Is there a chance they will still be
Is there a chance they will still be paying as support said they just have an unpaid invoice or something? If they end up not paying, will Apify make any more requests for them to pay? If they don't pay at all, will they be banned from Apify or at least is there a way for me to block them from reusing my actor?
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So, as I understand it, if the user pays for a plan, that’s obviously 100% prepaid. If they don’t pay the next month, access is canceled. But then, once the user reaches their plan limit, they switch to a “pay-as-you-go” mode. I assume that part is billed after it’s consumed, meaning it gets charged in the next billing cycle.
I also understand that if the user doesn’t pay for that extra usage, Apify would have to cover the internal platform costs, but you wouldn’t earn anything. And if you used external APIs, Apify wouldn’t be able to track or validate those costs, so they’d only cover internal usage.
If I were you and relying on many external services, I’d use the user’s token inside the code to check their plan limits, how much they’ve used, and how much they have left. That would be a good mechanism to prevent these situations, right? Using this endpoint:
👉 https://docs.apify.com/api/v2/users-me-limits-get
Please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this.
Thanks for the detailed response. It would be great if there's something built in to the platform to help prevent issues like this. Not really sure how to implement a good check with the users limit
Thanks @aciku for detailed explanation, it is pretty much on spot. Generally, in overage mode, customers are charged every $100 but for large customer with good history, it can be more.
And sadly, we will be soon implementing limited API scope (will be optional for now) where you wouldn't have access to detailed info about the user for security reasons.
I will pass the feedback to the team.
With paying - we attempt repeated charges to their card. If they pay, you get the money, all is fine. If they never pay, they are blocked and removed from platform. (we will contact them manually as well)
How often are the charge attempts? How do I know if there were attempts made yet or is that not until the end of month or billing cycle?
I think usually at least daily. I will talk with the team, it would be good to provide more upfront info
That would be useful for developers I think. Since it's done at least daily, does that mean the person who used my actor put a block on their card so they wouldn't get charged? If so, I feel that's obvious intentions to defraud.
They might have put a limit on the card and needs boss approval or similar semi-legit case.
Thanks. So will Apify continue to send reminders to the user for payment? If there's no payment made, at what point could the user potentially be banned? Just wondering if we can block the user from further use or if that's done automatically after failed payment requests.
I don't think you have many options to check this because you don't have access to user's invoices via API. You have some large costs for your runs outside of just Apify platform?
Luckily no. There are some minor costs but I can eat that. I'm just upset about the opportunity cost of ~$400 or so. Apify's cut would've been $80ish. I believe the data itself is worth $3k or more to the right buyer.
I understand these things happen though.
For PPR actors, how does apify dedupe the number of records to charge for? I think a user pulled 40k or more records but apify recorded half that like 20k as charged.
There isn't any dedupe on the dataset so if there is a missmatch between cost and number of results, please report to our support
Thanks