Challenge

In 2015, Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada founded Apify to make it easy for developers to build software for web scraping and browser automation. Today, it’s the world’s largest marketplace of tools for AI agents. In addition to selling its own products, Apify lets developers build, host, and sell AI agents, web automation and data extraction scripts, MCP servers, and other tools. Customers use these tools, called Actors, on the Apify platform to extract web data, generate leads, monitor social media, track competitors, and connect existing apps and agents.

By 2024, amid the AI boom, the team’s vision had changed: they now wanted to make Apify the world’s default place to buy tools for AI workflows. To achieve that goal, Apify decided it needed to replace its payment infrastructure, which was cumbersome for its engineers to maintain.

The team embarked on a search for a new payment platform with two main goals: reducing the burden on their engineering team and positioning Apify for global growth. The latter goal meant Apify was looking for a partner that offered the local payment methods necessary to capture market share in countries such as India and China.

Apify’s finance team also wanted more powerful and flexible tools for combating fraud risks unique to a multisided marketplace with a usage-based billing model. Priorities included richer transaction-level signals and finely tuned controls for preventing specific fraud schemes.

Apify sought a partner with a broad and growing range of products that would support its changing payments needs, including its ambition to enable agents to make purchases on its platform, a capability the company expects developers will come to demand.

“We want to be at the bleeding edge of the agentic economy,” said Matej Hamas, senior engineering manager at Apify. “We firmly believe that in a year or two, the volume flowing through these channels is going to become very significant, and we want to pioneer this.”

Solution

Stripe met all of Apify’s goals for its new payment platform, offering a growing range of solutions that would position it for long-term growth.

“Stripe had superior documentation, and its UX was much better for maintainability,” Hamas said. “The product is more modern and more mature, with a better ecosystem around it—not just for engineering, but for finance in general.”

Apify implemented Stripe Payments to accept payments globally and easily add new payment methods that support its expansion into new markets. Initially, Apify opted to offer the same payment methods it had enabled through its original infrastructure (i.e., credit cards and PayPal). The team also implemented Link, Stripe's consumer network.

The team is now planning to implement local payment methods such as Alipay to unlock growth in new markets such as China, Singapore, and Malaysia. They’re also looking into enabling payments with USDC stablecoin, which is popular among the developer community, particularly in countries with unstable fiat currencies. Stablecoins let people and businesses move money globally in minutes, around the clock, without incurring transaction or foreign exchange fees. Pegged to stable assets—like the US dollar, in the case of USDC—stablecoins also avoid the price swings of other cryptocurrencies.

Apify also adopted Stripe Radar, the AI-powered fraud prevention solution that uses trillions of data points from Stripe’s global network to identify and prevent fraud. The finance team used Radar to find suspicious consumption patterns, then implement granular controls to block them. For example, the team set usage limits tied to account standing and verification requirements that scale with spend.

In summer 2026, Apify became one of the first companies to adopt Stripe’s Machine Payment Protocol (MPP), an open protocol that lets AI agents make payments programmatically without a checkout UI. Initially, Apify configured MPP to accept payments with prepaid tokens. The engineering team is now preparing to adopt a pay-per-call infrastructure, which will enable users and AI agents to pay as they consume resources, and to accept credit card payments. This lets developers monetize their tools by usage, which many users prefer to a subscription model. It also lets agents access resources on demand without requiring a human to manually approve each transaction.

Results

Apify grows payments by 195% and transactions by 175% year over year and expands to 184 countries

Apify has accelerated its path toward becoming developers’ default destination for AI tools by adopting infrastructure that makes it easy to accept payments from users around the world without having to establish relationships with local payment processors in each new country. “Since Stripe supports payments in a lot of countries and offers a lot of payment methods globally, it’s easier to get paid globally,” Hamas said.

Providing a smooth payment experience for users across the globe has helped Apify grow payments by 195% and transactions by 175% year over year, putting the company on track to exceed its projected revenue for 2026. Apify now serves users in 184 countries, growth it achieved without having to devote significant engineering headcount to payments.

75% of payments use Link for a faster, smoother checkout experience

With Link, Apify has enabled users to complete payments more easily by autofilling payment details. Once a user enters their payment details on Link—whether on Apify or through one of the thousands of other companies that use Link—they can complete payments with a single click.

“It makes the checkout process frictionless, which is win-win for everybody,” Hamas said. Today, 75% of Apify’s total payment volume runs through Link.

Finance teams reduce fraud by 81% with Radar

Before Stripe, Apify’s finance team was limited in its ability to proactively prevent fraud risks inherent to its business model. Now, the team uses Radar to configure rules that block likely fraudulent transactions before they go through. Since adopting Radar, finance has reduced fraudulent payments by 81%.

“Radar gives us better insights into what’s happening, and the ability to act as soon as possible,” Hamas said.

Apify positions itself as a pioneer in agentic commerce with minimal engineering effort

With agentic payments, AI agents can pay to use Actors, while Actor creators can earn revenue without building or managing payment infrastructure. Apify completed implementing MPP in less than a week, putting itself at the vanguard of agentic commerce without significantly increasing the burden on its engineering team. “It was just plug and play, essentially,” said Jakub Kopecký, software engineer at Apify. “If you had to implement it from scratch, it would take much longer.”