Best Apify Store Alternatives in 2026:
USDC-Powered Scraping Marketplace

Web scraping has evolved from a niche developer activity into a critical enterprise function. Companies collect billions of data points daily for pricing intelligence, competitive monitoring, lead generation, and AI training data. The infrastructure supporting this work has consolidated into marketplaces where developers publish ready-made scraping tools and buyers can deploy them with minimal setup.

Apify Store dominates this space with over 3,000 community-built Actors and a proven ecosystem. But the landscape is shifting in two important ways. First, AI agents are becoming primary consumers of scraping infrastructure. Autonomous agents need to discover, evaluate, and purchase scraping services programmatically — without human-operated dashboards or credit card checkout flows. Second, USDC micropayments via the x402 protocol are eliminating intermediary commissions and enabling true pay-per-request pricing at the protocol level.

This combination — AI agents as buyers and x402 as the payment rail — is creating a new category of marketplace. Cloudflare recognized this in July 2025 when it launched its “Pay per Crawl” marketplace in private beta, allowing website owners to charge AI crawlers micropayments per page. In September 2025, Cloudflare and Coinbase announced the x402 Foundation to standardize HTTP-native payments. The infrastructure is now in place for scraping marketplaces that settle in USDC with zero commission overhead.

We will cover each platform in depth with real pricing, honest assessments of strengths and weaknesses, and a detailed comparison matrix. We are transparent about the fact that Proxies.sx is our own product — we will give Apify and others credit where they lead, and explain specifically where the x402 model offers genuine advantages.

Apify is the benchmark. Founded in 2015 in the Czech Republic, it has built the largest ecosystem of pre-built web scraping tools. Their marketplace model works: developers build “Actors” (containerized scraping scripts), publish them to the Store, and earn revenue when others use them. The $1M Developer Challenge that ran from November 2025 to January 2026 attracted 704 developers who published 3,329 Actors, with 1,086 meeting qualification criteria. The three top participants split $60,000 in prizes, and weekly $2,000 awards highlighted standout contributions.

Bright Data (formerly Luminati) is less of a marketplace and more of a full-stack scraping infrastructure platform. It operates the world's largest proxy network with 72M+ residential IPs and 7M+ mobile IPs across every country. Their Web Scraper IDE lets developers build custom scrapers with built-in unblocking, and their datasets marketplace sells pre-collected data.

Bright Data's strength is raw infrastructure power. If you need massive IP pools, geographic targeting down to the city and ASN level, or pre-collected datasets, nobody has a larger inventory. However, their pricing is significantly higher than alternatives for mobile proxies ($14.40/GB versus $4-6/GB on Proxies.sx), they do not operate a community marketplace of pre-built scrapers, and their platform requires traditional account-based access with API keys.

RapidAPI is not scraping-specific, but its sheer scale makes it relevant. With 40,000+ APIs and 4M+ developers on the platform, it is the world's largest API marketplace. Many scraping and data extraction APIs are listed there, from Google SERP scrapers to social media data extractors. If you are looking for a scraping API rather than a scraping Actor, RapidAPI likely has multiple options for your target.

RapidAPI's 25% marketplace fee is the highest among all platforms compared here. For a developer earning $10,000/month through their API, that is $2,500 going to RapidAPI before PayPal processing fees. The platform's value proposition is discovery and distribution — access to millions of potential users. For scraping specifically, the APIs listed on RapidAPI vary widely in quality, reliability, and maintenance. There is no infrastructure included; API providers must supply their own proxy and hosting infrastructure.

Zyte, formerly Scrapinghub, created Scrapy — the most popular Python web scraping framework. They operate Scrapy Cloud, a hosted platform for running Scrapy spiders at scale, alongside the Zyte API for automated data extraction with built-in anti-bot handling. If your team writes Python and uses Scrapy, Zyte is the natural ecosystem.

Zyte's strength is its deep Python integration and the Scrapy ecosystem. The Zyte API charges only for successful responses, which protects against wasted spend on failed requests. The tiered pricing with HTTP and browser request types means you pay based on the complexity of what you are scraping, not a flat rate. However, Zyte does not operate a community marketplace of third-party tools, it is Python-centric (limited JavaScript support), and like the others, it requires traditional account-based access with no crypto or x402 payment path.

Botster takes a different approach: it is a no-code bot marketplace where users create and share browser automation bots without programming. The platform offers pre-built bots for price tracking, LinkedIn scraping, TikTok data extraction, Google Trends analysis, and dozens of other data collection tasks. Pricing starts at $10 with a promotional offer of 3,000 credits for $3.

Botster appeals to non-technical users who want to automate browser tasks without writing code. Its drag-and-drop interface makes automation accessible, and the community contributes bots for common use cases. However, it lacks the depth of Apify's ecosystem, does not offer proxy infrastructure, has limited scalability for enterprise workloads, and (like all traditional platforms) requires account-based access incompatible with autonomous AI agents.

The Proxies.sx marketplace is built on a fundamentally different model. Instead of a traditional platform with accounts, API keys, and percentage-based commissions, it uses the x402 protocol for HTTP-native USDC micropayments. AI agents discover services, pay with USDC on Base or Solana, and receive results — all within a single HTTP request-response cycle. The marketplace charges 0% protocol-level commission; USDC flows directly from buyer to seller.

The marketplace currently hosts 14 active bounties totaling $1,150 for scraping tools, MCP server integrations, browser automation scripts, and data pipeline connectors. Bounties are paid in USDC upon completion. Unlike Apify's time-limited challenge, bounties are ongoing and open to any developer. The marketplace is built on real 4G/5G mobile proxy infrastructure across 15+ countries, giving it a unique infrastructure advantage for targets that require genuine mobile carrier IPs.

The table below compares all six platforms across the dimensions that matter most for scraping marketplace selection: commission rates, payment flexibility, infrastructure inclusion, and AI agent compatibility.

Every platform besides Proxies.sx requires the same flow: create an account, generate API keys, attach a credit card, and manage tokens or subscriptions. This works for human developers. It does not work for autonomous AI agents that need to discover and purchase services in real-time without any human in the loop.

The x402 protocol changes this. An AI agent with a funded USDC wallet can request any x402-enabled endpoint, receive a 402 response with payment terms, pay on-chain, and receive the resource. No registration. No API keys. No OAuth. No human approval. The wallet is the identity, and the blockchain is the payment processor. Settlement happens in under 400 milliseconds on Solana or under 3 seconds on Base.

This is not theoretical. The x402 Foundation, launched by Coinbase and Cloudflare in September 2025, has driven adoption across the agent ecosystem. Major frameworks including LangChain, CrewAI, and AutoGPT now include x402 payment adapters. Cloudflare updated its open-source x402 template in January 2026 for payment-gated proxies at the CDN edge. The infrastructure is production-ready.

For a deeper explanation of the x402 flow with code examples, see our complete x402 protocol guide. For how MCP servers integrate with x402 payments, see our MCP Servers guide.

x402 Integration Example: Buying a Proxy via HTTP

import { ethers } from "ethers";

const MARKETPLACE_API = "https://agents.proxies.sx/marketplace/proxy/";
const BASE_RPC = "https://mainnet.base.org";
const USDC_BASE = "0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913";

async function agentBuyProxy() {
  // Step 1: Request the resource (agent discovers the price)
  const res = await fetch(MARKETPLACE_API + "?country=US&type=4g");

  if (res.status === 402) {
    const terms = await res.json();
    console.log("Price:", terms.amount, terms.currency);
    // { amount: "6.00", currency: "USDC", network: "base", ... }

    // Step 2: Pay with USDC on Base
    const provider = new ethers.JsonRpcProvider(BASE_RPC);
    const wallet = new ethers.Wallet(process.env.AGENT_KEY!, provider);
    const usdc = new ethers.Contract(USDC_BASE, [
      "function transfer(address to, uint256 amount) returns (bool)"
    ], wallet);

    const tx = await usdc.transfer(terms.address, ethers.parseUnits(terms.amount, 6));
    const receipt = await tx.wait();

    // Step 3: Retry with payment proof
    const proxyRes = await fetch(MARKETPLACE_API + "?country=US&type=4g", {
      headers: {
        "X-PAYMENT-PROOF": receipt.hash,
        "X-PAYMENT-NETWORK": "base",
      },
    });

    const proxy = await proxyRes.json();
    console.log("Proxy ready:", proxy.host, proxy.port);
    // { host: "us-4g-7721.proxies.sx", port: 5057, protocol: "socks5", ... }
    return proxy;
  }
}

Comparison: Traditional API Key vs x402 Agent Flow

If you are a developer considering where to publish your scraping tools, the x402 model offers a compelling alternative to traditional marketplaces. Instead of building an Apify Actor locked to their proprietary runtime, you build a standard HTTP service that accepts x402 payments. Your service runs on your own infrastructure (or any cloud provider), you keep 100% of revenue (minus sub-cent blockchain fees), and AI agents can discover and use your service permissionlessly.

Minimal x402 Payment Middleware (Express.js)

import express from "express";
import { ethers } from "ethers";

const app = express();
const BASE_RPC = "https://mainnet.base.org";
const USDC_BASE = "0x833589fCD6eDb6E08f4c7C32D4f71b54bdA02913";
const MY_WALLET = "0xYourWalletAddress";

const ERC20_ABI = [
  "event Transfer(address indexed from, address indexed to, uint256 value)"
];

function requirePayment(amountUSDC: string, description: string) {
  return async (req: express.Request, res: express.Response, next: express.NextFunction) => {
    const proof = req.headers["x-payment-proof"] as string;

    if (!proof) {
      // Return 402 with payment terms
      return res.status(402).json({
        error: "payment_required",
        amount: amountUSDC,
        currency: "USDC",
        network: "base",
        address: MY_WALLET,
        description,
        expires_in: 300,
      });
    }

    // Verify payment on-chain
    const provider = new ethers.JsonRpcProvider(BASE_RPC);
    const receipt = await provider.getTransactionReceipt(proof);
    if (!receipt || receipt.status !== 1) {
      return res.status(400).json({ error: "invalid_payment" });
    }

    // Verify USDC transfer to our address
    const iface = new ethers.Interface(ERC20_ABI);
    const valid = receipt.logs.some(log => {
      try {
        const parsed = iface.parseLog({ topics: [...log.topics], data: log.data });
        return parsed?.name === "Transfer"
          && parsed.args.to.toLowerCase() === MY_WALLET.toLowerCase()
          && log.address.toLowerCase() === USDC_BASE.toLowerCase()
          && parseFloat(ethers.formatUnits(parsed.args.value, 6)) >= parseFloat(amountUSDC);
      } catch { return false; }
    });

    if (!valid) return res.status(400).json({ error: "payment_not_found" });
    next();
  };
}

// Your scraping service: $0.50 per request
app.get("/scrape/google-maps",
  requirePayment("0.50", "Google Maps scrape - 1 query"),
  async (req, res) => {
    const query = req.query.q as string;
    // ... your scraping logic here ...
    res.json({ results: [/* scraped data */] });
  }
);

app.listen(3000);

That is the complete middleware. Any Express route wrapped with requirePayment() becomes x402-enabled. AI agents discover the price from the 402 response, pay with USDC, and get results. You can publish your service on the Proxies.sx marketplace for discovery, or let agents find it through any x402 service directory.

Rather than declaring a single winner, here is our honest recommendation based on your specific situation and priorities.

Common questions about scraping marketplaces, x402 payments, and choosing between platforms.