How much does Apify cost to use with Claude?

Apify includes 5 dollars of free credit every month, which is usually enough for a focused, one-off research task. Heavier ongoing use typically runs a few tens of dollars a month depending on which Actors you run.

Is scraping competitor Instagram and Google data legal?

Scraping publicly available information, like open posts or public Google reviews, is legal in most jurisdictions, but you should always respect a site's robots.txt and its terms of service, and avoid scraping anything gated behind a login you don't have rights to access.

What is the best way to set up Apify MCP server for competitor research?

Create a free Apify account, copy your Personal API Token from Settings, Integrations, and register the hosted MCP server with Claude using that token as an Authorization header. Once connected, you describe the research task in plain English and Claude picks the right Actor to run.

Which Apify actors are most useful for marketing research?

The Instagram Scraper, Google Maps Reviews Scraper, Facebook Ads Library Scraper, LinkedIn People Finder, and the generic Web Scraper cover the large majority of competitor and market research requests.

What is the difference between Apify and Firecrawl?

Apify is a marketplace of platform-specific scrapers built for sites like Instagram, Google Maps, or LinkedIn that require specialized handling. Firecrawl instead crawls arbitrary websites and converts them to clean text, and the two are commonly used together.

Apify MCP Server

Over 5,000 ready-made scrapers, from Instagram to Google Maps, run directly through Claude

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