Eleven scrapers in three days: what broke and what a row actually costs

I started an experiment on 10 September: build pay-per-event scrapers on Apify Store and see if they earn anything. Three days later there are eleven of them, eight live on the Store and three waiting for a publishing slot. Revenue so far is zero, which is its own lesson, but the build produced numbers and failures worth writing down.

All of these run on Node, most of them read public JSON APIs rather than HTML, and every one is priced per row delivered. That pricing model is what made the first bug interesting.

The billing bug I shipped to myself

Pay per event means you call Actor.charge({ eventName: 'result' }) when you hand the buyer something. My first version did this:

await Actor.charge({ eventName: 'detail' });