Rentals are going away. Denying it no longer makes sense. That battle is over. We should focus instead on finding and collaborating on solutions. Apify has many reasons for making this change. Probably the main one, from a UX perspective, is that a double-subscription model overcomplicates things. A single subscription is simply easier for users to understand and is a well-known business model. That said, if rentals are going away, Apify should find a fair way to compensate developers of niche actors. By niche actors, I mean actors that attract very specific users who benefit from specialized know-how, even if their usage is low. These actors bring users to the platform. Those users pay a $29 monthly subscription. If it weren’t for these niche actors, some of them might never have signed up for Apify in the first place. I know firsthand that some users are in this situation, so there are probably many more. The current model does not fairly compensate those developers. Apify should fix that. One possible approach would be to distribute a percentage of each user’s unused balance across the actors that user has actually used. That way, Apify would not be the only party benefiting from the subscription model, but would also share that value with the developers who help bring users to the platform and keep them there. This would not be a new or strange idea. Similar user-centric or subscriber-linked revenue-sharing models already exist on other platforms. Freepik uses a pay-per-download model tied to each subscriber’s net revenue, SoundCloud uses fan-powered royalties that distribute a listener’s revenue across the artists they actually listen to, and Envato Elements uses a subscriber-share model based on the contributors each subscriber actually uses.

Yes, this has been an ongoing discussion inside of Apify for the past year and several community developers have been involved in interviews on the subject. But don't fear, that doesn't mean we think the conversation is over! We are feeding all your comments and suggestions in this channel back to Product and Engineering teams - and we have Creator Office Hours every 2 weeks for the foreseeable future, in order for you to voice your concerns directly to Product and Engineering teams. Please join if you're able, and share some of your thoughts: https://discord.gg/crawlee-apify-801163717915574323?event=1480849241348771973

I'll try to jump in the office hours. Thanks

Thanks for proposing those ideas! We also have a few but it is not fully solved problem