You found an Apify Actor that scrapes exactly the data you need. Then the pricing page starts talking about compute units.
Misread Apify pricing and a $19 plan can quietly turn into a $60 invoice. Or you pay 20 times too much for one add-on.
We pulled live prices for popular Apify Actors from Apify’s own API. Then we checked every plan and proxy rate.
The cheapest plan for you depends less on the plan price than on one tab most people skip.
Apify has a free plan with $5 of usage a month. Paid plans cost $19 (Starter), $199 (Scale) or $999 (Business) a month, and annual billing takes 10% off.
Each plan fee comes back to you as the same amount of prepaid usage. That usage pays for everything you run, and anything above it lands on your next invoice.
If you sign up through our links, we may earn a commission. Your price stays exactly the same, and our affiliate disclosure explains how it works.
What does Apify pricing look like in real dollars?
Here’s every plan side by side. Higher plans add usage, and they also cut the rate you pay for almost everything.
Apify plans and prices
Monthly list prices, checked September 28, 2026
- Included: $5 of usage every month
- Included: $0.20 per compute unit
- Included: 5 concurrent runs, 16 GB RAM
- Not included: Apify Store discount
- Not included: Pay-as-you-go overage
- Included: $19 of usage every month
- Included: $0.20 per compute unit
- Included: 32 concurrent runs, 64 GB RAM
- Included: Bronze Store discount
- Included: Pay-as-you-go overage
- Included: $199 of usage every month
- Included: $0.16 per compute unit
- Included: 128 concurrent runs, 256 GB RAM
- Included: Silver Store discount
- Included: Pay-as-you-go overage
Business costs $999 a month with $999 of usage, $0.13 per compute unit and the Gold discount. Unused usage expires at the end of each billing cycle.
We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. This does not affect our reviews.
| Plan | Monthly price | Usage included | Per compute unit | Concurrent runs | Store discount |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | $0.20 | 5 | None |
| Starter | $19 | $19 | $0.20 | 32 | Bronze |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | $0.16 | 128 | Silver |
| Business | $999 | $999 | $0.13 | 256 | Gold |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Custom | Custom | Custom |
Starter is the odd one out. Its compute rate matches Free, so the $19 buys overage rights, more concurrency and the Bronze discount.
Scale and Business cut the compute rate to $0.16 and $0.13. They also lower the price of proxies, storage and many Store Actors.
How does an Apify bill add up?
Your plan fee becomes prepaid usage, and every run draws it down. That usage gets spent four ways:
- Actor fees. Most Store Actors charge per result or per event, such as $3 per 1,000 Google Maps places on Starter.
- Compute units. Running code costs compute units. One GB of RAM for 1 hour is 1 CU, priced at $0.13 to $0.20.
- Proxies. Residential traffic costs $7 to $8 per GB, and Google SERP proxies cost $1.70 to $2.50 per 1,000 searches.
- Storage and data transfer. Datasets, key-value stores and request queues bill per GB-hour and per 1,000 operations. Data leaving Apify costs $0.18 to $0.20 per GB.
Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle. It doesn’t roll over, so a $199 plan you barely touch is $199 gone.
Run out on the Free plan and Apify blocks your runs until the next cycle. On a paid plan, runs keep going and overage lands on your next invoice, up to a limit you set.
What’s a compute unit, and how many will you use?
A compute unit (CU) is 1 GB of memory running for 1 hour. An Actor with 4 GB of memory running for 15 minutes uses 1 CU.
Memory also sets your CPU: every 4 GB buys one full core. A single run can use anywhere from 128 MB to 32 GB, as Apify explains in its usage docs.
Apify’s own example is handy. A 4 GB run that takes 15 minutes, repeated every hour for a month, uses about 720 CUs. That’s $144 on Starter, $115 on Scale or $94 on Business.
Memory is your biggest lever. Halve the RAM on a light job that runs as fast, and you halve its compute bill.
This matters most for your own Actors and for pay-per-usage ones such as Website Content Crawler. Most pay-per-event Actors fold compute into their per-result price.
What do Apify Store Actors cost?
Popular Store Actors charge $1.50 to $4.50 per 1,000 results, and the price falls as your plan goes up.
Remember that tab most people skip? It’s the pricing section on each Actor’s page. Here’s what four of the most-used Actors charge on each plan.
| Actor | Unit | Free | Starter | Scale | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Maps Scraper | 1,000 places | $4.00 | $3.00 | $2.00 | $1.50 |
| Google Search Results Scraper | 1,000 result pages | $4.50 | $2.50 | $1.95 | $1.80 |
| TikTok Scraper | 1,000 results | $3.70 | $3.00 | $2.30 | $1.70 |
| Instagram Scraper | 1,000 results | $2.70 | $2.30 | $1.90 | $1.50 |
Three pricing models sit behind numbers like these. Pay per event charges for events the developer defines, like a scraped place or an Actor start. Pay per usage charges only the platform usage a run consumes, as Website Content Crawler does.
The third model, rentals, is on its way out. Apify stopped new rental Actors on April 1, 2026. The rest move to pay per usage on October 1, 2026, according to its Store pricing docs.
You can cap any pay-per-event run with a maximum charge. The Actor stops gracefully at that limit, and you’re never billed for events past it.
Scraping search results yourself? Our guide to scraping Google search results safely covers the limits worth knowing first.
Here’s the catch most Free-plan users miss
Actor prices do more than step down by plan. Some add-ons are priced to push you off the Free plan.
On Google Maps Scraper, business lead enrichment costs $0.10 per lead on Free and $0.005 on Starter. That’s 20 times more.
Email verification costs $0.10 against $0.004. Google Search Results Scraper’s AI Mode add-on costs $0.20 against $0.005.
Put another way, $5 of free usage buys 50 enriched leads on Free. On Starter, the same $5 covers 1,000.
So if your job needs add-ons, Starter pays for itself almost at once. Building a lead list? Our roundup of email scraping tools lists other options.
What does Apify charge for proxies, storage and data?
Proxies are the biggest extra. Residential traffic costs $7 to $8 per GB, while storage operations cost fractions of a cent.
| Item | Free / Starter | Scale | Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential proxy | $8 per GB | $7.50 per GB | $7 per GB |
| Datacenter IPs included | 5 (Free) or 30 (Starter), then $1 each | 200, then $0.80 each | 500, then $0.60 each |
| Google SERP proxy | $2.50 per 1,000 | $2 per 1,000 | $1.70 per 1,000 |
| Unblocker | $1.50 per 1,000 requests | $1.25 per 1,000 | $1 per 1,000 |
| Data transfer out | $0.20 per GB | $0.19 per GB | $0.18 per GB |
| Dataset writes | $0.005 per 1,000 | $0.0045 per 1,000 | $0.004 per 1,000 |
Not sure which proxy type your target needs? Our guide to residential vs datacenter proxies explains the trade-off.
Add-ons fill the gaps. An extra concurrent run costs $5, extra Actor RAM costs $1 per GB, and personal training costs $150 an hour.
Reading a dataset after a run also counts as usage. Pulling a big result set through the API isn’t free, though it’s cheap: 1,000 dataset reads cost $0.0004.
What does the Apify API cost?
Apify doesn’t list a separate fee for API calls. You pay for what the calls do: the runs they start, the storage they touch and the data they move.
The rate limits are generous. Each user gets 250,000 requests a minute across the API, per the API docs. Each resource, such as one Actor or dataset, handles 60 requests a second by default.
Starting runs and pushing dataset items get a higher limit of 400 requests a second. Go over and you’ll get a 429 error, which Apify’s JavaScript and Python clients retry automatically with backoff.
What do real jobs cost on each plan?
Here’s the usage cost of four common jobs at list prices. Your bill is the plan fee plus anything above it.
| Job | Free | Starter | Scale | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 Google Maps places | $40 | $30 | $20 | $15 |
| 20,000 Instagram results | $54 | $46 | $38 | $30 |
| 5,000 Google result pages | $22.50 | $12.50 | $9.75 | $9 |
| 720 compute units (hourly 4 GB job) | $144 | $144 | $115.20 | $93.60 |
Every Free column blows past the $5 limit, so those jobs stop partway. On Starter, 10,000 Maps places cost $30: your $19 fee plus $11 of overage.
Scale starts paying off once you’d spend roughly $250 to $300 a month at Starter prices. Below that, the $199 fee is mostly unused usage.
Can you get an Apify discount?
Yes, and there are more routes than most tools offer.
- Annual billing takes 10% off every paid plan.
- Students get 30% off Starter and Scale, and startups get 30% off Scale.
- Nonprofits can ask Apify for a personalized discount.
- The Creator plan costs $1 a month and includes $500 of platform usage for the first 6 months.
The Creator plan has limits. It only covers your own Actors and Apify’s universal Actors, per its terms. Residential proxy traffic is capped at 10 GB a month.
Apify vs Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI: which is cheaper for your job?
Apify wins when a ready-made scraper exists for your target. Firecrawl is simpler for turning pages into AI-ready Markdown, and ScraperAPI is cheapest for raw HTML at volume.
| Feature | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Free option | $5 of usage a month | 1,000 credits a month | 7-day trial, 5,000 credits |
| Entry plan includes | $19 of usage | 5,000 credits | 100,000 API credits |
| Billed by | Actor fees and compute units | Credits per page or search | Credits per request |
We may earn a commission when you buy through links on this page. This does not affect our reviews.
Pick Apify if a Store Actor already scrapes your target, because you pay per result and maintain nothing.
Pick Firecrawl for AI pipelines that need clean Markdown from any page, because one credit covers one page. Our Firecrawl pricing breakdown covers every plan.
Pick ScraperAPI for raw HTML at volume, because 100,000 basic requests cost $49 a month. Our ScraperAPI review has the details.
Which Apify plan should you pick?
Pick by what you’d spend at Starter prices, because that tells you when the bigger fees pay off.
- Free to test an Actor, because $5 a month covers about 1,250 Google Maps places at Free prices.
- Starter for regular small jobs, because $19 adds overage, the Bronze discount and much cheaper add-ons.
- Scale once you’d spend $250 to $300 a month at Starter prices, because the Silver discount covers the bigger fee.
- Business for heavy scraping near $1,000 a month, because it adds the Gold discount, $0.13 compute and an account manager.
- Creator if you build your own Actors, because $1 a month gets you $500 of usage for six months.
Still weighing tools? Our roundup of web scraping tools covers the wider field.
How we checked these numbers (and what we didn’t)
We pulled current Actor prices, including every discount tier, straight from Apify’s public API on September 28, 2026.
Plan, proxy, storage and discount details come from Apify’s pricing page and its docs, checked the same day. Competitor prices come from Firecrawl’s and ScraperAPI’s own pricing pages.
What we didn’t do: run a month of paid scraping on each plan. Actor prices change often, so check the pricing tab on any Actor before a big run.
Frequently asked questions
Is Apify free to use?
Yes, the Free plan gives you $5 of usage a month with no card, enough for small tests of most Actors. When it runs out, Apify pauses your runs until the next cycle instead of charging you. Free-plan proxies also work only inside the Apify platform, not from outside tools.
Do unused Apify credits roll over?
No, prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing cycle on every plan. A downgrade is the one exception: the fee isn’t prorated, but unused platform usage carries over to the new plan. Upgrades are prorated, so you only pay the difference for the rest of the cycle.
Can I cancel my Apify subscription anytime?
Yes, you can cancel in Billing at any time. Your plan then runs to the end of the current cycle without renewing. You may still owe overage from that cycle, so check your usage chart before you leave.
How do Apify pricing tiers change Store Actor prices?
Each paid plan maps to a discount tier: Starter gets Bronze, Scale gets Silver and Business gets Gold. Actor owners decide whether to join the program and set a price per tier, so not every Actor gets cheaper. Enterprise customers can get further discounts.
Can an AI agent pay for Apify runs without an account?
Yes, an agent with a crypto wallet can pay through the x402 or MPP protocols at agi.apify.com, with no sign-up. It gets a temporary API token with a fixed spend cap, and each Actor run is metered against it. Any unused balance expires with the token.
How much memory should I give an Apify Actor?
Start with the Actor’s default and run a small test. Apify recommends lowering memory for single, isolated jobs, such as scraping one URL. Each 4 GB of memory also adds a CPU core, so cutting memory too far can slow browser-based runs.
What happens when I pass my prepaid usage on a paid plan?
Your runs keep going and Apify sends you a notification. The overage goes on your next invoice until you reach the usage limit set in Billing. Set that limit before you schedule Actors, because a runaway schedule can pile up overage quickly.
What support comes with each Apify plan?
Free users get community support, Starter adds chat, and Scale gets priority chat plus one training hour a quarter. Business adds a dedicated account manager and a training hour every month. Starter users can buy personal tech training at $150 an hour.
The bottom line on Apify pricing
Apify pricing looks like four plans, but your real cost is Actor fees, compute units and proxies.
Test on the Free plan. Move to Starter the moment you need add-ons or overage, because Apify Actors cost far less there. Scale only pays off past roughly $250 to $300 a month of Starter-priced usage.
One warning: paid plans keep billing overage, so set a usage limit in Billing before you schedule anything.
Your next step: open a free Apify account and run your Actor on a small input. The run’s detail page shows exactly what it cost.
