Hi Apify team

Hi, Apify team!

Today I realized some strange revenue report on two of my paid actors (Pay Per Use):

Currently:

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: $0
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: $117

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: $0
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: $117

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: $0
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: $117

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: $0
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: $117

Earlier today:

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: ~$18
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: ~$210

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: ~$18
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: ~$210

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: ~$18
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: ~$210

Actor ggs0SemoD6cE4gjda: ~$18
Actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZie: ~$210

Can this be corrected please? Thanks!

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:02 AM

Can you share screenshots? There are 3 places where the revenue shows and only one at the moment show the correct values

. The only one that show it correctly for PPR is the chart in the publiocation tab (the one where you can see daily values as well). The rest was designed for the rental actors and havent been updated yet, AFAIK. We are working on it and I am pushing it as much as I can.

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:07 AM

But I checked and in the charts the current values are correct.

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 6:14 AM

Unfortunately, I don't have any screenshots (I never thought the value would change - so I thought it was needless).

For this actor: heLL6fUofdPgRXZieheLL6fUofdPgRXZie
I am 700% sure that early yesterday, the PROFITPROFIT section was reading ~$200+. At the time of report, obviously, it was $117. Later that same day, it became ~$118 and all of a sudden it is now $117.23. Like I said, I haven't captured any screenshot because I least expected this value was ever going to reduce since it has already been tagged as PROFITPROFIT but is there any way you can confirm from your logs that there was a time when the PROFITPROFIT reached ~$200+?

I think this should be a bug

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 6:19 AM

For ggs0SemoD6cE4gjdaggs0SemoD6cE4gjda, Is there a way you can also check, from the logs, that the PROFITPROFIT reached ~$18? Because I am dang so sure about this and was actually really confused seeing it dropped back to $0. See screenshot below:
The ProfitProfit was showing ~$18+ yesterday and now $0. I'm only wondering what could have happened

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 6:25 AM

I undertand that the revenue for the PPR only comes from paying customers on Apify but the ProfitProfit section shouldn't have changed - as it means that it's actually paid customers that made that transaction and not 'free users'?

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:25 AM

I am going to check it with our main dev. Oh, and I also didint notice that you wrote wave not a minus with the numbers...

Eendless-jade I am going to check it with our main dev. Oh, and I also didint notice that you...

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 6:26 AM

Yeah, that was a wave, because I am not sure of the EXACT figure but for sure I know it reached a certain amount. Thanks for your help!

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:27 AM

There is an option to see the numbers for all users, not only paying, see the gif

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:27 AM

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:27 AM

But it still doesnt explain.

endless-jade•7/20/23, 6:28 AM

Just to make sure, we are talking about numbers in this chart, right?

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 6:30 AM

Yeah, I regularly check that chart as well. Thanks! Perhaps your logs (if it's not cleared yet) might greatly help with the metrics report

verbal-lime•7/20/23, 8:19 AM

Hi @microworlds ,
I am Matej, the lead engineer on a team working on the mechanism of paid actors. First of all, thanks for the report, we always appreciate feedback and try to improve the product as much as possible.

Explanation of your case
As @Zuzka (Apify) wrote, pay-per-result actors are still quite a new feature of our platform, and we had a bug in how the profits for pay-per-result actors (which both of your actors are) are displayed. Namely, what you saw as profit for both actors yesterday was actually revenue considering all users (i.e. paying and free). I checked the data and indeed, that value was around $18 for your Jumia scraper (ggs0SemoD6cE4gjdaggs0SemoD6cE4gjda) and around $200 for your Twitter scraper (heLL6fUofdPgRXZieheLL6fUofdPgRXZie) as of yesterday. However, correctly, the profit is computed as revenue - cost (cost is underlying platform usage of the runs, revenue what users pay for results), and only paying users are considered (i.e. those with Apify subscriptions).

Yesterday during the day (sometimes during the afternoon), a fix for the bug was deployed and that's why both those numbers fell down, Jumia to $0 and Twitter to $117. These numbers are the right ones using the correct logic, as explained above. They should also correspond to what you see in the daily overview of profits (as per Zuzka's last screenshot) - just bear in mind you need to select paying users in the chart if you want to see the actual amount you will be entitled to at the end of the month.

I hope this explanation makes sense and I apologize for showing the wrong information beforehand, and hope it didn't cause you too much inconvenience.

verbal-lime•7/20/23, 8:29 AM

a One more note on possibility of profits decreasing during the month
In the monetization statistics, when you select the profit chart with paying users, you see the daily profits you are entitled to. E.g. in the case of your Twitter scraper, these profits are always positive. As long as they are positive, the cumulative profit will never decrease during the month. However, it can happen that the daily profit would start being negative (you would see a red bar in the chart for the specific day). That could mean your pricing is set incorrectly, or maybe the website your Actor is scraping changed recently and results are not coming (hence the revenue is not coming but costs are accumulating), or it just takes more resources to scrape the website. Basically that the revenue is lower than the cost for that day. In such a case, the cumulative revenue would decrease. If this decrease would be significant, we would get notified and pass the information to you as quickly as possible. And in the future, we plan to design a mechanism so you can be notified directly.

Last note on the potentially decreasing cumulative profit
Since the daily profit can be negative, in theory it can happen that the cumulative monthly profit would turn out negative. We would of course try to help you figure out what went wrong (as soon as possible, we wouldn't wait until the end of the month) so you can turn the numbers positive again. On the monetary side, even if your numbers turned out negative for the whole month, we wouldn't try to charge you for the negative profit (of course with a small caveat that you should not try to game or somehow abuse the system which I'm sure won't be a problem

).

Hope it helped, please let me know if you had any further questions. And good job for keeping an eye on how your actors are performing :-). Thanks!

incredible-moccasinOP•7/20/23, 11:19 AM

Hi @Zuzka (Apify) and @Matej indeed everything makes perfect sense now. I thought as much. Thanks for your support!