How much does Apify cost in 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)

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.