Apify vs ScraperAPI: $60 vs $49 for 15k Amazon URLs
ScraperAPI is a proxy and rendering API. You send it a URL, you get HTML back, and you still own the parser. Apify is a platform. You run a pre-built Actor, it returns structured JSON, and it schedules and stores the result for you. Pick ScraperAPI when your scraper already works. Pick Apify when you would rather not write one.
The sticker prices ($19 against $49) make Apify look two and a half times cheaper. On a real workload it usually isn't, and at high volume ScraperAPI wins outright. Here is the arithmetic.
How does Apify's pricing compare to ScraperAPI's?
Neither product prices per page, so the plan fees tell you almost nothing. Apify charges $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09 for Starter, which includes $19 of platform usage; you then burn that usage at the Actor's own rate. ScraperAPI charges $49/month for Hobby and gives you 100,000 API credits, but an Amazon request costs 5 credits, not 1.
The workload: 500 Amazon ASINs, refreshed once a day. 15,000 pages a month.
| Apify | ScraperAPI | |
|---|---|---|
| Plan | Starter, $19/month | Hobby, $49/month |
| What the fee includes | $19 of platform usage | 100,000 API credits |
| Unit price for this job | $0.004 per Amazon result | 5 API credits per Amazon request |
| 15,000 pages consumes | $60 of usage | 75,000 credits |
| Monthly bill | $60 ($19 plan + $41 overage) | $49 |
| Parser you still have to write and maintain | none | all of it |
Sources, all checked 2026-09-09: Apify plan fees and included usage from Apify's pricing page; the $0.004 per-result rate is the Bronze tier of the junglee/amazon-crawler Actor's pay-per-event pricing, read from api.apify.com/v2/acts/junglee~amazon-crawler (Starter maps to the Bronze Apify Store discount tier). ScraperAPI plan fees and credit allowances from ScraperAPI's pricing page; the 5-credit e-commerce multiplier from ScraperAPI's credits and request costs documentation.
ScraperAPI wins that line by $11 a month. That is a real result and we are not going to bury it. It stops being true in both directions as soon as you move the volume.
Where the two prices cross
Apify bills usage linearly, so its cost is a straight line. ScraperAPI bills in bundles, so its cost is a staircase. Straight lines and staircases cross more than once.
| Amazon pages / month | Apify (Starter, $0.004/result) | ScraperAPI (5 credits/page) | Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $19 (usage sits inside the included $19) | $49 (Hobby) | Apify |
| 12,250 | $49 | $49 (Hobby) | tie, first crossover |
| 15,000 | $60 | $49 (Hobby) | ScraperAPI |
| 20,000 | $80 | $49 (Hobby, exactly at its 100,000-credit ceiling) | ScraperAPI |
| 25,000 | $100 | $149 (Startup; one page over the ceiling forces the jump) | Apify |
| 37,250 | $149 | $149 (Startup) | tie, second crossover |
| 200,000 | $800 | $149 (Startup, at its 1,000,000-credit ceiling) | ScraperAPI |
Read the shape rather than the rows. Under about 12,000 pages a month Apify is cheaper because you are inside its included usage and ScraperAPI's floor is $49 whatever you do. Between roughly 12,000 and 20,000 pages ScraperAPI's Hobby bundle is cheaper. The moment you cross a credit ceiling ScraperAPI triples and Apify does not, so the advantage flips back for about 17,000 pages. Past roughly 37,000 pages a month ScraperAPI is cheaper and stays cheaper, and at 200,000 pages it is cheaper by more than five times. If your volume is large and stable, ScraperAPI's credit bundles are the better buy and no amount of platform convenience closes a $650 gap.
What both columns leave out
- Apify: the $0.004 covers the primary
Resultevent only. The same Actor charges $0.002 per extra offer, $0.002 per extra seller, and $0.05 per delivery-location lookup at the Bronze tier. Turning on ZIP-level delivery pricing for all 15,000 results adds $750 a month, more than twelve times the rest of the job. Check the event list before you enable a field. - ScraperAPI: 5 credits is the floor for an Amazon URL, not the ceiling. Its documentation lists 10 credits for a JavaScript-rendered request, 10 for premium proxies, 30 for ultra premium, and 10 for each anti-bot bypass (Cloudflare, Datadome, PerimeterX). It does not state on that page how a domain multiplier and a rendering flag combine, so budget above 5, not at it.
- Neither column includes your own engineering time, which is the largest number on this page and the one nobody can quote you.
What do you actually get for free?
Both give you roughly a thousand Amazon pages before you pay anything. They run on different clocks, and that difference matters more than the allowance.
| Apify Free | ScraperAPI trial | |
|---|---|---|
| Allowance | $5 of platform usage | 5,000 API credits |
| Credit card | not required | not required |
| Amazon pages that buys | ~1,000 results at the Free-tier rate of $0.005 | ~1,000 requests at 5 credits each |
| Resets | every month, indefinitely | once, after 7 days it ends |
So Apify's free tier is a permanent small allowance and ScraperAPI's is a one-week evaluation. If you want to run a tiny job forever without a card, that is Apify. If you want to stress-test proxy quality on your own difficult domains for a week, that is ScraperAPI. More detail on the first in what the Apify free plan actually includes.
How many jobs can each run at once?
Concurrency is what ScraperAPI sells on, and the units are not comparable. A ScraperAPI thread is one in-flight HTTP request. An Apify concurrent run is one whole Actor run that may make thousands of requests inside itself. Starter's 32 versus Hobby's 20 is not a 1.6x advantage; it is a different quantity with the same name.
| Tier | ScraperAPI concurrent threads | Apify max concurrent Actor runs |
|---|---|---|
| Free / trial | not published for the trial | disputed (see below) |
| Entry | 20 (Hobby, $49) | 32 (Starter, $19) |
| Mid | 50 (Startup, $149) | 128 (Scale, $199) |
| Higher | 100 (Business, $299) · 200 (Scaling, $475) | 256 (Business, $999) |
One caveat we are not going to paper over. Apify's free-plan concurrency is stated differently on two of Apify's own pages. apify.com/pricing lists 5 max concurrent runs for the Free plan; docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists 25 in its limits table. Both read 2026-09-09. The two pages agree on every paid tier, so this is a free-plan discrepancy only. Design for 5 and treat anything above it as a bonus; if you need the higher number confirmed, ask Apify support in writing before you build around it.
What is actually different between them?
| Category | Apify | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Scraping platform: Actors, execution, storage, scheduling | Proxy and rendering API: send a URL, get HTML |
| Pre-built scrapers | 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors (apify.com/store, 2026-09-09) | none; you parse the HTML yourself |
| Output | Structured JSON or CSV per Actor | Raw page content |
| Where code runs | Apify's cloud | your servers, your language, your runtime |
| Scheduling | Built-in cron, webhooks, API triggers | your cron or orchestrator |
| Storage | Datasets and key-value stores included | your database or object store |
| Billing unit | Per event, or compute units at $0.20/CU on Starter | API credits, 1 to 75 per request depending on flags and domain |
| Geotargeting | Proxy country selection | US and EU only below the $299 Business plan; global above it |
| Anti-bot handling | Per Actor, plus Crawlee patterns | rotation, retries, premium and ultra-premium pools |
| MCP / AI tool calling | Hosted endpoint at mcp.apify.com | none |
| Mental model | "Run scrapers and keep the results here" | "Make my HTTP request look legitimate" |
The geotargeting row is the one most comparison tables miss. ScraperAPI restricts country-level targeting to US and EU on Hobby and Startup. If you need to see a Japanese or Brazilian storefront, the entry plan cannot do it and the cheapest plan that can is $299/month, which changes the arithmetic above completely.
What changed recently
Comparison pages rot faster than the products do. These are the moving parts as of 2026-09-09.
- Apify Starter is $19/month, not $29. This page carried the $29 figure until today, and it is not the only place that number survives. Corrected against apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09.
- The Amazon Actor is no longer a monthly rental.
junglee/amazon-crawlerbilled a flat $40/month until 2026-04-14, when it moved to pay-per-event, and its Bronze-tier rate has been $0.004 per result ever since (pricingInfosread fromapi.apify.comon 2026-09-09). Any "rental versus per-request break-even" comparison written before April 2026 is computing a model that no longer exists. - ScraperAPI has a $299 Business tier with 3,000,000 credits and 100 threads, sitting between Startup at $149 and Scaling at $475. Tables that jump straight from $149 to $475 are missing it, and it is the first tier with global geotargeting.
- The Apify Store is past 70,000 Actors. This page said "30,000+" until today, which was off by more than half. The current wording comes from apify.com/store itself: "70,000+ ready-to-run tools called Actors."
- Apify's MCP support is no longer a server Actor. It is a hosted endpoint at
https://mcp.apify.com, per Apify's MCP documentation. If you are wiring Actors into an agent, you point the agent at that URL rather than running an Actor to host it.
When should you pick ScraperAPI?
- Your extractor code already works and the only thing failing is the request path.
- You scrape more than about 37,000 pages a month at a steady rate, where the credit bundles win decisively.
- You work in Go, Ruby, PHP, or anything else where a one-line URL change beats adopting an SDK.
- You want a week of hard evidence about proxy quality on your specific domains before committing.
Start a ScraperAPI trial: 7 days, 5,000 credits, no card. The obvious objection: you get no parser and no storage, so budget the engineering time you are choosing to keep. If your target sites are outside the US and EU, check the geotargeting row above before you start; the entry plans cannot do it.
When should you pick Apify?
- Somebody already wrote and maintains a scraper for your target site, so you skip the parser entirely. Start from the best Apify Actors by category.
- You need scheduling, datasets, and exports without running your own job queue.
- Your volume is small, spiky, or unpredictable, so a monthly credit bundle would sit unused.
- You are wiring scrapers into an LLM agent and want tool calling over an API rather than glue code.
- You want to test the idea at zero cost for longer than a week.
Start on Apify: the free plan is $5 of usage a month with no card. The obvious objection: usage-based billing is harder to forecast than a fixed bundle. Run one real job first, read the actual usage in the console, and multiply. The Apify pricing guide walks through where the numbers land, and the Amazon scraping walkthrough uses the same Actor priced above.
Can you use both?
Yes, and a few teams do, but it is usually a sign of an unfinished migration. Apify Actors already ship with proxy configuration, so routing an Actor's traffic through ScraperAPI means paying two vendors for the same hop. The one case where it is deliberate: you keep a legacy in-house scraper on ScraperAPI while moving new targets onto Store Actors, and you run both until the old one is retired.
It depends on volume, and it flips more than once. Priced on 15,000 Amazon pages a month (2026-09-09), Apify Starter costs $60 and ScraperAPI Hobby costs $49. Below about 12,000 pages Apify is cheaper because the job fits inside its $19 of included usage. Above about 37,000 pages ScraperAPI is cheaper and the gap widens fast: at 200,000 pages a month it is $149 against roughly $800.
ScraperAPI fetches pages through managed proxies with optional headless rendering, and returns raw content. You supply, host, and maintain the parser. Apify runs Actors in its own cloud, usually pre-built for a specific site, and returns structured JSON into a dataset with scheduling and integrations included. One is a network layer, the other is an end-to-end pipeline.
There is no permanent free tier. ScraperAPI offers a 7-day trial with 5,000 API credits and no credit card required, verified on its pricing page 2026-09-09. Paid plans start at $49/month for Hobby with 100,000 credits. Credits are consumed faster than one per request on protected or e-commerce domains: an Amazon URL costs 5 credits, a Google SERP 25, and a LinkedIn page 30.
Apify Store publishes a figure of 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors as of 2026-09-09. The public store API returns a smaller total because it counts only the searchable public listing. The widely quoted 30,000+ figure is out of date by more than half.
Not in the sense Apify does. It returns page content for URLs you request. Its documentation lists structured-data endpoints grouped into four categories (e-commerce, search and insights, real estate, and AI results), which parse a limited set of high-traffic targets into JSON for you. For maintained, site-specific extractors across tens of thousands of sites, that is what the Apify Store is for.
Yes, with render=true, which its documentation prices at 10 API credits per request against 1 for a plain fetch. Combining rendering with premium proxies is documented at 25 credits, and with ultra premium at 75. On a single-page app that is a 10x to 75x cost multiplier, so measure how many of your target URLs genuinely need rendering before you enable it globally.
Which one is right for you?
If you already have working parser code and steady high volume, ScraperAPI is the cheaper and simpler layer and this site is happy to say so. If you would be starting the parser from scratch, or your volume is small and irregular, or you need scheduling and storage without operating them, Apify does more of the work for a bill that stays close on entry-tier workloads. Run both free allowances against your own five worst URLs for a week; that answers the question better than any table, including this one.
