Apify Alternative for Lead Scraping: No Compute Units

Apify is a powerful platform. With 4,000-plus Actors you can scrape almost anything — and that breadth is exactly why people end up searching for an Apify alternative for lead scraping specifically. When your job is building B2B lead lists, the marketplace model turns into overhead: you are choosing between five Google Maps Actors with five different prices, you are guessing what a run will cost in compute units, and you are the one who notices when an Actor quietly stops respecting its result limit.

Kavex is the opposite trade. A small, maintained set of scrapers — Google Maps, LinkedIn, websites, email find and verify — each priced flatly per result, all in one account, all exporting one CSV. You run a query and get leads. There is no Actor to evaluate and no compute meter running in the background.

The two things that push lead-gen teams off Apify

1. Compute-unit pricing you can't forecast

Apify bills in compute units, where one unit is roughly 1 GB of memory × 1 hour of runtime — and on top of that you pay for proxies, storage and data transfer. The result is that the same scrape can cost different amounts depending on how much memory it was given and how long it ran. For a one-off that is fine. For a recurring lead-gen workflow, it makes the budget a moving target: hidden proxy, storage and transfer charges are widely reported to add a meaningful slice on top of the headline rate, and pricing is the single most common complaint in Apify's public reviews.

Kavex prices the unit you actually care about — a lead, a profile, a verified email — and charges nothing for compute. A Google Maps lead is 5 credits ($0.005). A LinkedIn profile is 3 credits. An email find is 5 credits. You can read your bill before you run the job, not after.

2. Actor reliability and maintenance is your problem

Apify Actors are written by many different authors, so quality is uneven. When a target site changes its markup, a community Actor can break, stop respecting configured limits, or return half-empty rows — and you either wait for the author to push a fix or debug code you did not write. For a production lead pipeline that runs every week, that is real operational risk.

Every Kavex scraper is built and maintained in-house, with sticky-session proxying and rate-limit handling baked into each one. You are not QA-ing which Actor is trustworthy this month; you run the scraper and it works, or we fix it.

Built for the lead-gen job, not 4,000 jobs

Apify's catalog is enormous because it serves everyone — price monitoring, SERP data, AI training sets, the lot. Kavex deliberately covers the surfaces that build B2B lead lists, and covers them deeply:

• Google Maps — businesses by category and region, with phone and website on every row.
• LinkedIn (multiple scrapers) — company profiles, full personal profiles, posts, and company → people by job title.
• Website crawl — emails, phones, social links and addresses from any URL list.
• Email finder + verifier — turn a name and domain into a verified address.
• AI cold-email writer — a personalized first line per lead.

Add-ons stack inside a single job, so you scrape, enrich and write in one pass and get one CSV — no dataset to download per Actor and reconcile afterwards.

Kavex vs Apify at a glance

What it looks like in practice

You want decision-makers at 500 SaaS companies in a region, with verified emails and a written opener. On Kavex:

• Run Google Maps or LinkedIn company → people to get the companies and the right job titles.
• Add email find and email verify to get reachable addresses.
• Add the AI cold-email writer for a personalized first line.
• Export one CSV.

On Apify, that is several Actors — each with its own price, its own compute footprint and its own output dataset — that you then have to join. The Kavex version is one job with one predictable cost.

When Apify is still the right call

Credit where it is due: if your work involves scraping novel, long-tail sources — regional marketplaces, niche directories, sites no focused tool will ever support — Apify's 4,000-Actor marketplace is genuinely unmatched, and you can even write and host your own custom Actor on their infrastructure. If you need that breadth, or you are gathering data far outside B2B lead generation, Apify is the platform to be on. Kavex is the better choice when the job is specifically building and enriching B2B lead lists and you want a flat, predictable price with nothing to maintain.

Try a predictable scraper free

Kavex gives every new account 1,000 free credits — about 500 fully enriched leads — with no credit card and no compute meter. Pick a category and a region, run Google Maps, and watch one priced-per-result CSV come out the other side.

Start scraping leads free →

Keep reading

• Outscraper alternative — if Google Maps lead lists are your main job.
• Kavex vs Apify — the full feature-by-feature comparison.
• Recruiting — source target companies — Maps plus tech stack plus email finder.
• B2B sales — enrich your CRM — the find-and-verify workflow end to end.
• Marketing agency outreach — four add-ons, one sequencer-ready CSV.