Apify Influencer Discovery Actors, Reviewed

It has no first party Actor for finding creators or getting their contact details. For that layer, the single most commercially important step in influencer marketing, the Store offers community maintained Actors with lifetime user counts you can count on your fingers.

This is not an attack on Apify's quality. It is a note about where the platform's coverage stops, and it is checkable in ten minutes on Apify's own Store pages. Verified 1 October 2026.

The maintained Actors, and what they answer

None answers "find me creators matching these criteria." That is a different operation, and it is the one influencer marketing actually runs on.

The discovery and contact Actors

Here is what the Store offers for the job itself.

receptional_blender/influencer-discovery

Listed as "Find Influencers & Emails, IG, TikTok, YT". Community maintained by Assia Fadli. Priced from $0.01 per 1,000 results, which is remarkably cheap.

9 total lifetime users. 1 monthly active user. No ratings at all.

It advertises a genuinely useful field list: platform, handle, displayName, profileUrl, followers, following, postCount, bio, externalLinks, email, hasEmail, engagementRate, niche, source, scrapedAt. On paper that is close to what you want.

With no ratings and 9 lifetime users, nobody has publicly validated it. It reports 100% run success, which is encouraging, though against 1 monthly user that is a very small sample.

flash_scraper/creator-leads-scraper

Listed as "Influencer Email Finder, TikTok, Instagram & YouTube". Community maintained by Flash Scrape. 5.00 stars.

61 total lifetime users. 38 monthly.

Priced at $0.002 per creator lead, which is $2 per 1,000. The listing also states that Instagram leads move to $0.004 per lead ($4 per 1,000) starting 7 October 2026. A 100% price increase announced about a week ahead.

Its feature set is the most complete in this category: 54 uniform columns across all three platforms, including handle, bio, followers, verification, a best published email with MX verification status, engagement, and a lead score from 0 to 100 with an A to F grade. If it works as described, that is a thoughtfully built tool and the 5.00 star rating, however few the raters, is a point in its favour.

Others in the category

Found via Store search, with prices and maintainers I did not individually verify, so treat these as names rather than recommendations: tomas_bogado/social-influencer-leads-finder, koushik_ai_devloper/influencer-discovery-email-scraper, apricot_blackberry/influencer-email-finder, maximedupre/tiktok-email-finder, haketa/tiktok-contact-scraper, intelscrape/tiktok-scraper.

Why the user counts are the story

Nine lifetime users. Sixty one lifetime users. Set against 411,542 for the Instagram scraper.

That ratio is not a comment on code quality. Both of those Actors may work perfectly. It is a statement about what you are depending on:

• No first party ownership. Apify maintains the Instagram scraper. Apify does not maintain these. If one breaks, the fix depends on an individual's availability and interest.
• No SLA. Apify sells availability separately: their service levels page lists No SLA as the default, meaning no availability guarantee, no monitoring and no guaranteed reaction time, with 99.5% and 99.9% tiers purchasable. That page also does not state whether SLA tiers cover Store Actors at all, so do not assume buying one makes a community Actor someone's obligation.
• No validation at scale. With 1 and 38 monthly users, edge cases have not been found by other people yet. You will find them.
• Price volatility. A 100% increase with roughly a week's notice is a live example, not a hypothetical.
• Platform fragility. When a platform changes its surface, each independent maintainer fixes their own Actor on their own schedule. Apify hosts public per Actor issue pages that make this concrete: "The actor stopped working", "Actor is not working as advertised", "Actor down", and "AVOID! Stopped working".

For a weekend prototype, none of that matters and $0.01 per 1,000 is unbeatable. For a roadmap commitment with a customer facing feature on top, it is a real risk to put in writing.

The hashtag workaround and what it costs

Most teams that cannot find a discovery Actor they trust end up building discovery out of a hashtag scraper. The logic is reasonable: scrape a niche hashtag, collect the creators who posted, filter by followers and engagement.

Three costs that are easy to miss:

1. You pay for the whole funnel. Per result billing applies to every creator you scrape, including the ones your filter immediately discards. If 1 in 20 candidates qualifies, you paid 20x the per result price per usable creator.
2. Hashtags are a weak proxy for niche. A beauty hashtag is full of brands, resellers, bots and people posting off topic. Precision comes from attributes, not tags.
3. The tool rated worst is the one you are relying on. apify/instagram-hashtag-scraper sits at 3.41 stars, the lowest of any major first party social Actor. Apify does not publish a cause, so read it as user sentiment rather than diagnosis, but it is the most relevant single data point for anyone choosing this path.

Then you still have no engagement rate (not returned, you compute it), no email (not returned at all), and no normalization across platforms.

What discovery as a first class operation looks like

The contrast is not "better scraping," it is a different operation entirely. The Roster API exposes 14 filters on one endpoint across more than 1,000,000 Instagram and TikTok creators:

curl "https://api.ugcroster.com/v1/creators/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rsk_your_key_here" \
  -G \
  -d niche=skincare \
  -d state=CA \
  -d follower_min=25000 \
  -d follower_max=150000 \
  -d engagement_min=0.035 \
  -d has_email=true \
  -d gender=female \
  -d sort=engagement \
  -d limit=100

q, follower_min, follower_max, engagement_min, category, niche, has_email, country, city, state, gender, sort, limit, page.

Ten credits. One round trip. Filtering happens server side, so you pay for the 100 records you wanted rather than the 2,000 you enumerated. engagement_rate is precomputed, so your numbers are consistent and comparable. extracted_email is a field, so has_email=true is a filter rather than a separate enrichment project.

And the operation after discovery exists on the same key. The UGC Roster API exposes creator search, briefs, campaigns and payouts behind one key at UGCRoster: /v1/briefs sends the brief, /v1/contracts papers the deal, /v1/deliverables tracks the asset, /v1/payouts pays them, /v1/webhooks notifies your system. No Actor covers those steps, first party or community.

Where Apify remains the right answer

To be clear, because this matters for making a good decision rather than a lazy one:

• Post level depth. Comments, transcripts, video metrics, media downloads. clockworks/tiktok-comments-scraper at $0.50 per 1,000 comments is excellent value and a creator database does not do this.
• Arbitrary targets. 78,000+ Actors covering essentially any website. A vertical creator API covers creators.
• Custom Actors. If nothing existing does what you need, write it and inherit scheduling, proxy rotation, storage, retries and webhooks. A fixed schema API gives you only what it returns.
• Crawlee. Apify maintains Crawlee as genuinely good open source tooling for Python and JavaScript, deployable to AWS Lambda or Cloud Run. You can build on it and never pay Apify anything, which is a rare and creditable thing for a commercial platform to offer.

The sensible architecture for most teams is both: Apify for arbitrary targets, custom work and post level depth, a creator data API for discovery, contact and the campaign workflow. What is not sensible is putting a customer facing discovery feature on an Actor with 9 lifetime users and no SLA because it was the only thing in the Store that did the job.

See also the full Apify alternative breakdown, the Instagram and TikTok Actor comparisons, Apify pricing decoded and how creator data APIs compare.

Docs at api.ugcroster.com/docs, reference at api.ugcroster.com/reference, plans at api.ugcroster.com/pricing, keys at api.ugcroster.com/keys.

FAQ

Does Apify have an influencer discovery tool?

Not a first party one. Apify maintains social scrapers that describe known handles, hashtags and URLs, but creator discovery and contact enrichment are served only by community Actors. The two main ones showed 9 and 61 lifetime users as of 1 October 2026, with no first party ownership and no SLA.

What is the best Apify Actor for finding influencer emails?

The two candidates are receptional_blender/influencer-discovery (from $0.01 per 1,000 results, 9 lifetime users, no ratings) and flash_scraper/creator-leads-scraper ($0.002 per lead rising to $0.004 for Instagram on 7 October 2026, 61 lifetime users, 5.00 stars). The second has the richer feature set, including MX verified emails and a lead score. Both are community maintained, so validate thoroughly before depending on either.

Can I do influencer discovery with the Apify hashtag scraper?

You can approximate it, and many teams do. The costs are that you pay per result for every candidate including the ones you discard, hashtags are a noisy proxy for niche, engagement rate is not returned so you compute it, and email is not returned at all. apify/instagram-hashtag-scraper also carries a 3.41 star rating, the lowest among major first party social Actors.

Why do Apify influencer Actors have so few users?

Most likely because the audience that needs creator discovery buys vertical influencer platforms instead, so demand on a general scraping marketplace is thin. Whatever the cause, the practical effect for a buyer is the same: little public validation, no first party maintenance, and dependence on one person's availability when a platform changes.

Do Apify Actors come with an SLA?

Not by default. Apify's service levels page lists No SLA as the baseline, with no availability guarantee, no monitoring and no guaranteed reaction time, and sells Basic and Advanced at 99.5% and Ultimate at 99.9%. The page does not state whether those tiers cover Store Actors, so do not assume purchasing an SLA transfers responsibility for a community Actor.

What should I use instead for creator discovery?

Something where discovery is the product rather than a side effect of scraping. Practically that means an API you can query by follower range, engagement rate, niche, location, gender and email presence in a single request, returning normalized records with engagement precomputed, ideally with the briefing, contracting and payout steps on the same key so the workflow after discovery is not a second integration.