need continuously fresh data, schedule recurring runs (see Synchronous runs, webhooks, and scheduling) rather than relying on a single run from days ago.

Can I schedule an Actor to run automatically?

Yes — via Apify Schedules (cron-style, configured in the Console or through the API) or by triggering it from your own scheduler/automation tool. Full walkthrough in Synchronous runs, webhooks, and scheduling and Integrating with n8n, Make, Zapier.

Do you build private or custom Actors?

Yes — see /custom-actors/ for what that process looks like. Most of our public catalog started as a general-purpose scraper for a specific target; a custom build is the same engineering, scoped and private to your use case.

Can you add a field to an existing Actor’s output?

Often, yes, if the field is present on the target and just isn’t extracted yet. Report the request through the Actor’s Apify Issues tab or /contact/ with the specific field and, ideally, an example page where you can see it. We can’t add a field the source page doesn’t actually expose, but that’s rarer than it sounds — most requests are things the page already shows and we just hadn’t parsed out yet.

Do you store or reuse my scraped data?

No. Your run’s data lives in your dataset, in your Apify account, governed by your account’s storage retention — we don’t retain a separate copy or reuse the content of your runs. What we do monitor is run-level metadata (status, success rate, error type) across the fleet, for the maintenance purposes described in Maintenance and support — not the row contents of what you scraped.

What happens if a run fails?

The run finishes FAILED, the log shows what went wrong, and you’re not charged beyond whatever events already fired before the failure (usually just the actor-start fee, since a failure typically means the scrape genuinely couldn’t complete). We treat a hard failure as a bug to fix, not expected behavior — see Maintenance and support for how to report one.

What’s the difference between a failed run and a run with zero results?

A failed run means we couldn’t complete the scrape at all — a block we couldn’t get past, an unrecoverable error. A zero-result run means we completed the scrape successfully and the target genuinely had nothing matching your input; it finishes SUCCEEDED with an empty dataset and a status message describing the search. See How we handle proxies and blocking for the full explanation.

Do I need to know how to code to use a Devil Scrapes Actor?

No. Every Actor runs from a form in the Apify Console — fill in the input fields, click Start, download the results. Code is only needed if you want to automate the process or pull data programmatically; see Getting started and Run any DevilScrapes Actor via the API.

How much does it cost to try an Actor?

New Apify accounts get free trial credit, which typically covers the actor-start fee and a batch of results on most of our Actors before you spend anything real. Exact pricing per Actor — the actor-start fee and the per-result price — is always shown on that Actor’s Store page before you run it. See Pricing and billing.

Can I run an Actor against a target in a specific country?

Some Actors expose a country or region field, or a proxy country-pinning option inside proxyConfiguration, when geography meaningfully changes what the target returns. Check that specific Actor’s Input table — not every target is geography-sensitive, so not every Actor exposes the option.

What if the target changes its page and the Actor breaks?

That’s exactly what our daily monitoring exists to catch — see Maintenance and support. If you notice it before we do, reporting it with a run ID speeds up the fix.

Can I get a refund if a run charged me but didn’t deliver?

Yes, through Apify’s own support, which processes billing and payouts for every Pay-Per-Event charge. If you’re unsure whether your run was a genuine failure or a legitimate zero-result success, ask us first via the Issues tab or /contact/ — we’ll clarify before you go through Apify support. Full detail in Maintenance and support.