Apify is one of the few places where people who write automation tools actually get paid. It says so on the front page: $1.6 million paid out last month, many developers earning over $3,000. Compared with the agent marketplaces I've written about before, where the sellers outnumber the buyers by a comfortable margin, that sounds like a functioning economy. So I pulled the public store data for the 15,000 most popular tools and looked at who's getting the users.
The store lists about 66,000 tools. The 15,000th most popular one had zero users in the last thirty days, which means roughly 51,000 listings are furniture. Among the 15,000 that made the cut, the median tool had two users in a month. Two. Only 699 tools had a hundred or more, 100 had a thousand or more, and 13 had ten thousand or more.
The concentration is steep even by internet standards. The top 15 tools, one tenth of one percent, account for 37% of all usage. The top 1% account for 70%, and the top 10% for 92%. Ten developers collect 61% of the users. The biggest of them is Apify itself: its own 130 tools get 30% of all usage in the store, which is a polite way of saying that the landlord runs the most popular shops in the mall.
What are people buying? Mostly other people's social media. The single most used tool scrapes Instagram, with 44,000 users in a month. Social media scrapers as a category take 43% of all usage, and lead generation, meaning Google Maps listings, LinkedIn profiles and job boards, takes another 20%. After that it falls off quickly. Developer tools average 18 users per tool, news 10, and business tools 5.
My favourite line in the data is the category called AGENTS. It has 159 tools and 1,492 users between them, a median of one user per tool. This is in a year when every second pitch deck promises that autonomous agents will be the main customers of the internet. On the platform that is arguably best placed to serve them, the agent category is the emptiest shelf in the shop.
None of this means Apify is a scam. The money is real, the top developers really do earn thousands, and the platform handles billing and hosting that would be a pain to build yourself. It's just a normal marketplace, which is to say a power law with a checkout page. If you're thinking of building a tool for it, the useful question isn't whether the platform pays, because it does. It's whether your tool will be one of the few hundred that anyone uses, and the answer for a new generic data tool is almost certainly no. The shelf space that pays is next to Instagram and Google Maps, and it is already very crowded.
The same shape turns up in every marketplace I've looked at this month. On x402 the top five services took 90% of the money. On Apify the top 1% of tools take 70% of the users. The details differ, but the lesson doesn't: there's no long tail of modest earnings waiting for the next small tool. There's a short head, and a very long line of listings that nobody opens.
The numbers come from Apify's public store API, which reports thirty-day user counts per tool. They count user-tool pairs, so one person using three tools counts three times. Happy to share the script if anyone wants to slice it differently.