On 22 September 2025, Apify removed every community Apollo.io actor from its store. The announcement in Apify’s Discord was short: the scrapers could only work “using Apollo accounts, which constitutes a breach of their terms” (Apify Discord). Ours was one of them. This post is the account we would have wanted to read that morning.
What we ran on Apify
Our actor did what every Apollo actor did. You pasted a search URL, it paged through the results and returned a dataset you could export as CSV, Excel or JSON. Resellers used it to fill client lists by the thousand; founders used it to build their first outbound campaigns. The actor ran on Apify’s infrastructure, which meant it also ran on accounts that were not the customer’s own.
That design was the whole problem. Shared accounts get rate-limited, flagged and banned, which is why customers of every cloud Apollo scraper still report orders stuck for days and “No Results” walls. And a marketplace that hosts the actor can remove it in an afternoon when a lawyer asks. Both risks were visible for months before the removal; the removal just made them final.
The day it stopped
Thousands of n8n, Make and Zapier workflows that called Apollo actors failed at once. Searches for “apify apollo scraper alternative” appeared in Google’s autocomplete within days and are still there a year later (Google Suggest). The actors that stayed in the store with “Apollo” in the name were rebranded “Leads Finder” products querying their own databases, not Apollo’s, at $1.50 per 1,000 with a 3.46 rating (Apify).
What we rebuilt
Your session, not ours. The Apollo Exporter Chrome extension acts as a bridge: the export replays your search inside your own logged-in Apollo tab, page by page, at the pace a person would read it. No credentials are handed over, no shared account exists to be banned, and there is no actor for a marketplace to remove.
Verification before billing. A verification vendor’s study of 100,000 Apollo contacts exported in the first half of 2026 found 73.2% valid, 18.4% catch-all and 5.8% invalid (BounceZero). Every email in an Apollo Exporter file is checked by BounceBan before the file is built, and rows without an email are not charged.
Credits that never expire. The Apify era taught us that buyers think in cost per thousand and hate subscriptions they forget to cancel. Pricing is pay as you go, priced per 1,000 on the pricing page, and every account starts with 500 free credits.
Live status. The dashboard streams each request’s progress the moment it changes, so there is no refreshing a page to find out whether a file is ready.
For Apify users migrating today
The input is the same: an Apollo search URL. The Apify alternative guide maps the old actor names and inputs to the new flow, and the API page shows the two calls that replace an actor run from n8n, Make or Clay. If your search is larger than Apollo’s 100-page cap, the free URL splitter breaks it into exportable bands.
The part that has not changed
Apollo’s terms prohibit automated extraction, and that applies to every method on the market, including ours. We say so on the Apollo scraper page and in the legal guide rather than pretending otherwise. Running inside your own session is the lowest-footprint way to do it, but the risk is not zero, and a product built after a shutdown owes its customers that honesty.