How much does Apify cost in 2026?
Quick Answer: Apify offers a free tier with $5 of included usage. Paid plans start at $29/month (Starter, $26 annual) and $199/month (Scale, $179 annual), both based on platform usage credits; Business is $999/month (July 2026). Enterprise pricing with dedicated infrastructure is custom as of March 2026.
Pricing Overview
Apify is a web scraping and data extraction platform that uses a usage-based pricing model. Costs are measured in "compute units" that reflect the CPU, memory, and run time consumed by scraping actors (Apify's term for automation scripts). The platform also offers pre-built actors from its marketplace that can be run without writing code.
Apify Pricing Tiers (as of March 2026)
| Tier | Price | Key Features |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 ($5 platform usage included) | 30-day data retention, community actors, shared proxy |
| Starter | $29/mo | $29 platform usage, 14-day data retention, basic proxy, email support |
| Scale | $199/mo | $499 platform usage, 90-day data retention, premium proxy, priority support |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing | Dedicated infrastructure, custom SLA, dedicated account manager, on-premise option |
What Each Plan Includes
Free
The free plan includes $5 worth of platform usage per month, which is enough to run small-scale scraping tasks — typically 1,000-5,000 web pages depending on the actor's compute requirements. Data is retained for 30 days, and users have access to community-built actors in the Apify Store. The shared proxy pool is included but may be blocked by some target websites.
Starter
The Starter plan at $49/month provides $49 worth of platform compute. Data retention drops to 14 days (shorter than the free tier). It adds basic datacenter proxy access and email support. This tier is suitable for businesses running regular scraping jobs on 10,000-50,000 pages per month.
Scale
The Scale plan at $499/month provides $499 in compute credits and extends data retention to 90 days. It includes premium residential proxies (critical for scraping sites with aggressive anti-bot measures), priority support, and higher concurrency limits. This tier targets businesses that depend on web data for competitive intelligence, pricing monitoring, or lead generation.
Enterprise
Enterprise pricing includes dedicated infrastructure, custom SLAs, a dedicated account manager, and the option for on-premise deployment. Enterprise contracts are suitable for organizations scraping millions of pages monthly or processing sensitive data that requires private infrastructure.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
- Proxy costs are separate: Residential proxy traffic is billed separately from compute usage. Residential proxies cost approximately $8 per GB of data transferred. A large scraping operation that transfers 100 GB of data through residential proxies would incur $800 in proxy costs alone.
- Actor compute varies widely: Different actors consume compute at different rates. A simple HTML scraper might cost $0.25 per 1,000 pages, while a headless browser scraper (using Puppeteer or Playwright) might cost $2-5 per 1,000 pages due to higher CPU and memory usage.
- Data retention trade-off: The Starter plan's 14-day data retention is shorter than the free plan's 30 days. Users who need longer retention must download or export data regularly.
How Apify Pricing Compares
Apify competes with both web scraping platforms and data extraction APIs. Bright Data's SERP API starts at $500/month for 100,000 requests. ScrapingBee starts at $49/month for 1,000 API credits. Octoparse starts at $89/month for cloud-based scraping. Apify's advantage is its actor marketplace and the ability to run custom code, which provides more flexibility than API-only scraping services. For developers comfortable writing or customizing code, Apify typically offers better value per page scraped.
Editor's Note: We ran Apify for a price monitoring project scraping 50,000 product pages daily from 12 e-commerce sites. Monthly cost: $499 Scale plan + approximately $320 in residential proxy usage = $819/month. The residential proxies were necessary because 4 of the 12 target sites blocked datacenter IPs. Without residential proxies, the Scale plan alone would have sufficed at $499/month. Processing 1.5 million pages per month at $819 works out to approximately $0.55 per 1,000 pages — significantly less than API-based services that charge $2-5 per 1,000 requests.
Editor's Note: Across ShadowGen scraping builds on Apify in 2024-26, the included monthly credits cover compute, proxy, and Actor fees together, and residential-proxy bandwidth at $8 a gigabyte is the silent budget-killer. One JavaScript-heavy scrape pulling residential IPs drained most of a client's $29 Starter credit in a few days before we moved the parts that did not need residential proxies onto datacenter IPs. Two more traps: Store Actor charges (pay-per-result or rental) stack on top of your compute and proxy spend, so the Actor's advertised price is not the total, and unused credits do not roll over, so you cannot bank a quiet month to cover a heavy one. — Rafal Fila, ShadowGen
Related Questions
Related Tools
Apify
Web scraping and browser automation platform with 2,000+ pre-built scrapers
ETL & Data PipelinesActivepieces
No-code workflow automation with self-hosting and AI-powered features
Workflow AutomationAutomatisch
Open-source Zapier alternative
Workflow AutomationBardeen
AI-powered browser automation via Chrome extension
Workflow AutomationRelated Rankings
Best Human-in-the-Loop Automation Platforms 2026
Eight platforms are ranked here on a single mechanism: how a person enters an automated path, and what the system can prove afterward about the decision they made. Moxo scores 7.7 and ranks first; Camunda 8 scores 7.2, Microsoft Power Automate 7.1, Pega 6.9, n8n 6.7, Zapier 5.9…
Best Automation Platforms for AI Orchestration 2026
This ranking answers one question: how many real business applications can an AI agent act on out of the box? It evaluates nine platforms as of August 2026 on the reach they give an agent, not on the workflow logic they can express. That boundary is deliberate, because two…
Dive Deeper
Moxo vs Gumloop in 2026: Texting the Client, or Building the Agent
Gumloop (founded 2023) builds AI agents a company's own staff run; Moxo, whose predecessor Moxtra was co-founded in 2012, runs processes that wait on people outside the company. Gumloop wins three rounds to two: the way in, per-tool gating and a priced overage. Moxo wins on…
Moxo vs Relay.app in 2026: Where Relay's Approval Workflows Can Go Next
Relay.app, founded in 2021, shut down in September 2026 and deleted every account, workflow and run history; Moxo, whose predecessor Moxtra was co-founded in 2012, is one destination for its human-in-the-loop users. Relay.app takes two rounds, Moxo one, and vendor risk is a draw…
Moxo vs Workato in 2026: The Integration Estate, or the Approval Inside It
Workato, founded in 2013, is an enterprise integration platform whose Workflow apps add human tasks to recipes; Moxo, whose predecessor Moxtra was co-founded in 2012, ships the human step itself. Workato wins three rounds to two: connector reach, change control and the way in…