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Frequently asked questions

Everything teams ask before wiring Pry into production.

Getting started

What is Pry?
Pry is an adaptive web-scraping engine with a 15-tier escalation ladder — it starts with a cheap plain HTTP request and only climbs to stealth browsers when a site fights back. Cloudflare, DataDome and Akamai are handled automatically. The same engine powers our 109 Apify Actors and the x402-gated API.
How do I run my first scrape?
Add target URLs, click Start (or POST to /v1/scrape), and results stream into the dataset as each URL finishes. Export as JSON/CSV/Excel or consume via API and webhooks. Full walkthroughs live under Getting started.
Can I schedule runs?
Yes — scheduling, monitoring and API access are first-class Apify platform features. Monitoring Actors pair especially well with hourly or daily schedules: the first run captures a baseline, after that you only hear about actual changes.

Data & reliability

Where does the data come from?
It depends on the Actor — and we publish it either way. Our API-backed Actors (GitHub releases, npm/PyPI stats, App Store reviews, domain records, FX rates) document their exact public endpoints in the README. Extraction Actors read schema.org JSON-LD the target site already embeds. No magic, no silent breakage.
What happens when a page has no data?
Your dataset says skipped with the reason — never a fabricated row. You can audit every cent: each dataset item carries its status, method tier and timestamp.
Do you test against real websites?
Every extractor is back-tested against live sites before publishing. That process caught a parser bug affecting millions of WordPress sites (unquoted JSON-LD) before launch — see our live-fire verification log.

Pricing & billing

How does pricing work?
Pay-per-event from $0.50 per 1,000 results. No subscriptions, no minimums. Monitoring Actors charge less for quiet checks; you pay for outcomes, not for our compute struggle.
Do you offer volume pricing?
Yes — for bulk pipelines or private deployments contact biz@cryptorugmunch.com.
What are the pricing tiers and rate limits?
Pricing is published per endpoint in /v1/x402/pricing and scales across per-operation tiers, from standard scrapes up to heavier operations like screenshots, crawls and OCR. Rate limits are tier-based and enforced server-side; the escalation ladder walks you up as demand grows. You only pay for successful gates — health, docs, job management and the payment flow itself are always free.

Payments & API keys

How does x402 payment actually work?
x402 is the HTTP 402 Payment Required standard, native to crypto. When a client hits a gated endpoint, Pry replies 402 with the price and the assets it accepts. The client pays on-chain, a facilitator verifies and settles, and Pry returns your data.Server-authoritative pricing, payTo attestation, transaction-replay protection and settlement-success gating mean you pay only for work the facilitator confirms. No signup, no KYC.
Which chains and assets are accepted?
ERC-20 USDC and USDT on EVM chains, USDC/USDT and SOL on Solana, and USDT on Tron. Each gated endpoint quotes its accepted assets, and payments must land on the correct treasury address for that network: 0x1E3AC01d0fdb976179790BDD02823196A92705C9 (EVM), G1uZFfsdxK2PuH2Em5LhRkEcptxHWe4vy5BZak67QyKv (Solana), TYSWXWr24QTe3c99V9dtzhe1aZTneE261p (Tron).
How do I get an API key and what does it do?
Create one from the Pry dashboard. An API key holds a prepaid balance with a transparent ledger of every credit and debit, and it unlocks the hosted HTTP API. Prefer no account? The same endpoints also speak x402, so the payment itself is your credential — and you can hold balance without an API key via bulk scrape packs.
What happens if a payment fails?
Pry fails closed. If the x402 payment does not settle — wrong asset, network issue, or a replayed transaction — the request is rejected with the exact expected asset and price. Settlement-success gating releases data only after the facilitator confirms payment, so a failed payment never burns credits and never returns partial data.
Why was my mainnet payment not credited?
Three usual causes: the payment went to the wrong treasury address for that network, it was sent on testnet (testnet transactions are rejected by design), or it was flagged as a replay and refused. Check the channel, the address and the network against the values above, and re-check the balance/ledger on the API key.

Deployment

Self-host or cloud?
Self-host for full control and data that never leaves your infrastructure. The hosted subscription trades that for managed stealth, a residential proxy pool, dashboards and an SLA. The x402 pay-per-call lane sits in between: your code, our per-call billing.
Is it open source?
Yes — the core engine is MIT licensed and self-hostable with unlimited requests; the stealth/anti-detection module is source-available under BSL 1.1 (free for personal and non-commercial use, commercial license for production). Source is on Codeberg and GitLab.

Compliance

Is scraping legal?
We stick to publicly available data and documented sources, respecting robots.txt, ToS and privacy law. The self-hosted Pry core ships compliance tooling: consent handling, deletion and retention controls.

Still have questions?

Ask us directly — biz@cryptorugmunch.com