Apify Bounty Radar

Apify Bounty Radar

Find public open-source bounty opportunities, collect the evidence needed to decide whether to attempt them, and separate credible paid work from stale, crowded, assigned, or unsafe opportunities.

Prerequisites

• Apify account (sign up)
• Authentication via one of:
  • apify login if using the Apify CLI
  • APIFY_TOKEN environment variable
  • Token from Apify Console > Settings > Integrations

Workflow

1. Clarify the target lane: bounty platform, minimum reward, preferred stack, allowed regions, and whether credits or token payouts count.
2. Discover candidates with search Actors. Start narrow: recent GitHub issues, Algora wording, Polar funding text, or project-specific labels.
3. Crawl only the candidate pages that pass the first filter. Extract issue body, labels, comments, linked PRs, reward amount, assignment rules, and claim instructions.
4. Score each candidate before recommending work:
   • Reward credibility: platform, maintainer wording, currency, payout region, and deadline.
   • Claimability: open state, assignee, first-claim rule, required registration, and whether a claim comment is allowed.
   • Competition: number of attempts, merged or rewarded PRs, recent maintainer preference, and open high-quality PRs.
   • Delivery fit: stack, setup burden, tests, required demo video, and whether private data or paid services are needed.
5. Return a compact queue: claim now, inspect deeper, monitor, or skip. Include the exact evidence URL for each decision.

Actor Routing

Prefer Apify-maintained Actors first. Use third-party Actors only when the user accepts the extra trust and cost tradeoff.

Discovery Queries

Use several narrow searches instead of one broad scrape:

site:github.com "bounty" "$" "Steps to solve" "/attempt"
site:github.com "bounty" "$100" "is:issue" "open"
site:github.com "Polar" "Funding" "issue is completed"
site:github.com "Algora" "Low quality" "PRs will not receive review"
site:github.com "label:\"$50\"" "label:bounty"

For a specific ecosystem, add stack terms:

FastAPI bounty "$100" site:github.com
Rust bounty Algora site:github.com
Kubernetes "bounty" "$250" site:github.com

Calling Actors

Search Candidates

apify actors call apify/google-search-scraper \
  --input '{"queries":"site:github.com \"bounty\" \"$\" \"Steps to solve\" \"/attempt\"","resultsPerPage":10,"maxPagesPerQuery":2,"countryCode":"US","languageCode":"en"}' \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-bounty-radar \
  2>/dev/null

Crawl Candidate Evidence

apify actors call apify/website-content-crawler \
  --input '{"startUrls":[{"url":"https://github.com/OWNER/REPO/issues/NUMBER"}],"maxCrawlPages":1,"crawlerType":"cheerio","removeElementsCssSelector":"nav,footer,script,style","saveMarkdown":true}' \
  --json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-bounty-radar \
  2>/dev/null

Fetch Results

apify datasets get-items DATASET_ID --format json \
  --user-agent apify-awesome-skills/apify-bounty-radar \
  2>/dev/null

Decision Rules

Classify every candidate:

• claim now: clear payout, open issue, claim method available, no assignee or exclusive owner, low competition, and realistic scope.
• inspect deeper: possible payout but unclear rules, unclear status, or needs repo setup review.
• monitor: good project but already assigned, waiting on maintainer confirmation, or crowded with several strong PRs.
• skip: closed, archived, deadline passed, duplicate already rewarded, creator-only, private-registration-only, pay-to-bid, unsafe data handling, or requires publishing private config or identity metadata.

If a candidate says "first comment wins", "assigned only", "creator only", or "only one PR", treat that wording as a hard gate.

Evidence Table

Return concise rows:

Cost Guardrails

• Start with search results only. Do not crawl more than 10 candidate pages without user approval.
• For GitHub issue pages, crawl one page at a time; use GitHub APIs when available for comments and PR state.
• Stop crawling if a page is archived, closed, paid already, or clearly unavailable.
• Never crawl private repositories, account dashboards, payment settings, or pages requiring login unless the user explicitly authorizes that account workflow.

Troubleshooting

• Too many stale hits: add created:, updated:, current year, platform name, and minimum amount to the search phrase.
• Search misses label-only bounties: search GitHub labels directly with the GitHub API or crawl repository label pages.
• GitHub HTML is noisy: use website-content-crawler for page text, then verify state and comments through GitHub APIs before any public action.
• Reward is not cash: label it clearly as credits, tokens, or unknown; do not mix it with confirmed cash payout.
• Existing PRs look weak: competing is only worth it when the new implementation can prove a stronger root cause, broader coverage, or lower review burden.