So I want to raise a concern and see what other builders think, because this seems like a MAJOR flaw in how this marketplace is operated... With pay-per-event pricing, if one of your actors have negative profits, that doesn't affect your total profits. That protects builders from one bad actor wiping out the profits from their whole portfolio, but it creates a serious incentive problem. Right now, a builder can publish a new Actor and price it extremely low (basically free). If that Actor loses money, the loss does not affect the builder’s other profitable Actors. So a builder can simply use this tactic to undercut aggressively, because there are literally no downsides. Example: Let’s say there is a normal keyword with a few good Actors. Most of them charge around normal market pricing, maybe $2-5 per 1,000 results. Then someone launches a new Actor for the same keyword, with similar quality and reliability, but charges $0.01 per 1,000 results. The cheap Actor might run at negative profit, but the builder does not really feel the loss across their whole account. The negative profit just becomes $0 for payout purposes. So they can keep the price extremely low to gain users, reviews, runs, and ranking. Maybe the plan is to raise prices after getting enough market share. But NOPE. Nobody can raise prices again, because everyone is doing it 😅. The “normal” price disappears. The whole category becomes worth almost nothing. This could (and will) slowly decimate the economics of the marketplace, especially now that building good Actors is becoming much easier, quality alone might not be enough to protect pricing. If two Actors are the same quality, users will naturally pick the one that costs almost nothing. The incentive is misaligned. If negative profit on one Actor affected the builder’s total payout, then pricing below cost would become a real business decision. Builders could still choose to subsidize a new Actor, but they would actually pay for that decision from their total profit. I’m not trying to attack anyone using low prices, because I'm lowering my price under anyone who undercuts me just as aggressively lol. But I think there's really no other way than aligning incentives and have negative profits affect your whole portfolio if we want this store to be healthy.

The implied solution seems to have Apify modify their policy? Or you want to propose something else? Think they did this initially to help protect builders - so one nasty bug does not wipe out your entire month earnings. It has certainly saved me on more than one occasion in the past. But you are describing a scenario where folks can abuse that feature to gain market share. Perhaps there could be some sort of middle ground? Like you get negative profit protection only for the first N actors. Or there is some flat penalty fee after N actors go negative. For the record, I stay away from this tactic - have seen the race to the bottom in too many other places. But I do aim to price things competitively, which sometimes leads to negative margins in a few edge-cases that are still being worked out.

> The implied solution seems to have Apify modify their policy? Or you want to propose something else? The only solution I see is to have negative profits affect your total profits. > Think they did this initially to help protect builders - so one nasty bug does not wipe out your entire month earnings. It has certainly saved me on more than one occasion in the past. Definitely, I understand why this mechanism is in place. But it comes at the expense of destroying the marketplace little by little. > Perhaps there could be some sort of middle ground? Obviously, the total profits should be capped at minimum zero, meaning we should never owe money to apify in the event our total profits were negative lol > For the record, I stay away from this tactic - have seen the race to the bottom in too many other places. But I do aim to price things competitively, which sometimes leads to negative margins in a few edge-cases that are still being worked out. It doesn't matter if you, me and a bunch of people here are acting in good faith. Even 10 people publishing 10 actors a day and pricing their actors $0.01/1K results could cover all niches/keywords in less than a month and break the marketplace 😄 The system just doesn't work. On the flip side, if negative profits from our actors affected our overall portfolio, no one would be incentivized to price their actors at a ridiculously low price. And the overall profit margins of ALL builders would go way up, because there would be real consequences to pricing below profitability. So higher risk: if you're not careful with your actors that could remove a lot of your profits But also higher rewards: all profit margins becomes much healthier for everyone

This is actually a good thing from Apify’s perspective: developers race to the bottom on pricing and margin, bringing in more customers. It only breaks for Apify if the quality goes down, and their customers seek services elsewhere; which they are starting to really focus on with quality scores. How the quality scores are weighted will be the determining factor I think . . .

Well, what if Apify just deprecate an actor once it's been bleeding negative profit for a while and made the developer explain themselves before turning it back on? Could be time based or a flat threshold.

There's one extra incentive to do this. People could be creating these actors just to use them almost for free with a second user account, paying only cents for CPU and proxies, essentially getting free infrastructure. I assumed Apify wouldn't allow unprofitable actors to exist forever. But if they do, they should definitely do something about it.

> Well, what if Apify just deprecate an actor once it's been bleeding negative profit for a while and made the developer explain themselves before turning it back on? Could be time based or a flat threshold. Yes, that might actually be the best solution. As soon as an actor bleeds, it is turned "off". The reason I'm saying it might be the best solution, is because even though having every actor's profit impact the total profit (negatively or positively) works as an incentive for builders with actors that are already making money (e.g. If I have an actor making money, I'll make sure the other actors don't destroy my profits for that good actor), it doesn't work as incentive for an account where literally no actor makes money and that just wants to conquer the marketplace. So either: 1. Shutting down the actor as soon as it bleed 2. Allowing the builder to pay for losses with usage (directly taken from usage), because sometimes small loss are temporary. > Can you link me to one of these actors? Don't want to throw anyone under the bus 😄 But I have 150+ actors now, and I see some patterns from some people competing for the same keywords aha

you can still try to dump price because you can move most of heavy calculation/costs outside of apify and use Actor just as small client to your api

Wow good point. Didn't think of that... Maybe the could be banned in their TOS

Forcing to do all scraping inside apifys infra? That would be very annoying. For example I’m selling my scrapers on multiple marketplaces and maintaining separate code would be really bad

Yeah I definitely don't have an answer, but if the tradeoff is that or a broken marketplace at some point a decision has to be made. Even the big players will eventually be affected by this pattern. Their position in the top rankings is only secured for so long. Might take weeks or months (depending on the keyword, e.g. Might take longer for google map actors) for an actor that's gaming the system to rank high, but it will eventually. Once it reaches the top two rows it's kind of gameover for every single top actor

Negative profit actors could be lower in search ranking and/or hidden from store

Yes the solution is probably something like this or putting them in maintenance/turning them off as mentionned above. But simply hiding them might be better for existing users

An actor with negative profit being put as in maintenance might be a very practical solution for this. Apify already has tooling to mark actors as in maintenance and they already detect negative profits.

perhaps a simple solution is to integrate negative margin into the actor quality score - that would keep it from ever ranking high.

Problem with that is some niches don't have that many actors, so not ranking high can still mean in the top rows. And if shadowbanned/hidden from the results entirely, then how does one "unban" their actor? If turned off/put on maintenance, at least the builder has a chance to fix the problem and then turn it back on. Personally I think the best solution is to turn off the actor, unless the builder has opted to cover the negative costs with usage credits (e.g. the builder thinks the negative profits will be temporary, or trivial (e.g. -$0.01) before the actor goes back to making positive profits, or even if the builder is willing to subsidize the actor and take the loss to climb the rankings, but in a legit way)

I don’t think the math works here.

It does work. E.g account 1 creates an actor with event prices that are almost 0. Unrelated account 2 uses this actor. Account 1 has big negative profit, but Apify eats the cost.

I don’t understand how Apify eats the cost? Apif, pays for infrastructure and proxy and all?

Yes they pay for negative profits

So if you lose money on an actor, Apify pays you the developer the money you lost? Say my actor runs -$5 for the month, Apify pays me $5?

No they pay you zero.

In my experience they deducted any infrastructure and proxy costs out of the profit for the month. So I’m surprised that these expenses don’t just come out of the developers account. I guess if your entire portfolio of actors has run negative, and you have no profit for the month, Apify covers your negative balance?

> In my experience they deducted any infrastructure and proxy costs out of the profit for the month. So I’m surprised that these expenses don’t just come out of the developers account. They do deduct infrastructure and proxy costs out of the profit for each actor...

Wild. Thanks for explaining this to me in detail! Wow!

Now go read the initial message again, it will make much more sense on how people are using this to game the rankings lol.

I can now see how one could build an actor, crater the price, and at least get some free infra. @Ella is this possible?

I don't have time to read the whole discussion but we are aware of the wrong incentives but we are monitoring this and will see if someone's profit gets too negative. Then we will check and will see if it is abuse or not. In this case, we went for simplicity for publishers at the expense that we have to monitor for abuse. If this gets bad over time, we might update the rules. It is one of the "solve it once it happens" things

Hey, we discussed this internally and will implement some better monitoring to ensure nobody is abusing this feature, which was intended to help the creators.

Awesome, thanks for taking this issue seriously 🙏