Apify has grown a huge amount in the last few years. From the early days in Y Combinator, we have gone on to develop a cloud computing platform that supports hundreds of community-made automation and web scraping tools, created the widely-used Apify SDK, and are trusted by some of the biggest global brands in a vast range of industries.
In 2021 so far, we have doubled the size of the Apify team, bringing on board some amazing new people to take on the increasing workload in development, engineering, support, marketing, and sales. We launched a new way for any developer to make a passive income from coding, and we continue to expand the range of actors in Apify Store. We believe that we have made great strides forward in bringing the Apify Master Plan to life and we're excited to continue growing.
But as a company grows, it needs to change, so we're introducing some improvements to make it even easier for our users and clients to work with us.
Apify Marketplace and the introduction of the offers process a few years ago was an essential step in letting our smaller team of the time leverage their connections to developers all around the world. It gave a chance for those external developers to take on smaller projects and deliver solutions, with Apify acting as the conduit between customer and developer and making sure that the whole process worked well, and the solution was created to our high standards.
But from now on, Apify Marketplace is Apify Freelancers. We will continue to rely on Apify-approved external developers to deliver some solutions, but now Apify staff will be more involved in guiding customers in their choice. The customer no longer needs to make that decision before contacting us.
Our growing network of freelance developers is part of the thriving Apify Partners ecosystem, which collaborates with us to provide efficient and complex web scraping and automation solutions to our customers.
Apify is, and always has been, dedicated to making sure that developers and the open-source community can make a living from their work. Apify Freelancers gives talented coders the chance to get involved in bigger projects, while Apify Store gives them the opportunity to create actors that can be rented out on a monthly basis. If you’re a dev and you’re interested, please contact us.
Single, simplified custom solution form
Part of the streamlining of the custom solution ordering process is to make it faster and simpler for clients to request a solution. Up to now, you had to choose between Apify Enterprise and Apify Marketplace when you contacted us for a custom web scraping or automation solution. Not any more. Now you just go to our custom solution page, fill out a really short form and we will assess your needs and contact you to decide whether Apify Enterprise or Apify Freelancers is the right choice. You just tell us what you need and we'll make sure you get it.
Remember that anything you share with us about your project is completely confidential and treated as though we already have an NDA with you.
Apify app is now Apify Console
Our final big change, happening just this week, is that you will no longer visit my.apify.com when you want to interact with the platform. You can do so much more with Apify these days and we wanted to reflect that with a name that spoke of more control, more options, but also a streamlined interface. From now on, you can go ahead and bookmark console.apify.com. As Apify Console matures, you'll also continue to see a lot of optimization and improvements. Keep an eye on the monthly Apify newsletter or the new Apify Developer Bulletin if you want to know about these kinds of changes as they happen.
If you want to tell us what you think of any of these changes, feel free to send an email to hello@apify.com or join the conversation on our Discord server. Apify continues to expand and grow. We have some big plans for global expansion and as part of that we’re continuing to seek out the best people we can to help us. Check out our open positions if you think you’d like to be part of the Apify team!