Apify Pricing 2026 Explained: Free Tier to Scale — What You Pay

The three layers of Apify pricing

Everything you pay falls into three buckets:

• Platform subscription — Free ($0, $5/mo credit), Starter ($49/mo), Scale ($199/mo), Business ($999/mo). Each includes a usage credit roughly equal to its price
• Compute units (CU) — the meter running on every actor run: RAM × time. A 4GB actor running 30 minutes burns ~1 CU
• Paid actors — some Store actors charge per result or a monthly fee on top (rented actors). Most popular scrapers are free-to-run, you pay only compute

The mental model: your subscription credit pays for the compute and actor fees. Overages bill at the per-CU rate.

What the free tier actually covers

$5/month in usage credit is a real testing budget, not a demo tease: a few dozen Google Maps scrapes of a niche+city, several thousand review extractions, or a couple of full competitor catalog pulls — more than enough to validate whether a workflow pays for itself.

The free tier is also permanent — no trial countdown. If your usage stays small (a weekly lead scrape of a few hundred results), you can run on it indefinitely.

Starter at $49/mo: who it covers

Starter is the working plan for most solo users and small agencies: its included usage handles daily lead scrapes on a niche, price monitoring across dozens of competitors, or weekly review tracking across a client portfolio — the exact workloads in our lead generation and price monitoring guides.

The workloads that outgrow Starter fast: heavy proxy usage on protected sites, big TikTok/Instagram volume, and large marketplace pulls measured in hundreds of thousands of results. At that scale you are on Scale ($199) — and usually earning enough from the data for it to be a rounding decision.

Where the money actually goes

Three cost drivers dominate bills, in order:

• Residential proxies — required for protected sites (Instagram, LinkedIn); the single biggest cost lever. Datacenter proxies are far cheaper where they work
• Run time × memory — a slow actor on a heavy page burns CUs; choose efficient actors and limit pagination
• Paid actor fees — check the actor page before running at scale; per-result pricing adds up on volume

Cheap where it matters: scraping your own data, public directories, and unprotected sites costs pennies — which is why Google Maps lead scraping is the best first use case.

Apify vs alternatives on price

Per-SKU repricing platforms: $300-500/mo vs Apify ~$49 for equivalent coverage. Lead databases: $99-500/mo for stale shared data vs scraped-fresh lists on a Starter plan. Dedicated scraper hosting: cheaper at massive scale but you build the infrastructure Apify already has.

Where Apify is NOT the cheap option: simple one-off extractions a $20 point-tool handles, or huge sustained volume where rolling your own infra wins on pure compute cost.

How to keep bills predictable

• Set a usage cap in billing settings — hard stop, no surprises
• Test every new actor on a small run (100 items) before scaling
• Prefer datacenter proxies where sites allow them
• Schedule smart: daily runs on deltas beat full rescans
• Monitor CU per run in the console — a spike usually means the actor or the site changed