Custom Scraper — 14,800 Contractor Records in 48 Hours

The Brief

A client needed a complete database of verified contractors from a French construction industry directory, across all regions.

Standard options:

→ Data vendor: €12,000+, 2–3 weeks
→ Manual research: months of work
→ Our approach: custom scraper, proprietary data

The Challenge

The directory uses a non-standard data format and aggressive rate limiting. Off-the-shelf tools don't handle it reliably.

We needed:

→ Adaptive rate limit handling
→ Non-standard format parsing
→ Regional data structuring
→ Verification at scale

The Solution

Built a custom Node.js actor on Apify:

→ Handles rate limiting and session management
→ Parses non-standard public directory format
→ Structures by region automatically
→ Verifies each record on extraction

construction-directory/src/main.js — WebsiteHub

import Actor from 'apify';

import extractRecords from './parser';

Actor.main(async () =>

const session = await createSession(

rateLimit: 'adaptive',

headless: true,

);

// Iterate all 13 French regions

for (const region of REGIONS)

const data = await fetchRegionData(session, region);

const records = await extractRecords(data);

await Actor.pushData(records);

);

❯ apify run
Actor starting… adaptive rate limiting active
✓ Île-de-France 3,214 records
✓ Auvergne-Rhône 2,891 records
✓ Occitanie 1,744 records
… 10 more regions
✓ 14,800 records exported in 3d 04m

Custom Apify actor — Node.js with adaptive rate limiting and regional data parsing

The Output

14,800 verified contractor records structured by region, type and status. Ready for immediate outreach. Yours permanently.

construction_directory_14800.csv

Company Region Trade Qualification Email Verified

Entreprise Dupont SARL Île-de-France Électricité RGE 2024 contact@dupont.fr ✓

Names and emails blurred — actual export contains full verified contact data

The Numbers

14,800

Records delivered

€78

Total build cost

€12,000+

Vendor equivalent

What This Means for Outreach

Every client gets a custom scraper built for their exact ICP.

Not Apollo exports.

Not shared lists.

Proprietary data — yours permanently.

14,800 verified contractor records. €78. No vendor. No wait.

14,800 verified contractor records.
€78. No vendor. No wait.