Apify Store May 2026: 25,787 Actors, 480k MAU
Apify Store totals 2026-05-16: 25,787 actors, 3,015 active publishers, 480,052 30-day active users. Three-week delta vs 2026-04-25: catalog +5.7%, publishers +1.6%, demand +14.5%. Demand growing 9× faster than publisher base — demand-led phase.
The Apify Store closed the 2026-05-16 data window at three round numbers worth tracking month-over-month:
- 25,787 actors in the catalog
- 3,015 active publishers with at least one published actor
- 480,052 30-day active users in aggregate across all actors
Compared to the same metrics on 2026-04-25 — the earliest store snapshot in our current pulse data — the three-week deltas are:
| Metric | 2026-04-25 | 2026-05-16 | 3-week Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total actors | 24,386 | 25,787 | |
| Active publishers | 2,967 | 3,015 | |
| Sum 30d users | 419,195 | 480,052 | |
| Sum 7d users | 173,028 | 199,507 |
The composition of the growth matters more than the totals.
Demand is outpacing supply by 9×
The most informative ratio in the table is demand growth divided by publisher growth: 14.5% versus 1.6%. Aggregate buyer demand is growing roughly 9× faster than the active publisher base. That is the cleanest possible signal that the Store is in a demand-led phase — new buyers are arriving and using existing actors, rather than new publishers shipping actors that buyers then have to discover.
The actor count grew faster than the publisher count (5.7% vs 1.6%), meaning the average existing publisher added a couple of actors over the three-week window. But the per-actor demand growth (14.5% on the demand side versus 5.7% on the supply side) means demand-per-actor is also rising. The Store is becoming denser with usage, not just larger.
A different reading: if the publisher base had grown 9× faster, the conclusion would be supply-led growth (publishers piling in faster than buyers can absorb). The reverse pattern is healthier for existing publishers because it means each actor is more likely to find a buyer than it was a month ago.
Where the 480k demand lives by category
What 480,052 monthly active users means in context
The Store’s aggregate MAU is the most directly comparable figure to other developer-tool marketplaces, but the comparison is limited by what other vendors publish.
Apify’s reported ARR per the Cerebral Valley interview is roughly $25mn. Distributed across 480k 30-day active users, that implies an average per-user monthly contribution of about $4.30 — the right order of magnitude for a developer-tool platform where most usage is free or sub-dollar PPE consumption and a small head of paid users carries the revenue. The numbers are consistent.
For context against the competitive set documented in the Bright Data $300mn ARR coverage: Apify’s MAU base is the largest single signal of catalog reach in the scraping-infrastructure category. No other vendor in the segment publishes anything close to comparable data.
Catalog density continues to bifurcate
The pace of catalog growth (1,401 new actors in three weeks) makes the structural question more pressing rather than less: where in the distribution are the new actors landing?
The Q1 2026 long-tail analysis on this site documented that 57% of all tracked actors serve fewer than 10 active users per month, and 89% serve fewer than 100. The May 16 distribution would not be meaningfully different — three weeks is not enough time to reshape a distribution of 25,000+ items. What the +1,401 new actors do is widen the bottom of the curve, not the top.
The top-of-distribution composition is structurally stable. Seven actors hold 10,000+ active users in 30 days; the same seven would have held that position three weeks ago with one or two substitutions. The “household name” tier moves slowly. The middle tier (100–999 users) is where category leaders compete and where most of the genuinely visible quarterly changes happen. The bottom tier (1–9 users) is where new actors land by default and where the +1,401 mostly sit.
PPE absorbs all of it
The pricing-model composition across the catalog as of 2026-05-16: pay-per-event holds 66% of catalog and 87% of demand. Flat-price-per-month (Rental) holds 28% of catalog and 2% of demand — the tier is alive on paper, dead by usage, with a median of 3 active users per actor across 869 listings. Free holds 6% of catalog and 11% of demand, almost entirely concentrated in Apify-published developer-tooling flagships (RAG Web Browser at 21,797 users, Website Content Crawler at 7,498).
The +14.5% three-week demand growth therefore lands almost entirely in the PPE tier. Rental cannot absorb it (the buyer pool is functionally zero); Free scales with Apify’s own platform usage rather than third-party publisher activity. The implication for new publishers is direct: PPE is the only pricing model where new shipping work compounds.
Category-level growth is uneven
The 23 tracked categories grew at very different rates in the seven-day window ending 2026-05-16, documented in detail in the category growth race coverage on this site. The headline pattern at the monthly level matches: BUSINESS at high percentage growth from a small base, AUTOMATION at high absolute growth from a mature base, SOCIAL_MEDIA at low actor-count growth but high user-demand growth.
The aggregate Store metrics conceal this category-level variation. A new publisher choosing a target should read the category-level data first; the Store-wide totals are useful only as a top-line indicator of market health.
What to watch in the June 2026 pulse
Three signals worth tracking when the next monthly snapshot publishes:
Whether demand-to-publisher growth ratio holds near 9×. If it widens further, the Store is moving deeper into demand-led territory and per-actor returns will improve for existing publishers. If it tightens toward 1×, new publishers are catching up to buyer growth and the per-actor competition intensifies.
Whether MAU growth flattens or accelerates. The +14.5% three-week growth annualises to roughly +250%. Sustaining that rate for a full quarter would put 2026 Q3 aggregate MAU above 700,000. That number would be meaningful for the Apify business model and for the broader MCP-driven catalog-defensibility thesis.
Whether the +5.7% catalog growth turns over. If publishers stop adding actors at the current rate while demand continues to grow, the per-actor demand density (currently 480,052 / 25,787 = 18.6 users per actor) starts compressing the long tail. If it accelerates, the distribution stays in its current bifurcated shape.
The May 16 totals are the structural baseline. The June and July snapshots will say whether the demand-led pattern is durable or a single-month anomaly.
Sources
- Signal Census pulse: store_pulse.json (latest snapshot 2026-05-16; 25,787 actors, 3,015 publishers, 480,052 sum 30-day active users)
- Signal Census: Apify’s Long Tail — 57% under 10 users
- Signal Census: Apify Category Growth Race
- Cerebral Valley: Apify infrastructure interview