Apify Actors for Sales: 5 Cheap Tools to Build Lead Lists Without Code

Most sales people have the same problem: they know exactly who they want to sell to, but building the actual list is slow, manual work. Copying business names off Google Maps. Clicking through LinkedIn one profile at a time. Paying $99 a month for a data tool you use twice.

There is a much cheaper way, and it does not require you to write a single line of code.

What Apify Actually Is, In Plain English

Apify is best understood as an app store for data collection tools.

Each tool is called an Actor. An Actor does one specific job — one pulls businesses from Google Maps, another pulls people from LinkedIn, another digs email addresses out of company websites.

Here is the important part: you do not build them, you just use them. Each Actor has a simple form. You type in what you are looking for, click Start, wait a few minutes, and download the results as an Excel or CSV file.

If you can use a search box and download a file, you can use Apify.

The Free $5 Every Month

This is the part most people miss.

Every Apify account comes with the Free plan: $5 of usage credit, every month, with no credit card required. It resets on the same day each month whether you use it or not.

Five dollars sounds like nothing until you see what these tools actually cost. Most lead-generation Actors charge between $1 and $3 per 1,000 results, so your free monthly credit works out to roughly:

For a solo founder, a freelancer, or a small team testing a new market, that free tier alone may be all you ever need. One thing worth knowing: on the Free plan the $5 is a hard stop rather than a bill. When the credit runs out the Actor simply stops instead of charging you.

Action: Create a free account, run one small test at 50 results rather than 5,000, and look at the output format before you spend real credit.

1. Google Maps Scraper, for Local Businesses

compass/crawler-google-places — from $1.50 per 1,000 places

The single best tool on this list if you sell to local businesses: restaurants, dentists, gyms, salons, contractors, car dealerships, hotels.

You type in a search like "dental clinics in Munich" and it returns the business name, address, phone number, website, rating, review count, category and opening hours. Everything you would otherwise copy by hand.

Best for: agencies, local service providers, and anyone doing city-by-city outreach.

2. LinkedIn Profile Search, for B2B Decision-Makers

harvestapi/linkedin-profile-search — $0.004 per profile, or $0.01 per profile with verified emails, plus $0.10 per search page

This is the one most B2B sellers should start with, for one specific reason: it does not ask for your LinkedIn login or cookies. Many LinkedIn tools require you to hand over your session cookie, which puts your own account at risk. This one does not.

You search by job title, company, location and industry — the same filters you would use in LinkedIn search — and get back work history, education and location. Turn on the email option and it runs deliverability checks on the addresses it finds.

With more than 43,000 users and a 4.4-star rating, it is one of the more trusted tools in the store.

Best for: B2B outbound where you need named decision-makers, not just company details.

3. Apollo People Leads Scraper, for Filtered B2B Lists

coladeu/apollo-people-leads-scraper — $3.00 per 1,000 results

Apollo has one of the biggest B2B contact databases around, and this Actor pulls structured people data out of it without needing your own Apollo account or subscription.

One honest caveat: this Actor does not return email addresses or phone numbers. It gives you the people and their company details. To get contact details, pair it with the next tool on this list.

Best for: building a targeted list of people at specific companies, then enriching it separately.

4. Contact Details Scraper, for Turning Websites Into Emails

vdrmota/contact-info-scraper — from $1.05 per 1,000 pages

This is the quiet workhorse of the list, and the one people underuse.

You feed it a list of website addresses. It visits each one and pulls out every email address, phone number and social media profile it can find, across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok, YouTube and around eight others.

Here is why it matters. The Google Maps Scraper gives you 500 local businesses with their websites but often no email address. Run those websites through this tool and you have turned a list of names into a list you can actually contact.

With nearly 60,000 users and a 4.69-star rating, it is among the most-used tools on the platform.

Best for: the second step of almost any list-building workflow.

5. Instagram Scraper, for Local, DTC and Creator Outreach

apidojo/instagram-scraper-api — around $0.50 per 1,000 posts

The cheapest tool on this list by a wide margin, and genuinely useful if your buyers live on Instagram: local businesses, e-commerce brands, gyms, restaurants and creators.

You can pull posts, profiles, hashtags and location data. Search a hashtag or a location, get a list of active accounts, then cross-reference those accounts with the Contact Details Scraper to find their business email.

Best for: agencies and anyone selling to consumer brands or local businesses with a strong social presence.

A Simple Workflow That Actually Works

Here is how the tools fit together in practice. Say you sell website design to restaurants in Berlin:

Total cost: around $1.25, comfortably inside the free monthly credit, with enough left over to do the same for three more cities.

How to Run Your First Actor

For anyone who has never touched a tool like this:

That is the whole thing. The most common beginner mistake is leaving the result limit blank on the first run and burning the month's credit in one go, so always set a small limit until you have seen what the output looks like.

One Thing to Get Right Before You Send Anything

This is worth saying plainly, especially if you or your prospects are in Europe:

None of this makes the tools unusable, and compliant cold B2B outreach happens in Europe every day. It just means the list is the easy part, and what you do with it is the part worth thinking about.

The Bottom Line

You do not need a $99 a month data subscription to start building good lead lists. Between the Google Maps Scraper for local businesses, the LinkedIn Profile Search for decision-makers, and the Contact Details Scraper to fill in the emails, most sales people can cover their list-building inside a free $5 monthly credit, and scale up only when it is clearly paying for itself.

Start with one Actor, one small run, one city. Look at the spreadsheet. Then decide.