Help & FAQ

ApifyForge is a free developer dashboard that connects to your Apify account via API token and gives you fleet-level management, analytics, and developer tools for all your actors in one place. When y...

Yes, ApifyForge is completely free to use with no subscription fees, no premium tiers, and no feature gates. Every feature — the dashboard, fleet analytics, schema validator, test runner, regression t...

Yes, you need an Apify account with an API token to use ApifyForge. ApifyForge is purpose-built for Apify developers who build, publish, and manage actors on the Apify platform, so a connected Apify a...

The fundamental difference is scope: the Apify Console manages individual actors one at a time, while ApifyForge manages your entire actor portfolio as a fleet with cross-cutting analytics, bulk opera...

Apify uses a credit-based pricing model where you pay for the compute resources your actors consume, with plans starting from a free tier that includes $5 of monthly platform credits all the way up to...

Yes, Apify offers a free tier that lets you develop actors, run scraping jobs, and explore the platform without paying anything. The free plan includes $5 of monthly platform credits, 10 GB of data tr...

The Apify Store is a public marketplace where developers publish actors (pre-built automation tools) and users discover, run, and pay for them. Think of it as an app store specifically for web scrapin...

To connect your Apify account, go to the ApifyForge Settings page, paste your Apify API token into the token field, and click Save. The connection is validated immediately, and your dashboard begins p...

ApifyForge can only access the data that the Apify API exposes for your account using your API token. This includes your actor list, run history and logs, dataset metadata, key-value store metadata, b...

Yes, your API token is stored in our database, but it is encrypted at rest using AES-256 encryption — the same encryption standard used by banks, government agencies, and major cloud providers. The to...

To disconnect your Apify account from ApifyForge, go to the Settings page and click the Disconnect button. This immediately deletes your encrypted API token from our database and clears all cached ana...

The Revenue dashboard shows PPE earnings across your entire actor portfolio with per-actor breakdown and trend lines. It is powered by the Revenue Tracker actor ($0.40 per sync) and the Cost Watchdog ...

The Health dashboard monitors actor failure rates, success trends, and deprecation signals across your fleet. It is powered by two actors: the Health Monitor ($0.25 per check) and the Deprecation Moni...

The Quality dashboard scores your actors on the factors that affect Apify Store visibility and ranks. It is powered by three actors: the Quality Monitor ($0.25 per scan), the Output Completeness Monit...

The Competitors dashboard analyzes rival actors in your categories and identifies market opportunities. It is powered by the Market Gap Finder actor ($0.40 per scan). The Market Gap Finder scans the ...

The Failures dashboard tracks which actors gained new failures since your last check. It is powered by the Failure Tracker actor ($0.10 per report). Unlike the Health dashboard which shows 30-day agg...

Bulk Operations let you update metadata, pricing, categories, or trigger builds across multiple actors in a single action. This is the fleet-management feature that makes ApifyForge essential for deve...

Alerts notify you when important events happen across your actor fleet — failures, revenue milestones, new users, cost spikes, and maintenance flags — so you know what happened without checking the da...

The Schema Validator checks your actor's actual dataset output against the schema you declared in your dataset_schema.json file, catching mismatches before they trigger maintenance flags on the Apify ...

The Test Runner is a testing tool that runs your Apify actor with predefined test inputs and automatically validates the output against assertions you define, giving you confidence that your actor wor...

Cloud Staging runs your actor in Apify's actual production environment before you make it public on the Store, catching issues that local testing cannot detect. Think of it as a staging server specifi...

Regression tests are automated test suites that run before every publish to verify that new code changes have not broken existing functionality in your Apify actors. They are your safety net against d...

Use the ApifyForge Schema Validator to compare your actor's actual dataset output against the schema declared in your dataset_schema.json file. The validator runs locally on your machine, takes just s...

The MCP Debugger tests and diagnoses MCP (Model Context Protocol) server connections on Apify standby URLs. It sends a real protocol handshake — the same initialize request that Claude Desktop and oth...

The Compliance Scanner assesses legal and regulatory risk for any Apify actor before you scrape. It analyzes the actor's metadata — name, description, categories, and README — to detect PII collection...

The Cost Calculator estimates what any actor will cost at various volumes before you spend credits. Enter an actor ID and get a breakdown of PPE pricing, average compute cost per run, average events p...

The Input Tester validates your input JSON against an actor's declared input schema without running the actor. It checks required fields, type constraints (string vs number vs integer), enum values, a...

The LLM Output Optimizer analyzes actor output and recommends how to reduce token consumption when feeding data to large language models. It scores every field by information density — high-value fiel...

The Pipeline Builder validates multi-actor data pipelines and generates TypeScript orchestration code. Define pipeline stages with actor IDs and field mappings, and the builder checks that output fiel...

Every tool in ApifyForge runs as an Apify actor on your account and charges a small PPE fee per use. Results are cached in your dashboard, so viewing previous reports is always free. Here is the comp...

The Personal Data Exposure Report scans 20+ data broker and people-search sites to find where your personal information is listed online. It searches sites like Spokeo, WhitePages, TruePeopleSearch, R...

When an Apify actor fails, the run terminates with a FAILED status and the platform records the error details, exit code, and run log. Understanding why actors fail — and how to diagnose failures quic...

Start with the run log in the Apify Console — it contains the error message, stack trace, and timeline of what happened during the run. Navigate to your actor, click the failed run, and read the log f...

Maintenance flags are applied by Apify's automated quality system when your actor consistently fails certain checks over a multi-day period. The most common causes are: dataset schema mismatches betwe...

Actor timeouts occur when your actor exceeds its configured time limit (set in actor.json, default is 3600 seconds / 1 hour). The fix depends on whether the timeout is caused by the actor doing too mu...

Yes, Apify has a full Python SDK available on PyPI (package name: apify) that supports complete actor development, API access, dataset management, and all the same capabilities as the JavaScript SDK. ...

Earnings from Apify actors vary widely depending on your niche, pricing strategy, actor quality, and portfolio size, but individual actors solving high-value problems can earn $100 to $1,000 or more p...

Actor discoverability on the Apify Store is driven by three main factors — quality score, search relevance, and usage volume — and optimizing all three is the key to growing your user base and PPE rev...

An empty dashboard usually means your API token is invalid, expired, or was not saved correctly. The first step is to go to the ApifyForge Settings page and verify that your token is entered and saved...

HTTP 403 (Forbidden) and 429 (Too Many Requests) errors mean the target website's anti-bot system has detected your scraper and is blocking its requests. This is one of the most common issues in web s...

This is a common and frustrating situation where your actor runs successfully when you test it manually, but Apify's automated quality system still flags it with a maintenance warning. The explanation...

Report bugs by opening an issue on our GitHub repository at github.com/apifyforge/apifyforge. We use GitHub Issues as our primary bug tracking system because it allows public visibility, threaded disc...