About seven weeks ago I published a scraper on the Apify Store for Likee, the short-video app that's big in a bunch of countries outside the US. I picked it because there was only one other actor covering it and it looked like a gap. This week I got my first payout: $37. Not life changing money, obviously. But it's the first time something I built has been used by strangers who paid for it without me talking to them, and that felt worth writing up. Some numbers from the dashboard since launch: - around 7,200 runs total, 6,000 of those in the last 30 days - 12 paying users, 4 of them active this month - 99.9% of runs succeed - pricing is pay per result, starting at $5 per 1,000 rows A few things I'd tell someone thinking about doing the same: Plain HTTP beats a headless browser if you can get away with it. The whole thing is fetch calls against Likee's public JSON endpoints plus their share pages. No Puppeteer, no Playwright. Runs finish in under 30 seconds and cost a fraction of a cent in compute, which is what makes the per-result pricing work. The Store listing matters more than the code. Early on my dataset showed nested JSON objects in the output table and people clearly bounced. Flattening it into normal columns (Views, Likes, Comments, Engagement %) was one of the highest-impact changes I made. Failure states need to be visible. My first version showed "Success!" even when a share link was dead or private. Users got confused and I got confused reading their runs. Now every unresolved input shows up in a run summary and the status banner says what went wrong. Competition will notice you. The other Likee scraper on the Store left a one-star review saying I copied him because our example input was the same video. Fair is an open market and a second option is good for buyers. If you want to look at it or kick the tires, here it is: https://apify.com/scrapelabmax/likee-scraper Happy to answer questions about the Apify side of things, pricing models, or how the share-link lookup works.   submitted by   /u/Inchardware [link]   [comments]