Meda Alčauskaitė describes her team as “me, myself, and I,” and Darek Pajestka and Sebastian Staniak could say much the same. Each of them built an app that gathers local events in Poland or Lithuania, and each one runs on Apify's Facebook Events Scraper. In both countries, a lot of what's on gets announced on Facebook first, often on a town council's page that nobody outside the area would think to check.
Two of them found Apify the same way, by asking ChatGPT or Claude how to scrape the web. None of the three wanted to write or maintain a Facebook scraper of their own, and here's what they built instead.
For Facebook, we found out that Apify is the most stable and best-developed product. I found a few other Facebook event scrapers that were much cheaper, but they were less stable or more complicated to integrate.
-- Sebastian Staniak, co-founder, Coupleroom
🇵🇱 Sebastian Staniak, Coupleroom
Sebastian is the co-founder and only technical person at Coupleroom, a mobile game for couples with more than 100,000 downloads on Google Play. Its Date Ideas Generator pulls local events from Facebook Events Scraper, adds places from Google Maps, and checks the weather first, because nobody wants to be sent to a park “if it's like minus 20 degrees or it's raining,” as he puts it. An AI layer then turns all of that into date ideas.
As a former Google tech lead, he could write a scraper himself, but his rule is official APIs first, Apify second, and his own code last. “If the company really wants to block you, that's very hard,” he says. He tried several cheaper Facebook scrapers and picked Apify's partly because it works in one step: the app passes in a city like Warsaw and gets events back, with no separate run for the details. He also added a cache, so each city is scraped once and reused for about a week instead of being fetched again for every couple.
Everything runs through the API, and he has opened Apify Console about twice, both times to debug. “Of course, AI was writing most of the code, but even without AI it would be very simple,” he says.
🇱🇹 Meda Alčauskaitė, Avilys
Avilys is Lithuanian for “beehive,” and the app gathers events from across the whole country. Meda built Avilys in about eight months, entirely on her own, coming from marketing rather than engineering. She wrote the code with AI assistants, including custom Actors for local sites that Apify's Web Scraper couldn't handle.
Those custom Actors taught her what a scraper costs to keep alive. Some took a week to build and some took months, and “one thing changes in a website that I'm scraping and I have to redo the whole Actor from scratch,” she says. “AI is not a superman.” Facebook, her biggest source, is the one she leaves to Apify.
Since the app is based on events, my main source is the Facebook Events Scraper. It's the main Actor I need and will need.
-- Meda Alčauskaitė, founder, Avilys
Facebook Events Scraper runs several times a week. Events land in a database that drops old listings and duplicates, and users filter the list by city, date, and price. Next, she plans to have an LLM sort events into categories, since every source labels them differently or not at all.
🇵🇱 Darek Pajestka, Co w Beskidach
Darek has been a front-end developer for 20 years. When he asked local governments in the Beskidy region of southern Poland to bring their events together in one place, they told him they didn't have the people. Towns of 5,000 people had no central listing at all, so he came up with what he calls his “genius plan” and built Co w Beskidach himself.
Many councils post events as ordinary Facebook posts, so Facebook Events Scraper and Facebook Posts Scraper both run every 24 hours. A local LLM on his own machine decides whether each post is an event, rewrites it, and adds tags like “Regional Pearl” and “Don't miss it.” He reviews everything before it goes live. “I can give a lot of freedom for the LLM, but the last decision needs to be on my side,” he says.
Facebook events disappear a few days after they happen, so he is also building a Places section that lasts longer, with Google Places IDs keeping each spot listed once. Next, he wants visitors to be able to ask for “something for a weekend with my child” that doesn't go “too much in the mountain” and get a full plan back.
Facebook changes every two or three months, and a scraper I built would break. I'd have to sit and fix it manually. That's why I use Apify: to take that work off my shoulders. I want to go on holiday sometimes and have the project keep running without disruption.
-- Darek Pajestka, founder, Co w Beskidach
Build one for your own region
These three apps use the Facebook Events and Facebook Posts scrapers, Google Maps Scraper, Web Scraper, and Actors their founders built themselves. Apify keeps the Facebook scrapers working through Facebook's changes, which is the one job none of them wanted.
If your town or country still has no single place to find out what's on, Facebook Events Scraper is where all three started. Apify's free plan gives you $5 of usage every month, with no credit card needed.
