How to Scrape Leads With Apify in 2026 (Step-by-Step Guide)

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Short answer: to scrape leads with Apify, create a free account, choose a ready-made scraper (called an Actor) that matches where your leads live, configure a specific search, run it, then enrich and verify the results before you send anything. For local businesses the go-to is the Google Maps Scraper; for B2B roles and companies you use a LinkedIn or B2B-database Actor. Your first run takes about 15 minutes and costs nothing on the free $5 monthly credit, which is enough for roughly 500 to 1,000 leads. The honest catch: Apify hands you raw data, not deliverability or legal cover. The money is in how tightly you target, how well you verify, and how compliantly you reach out. Here is the exact workflow we use.

What scraping leads with Apify actually means

Apify is a cloud platform with more than 36,000 pre-built scrapers, called Actors, that pull structured data from sites like Google Maps, LinkedIn, Instagram and thousands of others. You never write code or host a crawler. For lead generation you chain three jobs:

• Discovery: find the businesses or people who fit your ideal customer, and pull their core details such as name, company, website, phone and location.
• Enrichment: add the contact data a raw listing is missing, usually a verified work email and sometimes a direct phone or LinkedIn URL.
• Verification: confirm each email is real and deliverable before it ever touches your sending tool.

Get those three right and you export a clean CSV that loads straight into a cold email platform or CRM. Get them wrong and you have a list that bounces, burns your domain and wastes the spend. Most of this guide is about getting them right.

Step 1: Create a free Apify account

Go to Apify and sign up. No credit card is required, and the free plan includes $5 of usage credit every month, which is enough to scrape roughly 500 to 1,000 Google Maps listings or test almost any Actor before you spend a cent. This free tier is the single best reason to start here rather than with an expensive database subscription: you can prove the data quality on your exact niche first. Create your free Apify account here, and you can run your first lead scrape in about ten minutes.

Step 2: Pick the right discovery Actor for your leads

The Actor you choose depends entirely on where your prospects live. Three paths cover almost every B2B use case:

• Local and service businesses, use Google Maps. The Google Maps Scraper by Compass is the default, with over 420,000 users and a 4.75 star rating across more than 1,300 reviews. It pulls business name, address, phone, website, category, rating, review count and opening hours. Pricing runs from about $1.50 to $2 per 1,000 places, with the exact figure shown on the Actor page. This is the fastest way to build a list of, say, every dental clinic or HVAC company in a city.
• B2B roles and companies, use a LinkedIn or database Actor. For people you already have profile URLs for, a no-cookie LinkedIn profile Actor such as HarvestAPI runs at around $4 per 1,000 profiles, or about $10 per 1,000 when you also pull the email. To search by job title and industry instead, a B2B database Actor like Leads Finder works as an Apollo or ZoomInfo style alternative from roughly $1.50 per 1,000 leads.
• Any list of websites, use a contact scraper. If you already have company domains, the Contact Details Scraper visits each site and extracts emails, phone numbers and social links from about $1.05 per 1,000 pages.

One honest rule before you commit to volume: check each Actor's rating, user count and last-updated date. The top Actors are excellent and actively maintained, but the long tail of the marketplace is hit or miss.

Step 3: Configure the search (where most lead lists go wrong)

The single biggest lever on list quality is how specific your search is. "HVAC companies in Austin Texas" returns a usable list; "HVAC" returns noise. Enter several precise queries at once if you want to cover multiple cities or niches in one run. Set a realistic max results, because 100 to 500 is a sensible starting range and going higher just burns more credit and takes longer on a list you have not validated yet. Set the country and language so you do not pull the wrong region.

Tighter targeting here pays off twice: you spend less on scraping, and your reply rate later is far higher because every contact genuinely fits your offer. This is the same discipline we apply when we build lists for our lead generation service, which is to narrow the ideal customer first and scrape second.

Step 4: Run the Actor and export your data

Click Run. A scrape of 100 results usually finishes in three to eight minutes. When it completes, download the dataset as CSV, JSON, Excel or XML, or push it straight to Google Sheets, Make, n8n or your CRM through Apify's native integrations. Apify even publishes a ready-made n8n template that sends Google Maps leads into a Google Sheet automatically, which is handy once you want this running on a schedule rather than by hand.

Step 5: Enrich and verify before you send

This is the step that separates a list that books meetings from one that wrecks your deliverability, and it is the step most people skip. Google Maps only returns an email when the business has published one, which is the minority of listings. So you enrich: run an Actor like the Contact Details Scraper across the website column to pull emails and phones, or use a Waterfall Contact Enrichment Actor (around $0.20 per contact) that checks ten sources in sequence and includes SMTP verification, so you only pay for contacts it actually finds.

Then verify. Run the finished list through an email verification step or a second source to drop catch-all, invalid and risky addresses, and dedupe against your existing CRM so you never message a current client. A verified list of 200 is worth more than a raw list of 2,000. Start your free Apify account and you can build and enrich a first test list without spending anything.

What it really costs to scrape leads with Apify

Your bill has up to three layers, and understanding them prevents nasty surprises:

• The platform plan, which gives you usage credit: Free ($0 with $5 of monthly credit), Starter ($29), Scale ($199) and Business ($999). Annual billing takes 10 percent off. Compute is measured in compute units, where one unit is 1 GB of memory for 1 hour, priced at $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business.
• Per-Actor fees, which many community Actors charge on top, either a monthly rental or a pay-per-result price such as the $1.50 per 1,000 places above. The price is always shown on the Actor page before you run it.
• Proxies, only if you scrape heavily protected sites. Datacenter proxies are included in every plan; residential proxies cost extra per gigabyte.

Two things to respect: unused prepaid credit expires at the end of each billing cycle and never rolls over, so size your plan to your real usage rather than buying ahead. And the honest way to budget is to run one small test, read the usage chart, then multiply by your target volume. Most freelancers and small lead-gen teams live comfortably on the $29 Starter plan.

Is scraping leads with Apify legal?

Scraping data that is public and visible without logging in is generally legal in both the US and EU, as long as you do not bypass a login or a technical block and do not overload the site. That covers most Google Maps and public-website scraping. The nuance that catches people out is personal data: under GDPR and the EDPB guidance issued in 2024, information that can identify a person is regulated even when it is publicly visible. So for B2B outreach in regulated regions you need a lawful basis, where legitimate interest is the usual one, you should honor opt-outs, and you should be ready to explain your reasoning.

LinkedIn is the other sharp edge: its terms of service explicitly prohibit scraping, and it does suspend accounts, so the safer posture is to use logged-out public data and Actors that do not need your account cookies. Respect robots signals and any cease-and-desist, do not republish copyrighted content, and keep your outreach honest. None of this is legal advice, and for a production operation that touches a lot of personal data it is worth a quick word with a qualified lawyer in your market.

From a scraped list to booked calls

The scrape is maybe 20 percent of the job. A list only earns money once it is verified, segmented, and worked through a warmed-up sending system with relevant copy and a real follow-up sequence. The full pipeline looks like this: scrape, enrich, verify, personalize from the fields you pulled, send, then follow up. If you would rather own the outcome than learn every tool, this is exactly the stack we run for clients through our cold email marketing service, and we wire the whole scrape-to-send flow together as an AI automation build when clients want it hands-off. For the wider toolset, see our roundup of the best B2B lead scraping tools in 2026 and our deeper Apify review.

The bottom line

Apify is the fastest way to get from "I need a list of X" to a clean, exportable lead list without building or maintaining a single scraper. Start on the free plan, pick one discovery Actor, one enrichment Actor and one verification step, test the quality on 100 leads in your niche, then scale the volume only once the data proves out. The tooling is cheap and quick to learn. The discipline around it, meaning a tight target list, honest verification and compliant outreach, is what actually turns scraped rows into revenue. Create your free Apify account and run your first lead scrape today.