Zyte pricing vs Apify pricing, with sources
Zyte publishes a full per-request rate card, but it is on the marketing pricing page rather than in the developer docs, and it is priced per target site rather than as one flat number. That split is why so many comparisons quote a single figure and get it wrong: the rate you pay depends on which of five difficulty tiers your target falls into, whether the request is HTTP or browser-rendered, and what monthly commitment you have made.
Zyte API pay-as-you-go runs $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP requests and $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered requests, by target-site difficulty tier; a $500/month commitment takes the HTTP band down to $0.06-$0.61 (zyte.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09). Scrapy Cloud is $9/month per unit. Apify's cheapest paid plan is $19/month subject to change · verified 2026-09-09.
What does Zyte cost?
Everything below is transcribed from Zyte's own documentation on 2026-09-09. Nothing here comes from a review site.
| Product | Published price | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Scrapy Cloud, free unit | $0. One low-resource unit at half the resources of a paid unit, 7-day data retention, jobs capped at 1 hour | scrapy-cloud/pricing |
| Scrapy Cloud, paid unit | $9/month per unit. 120-day retention, unlimited run time, job scheduling and Docker deploys | scrapy-cloud/pricing |
| What one unit gives a job | 1 computing unit, 1 GB of memory, 2.5 GB of disk | scrapy-cloud/usage/units |
| Zyte API, pay-as-you-go | No monthly commitment. $5 starting credit, $100 spending limit. No volume discount published | zyte-api/pricing |
| Zyte API, commitment tiers | $100/mo → $200 limit, 25% off · $200 → $400, 40% · $350 → $700, 48% · $500 → $2,500, 52% | zyte-api/pricing |
| Zyte API, HTTP request cost (PAYG) | $0.13 Simple · $0.23 Easy · $0.44 Moderate · $0.70 Complex · $1.27 Advanced, per 1,000 | zyte.com/pricing |
| Zyte API, browser request cost (PAYG) | $1.01 Simple · $2.01 Easy · $4.02 Moderate · $8.04 Complex · $16.08 Advanced, per 1,000 | zyte.com/pricing |
| Zyte API, effect of commitment | $100/mo → HTTP $0.10-$0.95 · $200/mo → $0.08-$0.76 · $500/mo → $0.06-$0.61, per 1,000 | zyte.com/pricing |
| Zyte API add-ons | Screenshot $0.002 · automatic extraction $0.0004–$0.0016 per data type · custom attributes $0.001 to extract, or $0.002/1k input and $0.01/1k output tokens to generate | zyte-api/pricing |
| Zyte API, enterprise | $200 free credit, sales contact required | zyte-api/pricing |
| Smart Proxy Manager | Closed. "Zyte API is replacing Smart Proxy Manager. It is no longer possible to sign up" | smart-proxy-manager |
One structural note in Zyte's favour, and it is a real one: you are only charged for successful responses. Rate-limited and failed requests are free, per the same pricing doc. Apify bills compute whether the run returned rows or not.
The comparison that matters is the request rows, and the honest reading is that a single "Zyte costs $X" number is meaningless — the spread between Simple HTTP and Advanced browser is 124x. The widely-quoted "$0.13 per 1,000" is real, but it is the cheapest cell in the table: pay-as-you-go, HTTP, an easy target. A browser-rendered request against a hard site is $16.08 per 1,000 on the same plan.
docs.zyte.com documents the mechanism but not the numbers, and points you to the marketing page: "See Pricing @ zyte.com for tier pricing and distribution data." So if you budget from the docs alone you will find no rate at all, which is how the $0.13 figure ends up quoted flat and out of context across the web.
To budget properly, run Zyte's calculator against your actual domain list — tier assignment is automatic and per-site, so your mix is the only thing that determines the bill.
What does Apify cost?
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Included platform usage | Compute rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | $5 | $0.20 / CU |
| Starter | $19 | $17 | $19 | $0.20 / CU |
| Scale | $199 | $179 | $199 | $0.16 / CU |
| Business | $999 | $899 | $999 | $0.13 / CU |
Verified against apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09. The plan fee and the included usage are the same money, not two charges. One compute unit is 1 GB of RAM running for one hour, so Starter's $19 buys 95 GB-hours before overage begins. Credits do not roll over. Full mechanics are in our Apify pricing breakdown and the compute-unit explainer.
Two cautions before you use that table for budgeting.
Store Actors can charge on top of compute. Many of the 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors in the Apify Store bill per result or per event in addition to the GB-hours they consume. A $4-per-1,000-results scraper will empty a $19 credit long before the usage chart looks alarming. Picking on price is covered in our guide to choosing a Store Actor.
Apify's own sources disagree about free-plan concurrency. apify.com/pricing says 5 concurrent runs on Free; docs.apify.com/platform/limits says 25. Both were checked on 2026-09-09 and both are Apify's. We are not going to guess which is stale. Budget on 5, and if your evaluation depends on more than that, test it before you commit. Paid-plan concurrency is not in dispute: 32 on Starter, 128 on Scale, 256 on Business.
Which one is actually cheaper?
For once the two billing models can be compared directly, because both denominate in gigabyte-hours. A Scrapy Cloud unit is 1 GB of memory with unlimited run time. An Apify compute unit is 1 GB of RAM for one hour.
Take one 1 GB spider that runs continuously through a 30-day month — 720 GB-hours.
| Scrapy Cloud | Apify Starter | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing shape | Fixed, per concurrent slot | Metered, per GB-hour |
| 720 GB-hours of compute | $9 (one unit) | 720 CU × $0.20 = $144 |
| Included before that | — | $19 of the $19 plan fee |
| Effective total | $9/month | About $144/month |
Sixteen times. If your crawlers run long and continuously, Scrapy Cloud is dramatically cheaper than metered compute, and no feature table on this site changes that. The break-even sits at roughly 45 GB-hours a month — about an hour and a half a day for a single 1 GB job. Above that line, per-unit pricing wins on compute.
Now the part the arithmetic hides. That $9 buys compute and storage only. It does not include proxies, browser rendering or anti-bot handling; on Zyte those are Zyte API, metered separately, at the rate nobody publishes. Apify's $19 credit is spent against compute, Apify Proxy and storage from the same pool, and the Store sits on top of it. So the comparison is $9 of predictable compute plus an unpriced variable, against $19 of everything with a rate card.
Choose accordingly:
- Long-running spiders on sites that do not fight back. Scrapy Cloud, on price, decisively.
- Bursty jobs, a few hours a day, on hard targets. Apify, because the compute is cheap at that duty cycle and the unblocking is priced.
- You cannot forecast volume at all. Zyte API pay-as-you-go has no monthly commitment and a $5 starting credit, which is the lower-risk way to find out what your targets cost.
Is Zyte the same as Scrapinghub?
Yes. Zyte is the company formerly called Scrapinghub, and it maintains Scrapy. Scrapy Cloud is still the hosted-spider product; Zyte API is the extraction and unblocking API. The rename does not affect pricing or account continuity.
What changed in 2026
Three things worth knowing if you are reading an older comparison — including an older version of this one.
- Smart Proxy Manager is closed to new signups. Zyte's docs carry the notice verbatim: "Zyte API is replacing Smart Proxy Manager. It is no longer possible to sign up to Smart Proxy Manager" (docs.zyte.com, checked 2026-09-09). Any page still presenting it as a buyable standalone proxy product is out of date. If you need standalone proxy volume rather than a bundled unblocker, that demand now has to go somewhere else — Bright Data is the usual landing spot, and we compare it in Apify vs Bright Data.
- Apify Starter is $19, not $29. This page said $29 until 2026-09-09. The live price is $19 monthly, $17 billed annually, with $19 of included usage.
- The "$0.13 per 1,000 requests" figure is real, but it is a floor, not an average. It is the pay-as-you-go rate for a Simple-tier HTTP request. This page previously carried it without that qualifier, which flattered Zyte on hard targets; the full tier table is now above.
Where each platform is genuinely stronger
| Job | Better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Existing Scrapy codebase, long-running | Zyte | Native deployment target, $9/unit fixed compute, unlimited run time |
| "I need an Amazon scraper today" | Apify | 70,000+ Store Actors, run one without writing code |
| Non-developers pulling data themselves | Apify | Fill in inputs, export CSV or JSON from the Console |
| API-first extraction with unblocking built in | Zyte | Zyte API bundles rendering and anti-bot; only successful responses are billed |
| Mixed JavaScript and Python teams | Apify | Crawlee and the SDK cover both; start from the Crawlee Python tutorial |
| Scheduling, datasets, webhooks in one place | Apify | Built in, drawn from the same usage credit |
| Budgeting before you sign anything | Apify | Published rate card. Zyte's request pricing is not public |
If your team is standardised on Scrapy and your spiders run for hours, do not migrate for the sake of a comparison table. The Apify vs Scrapy write-up goes into what a migration actually costs.
Start on Apify's free plan and check the CU maths against your own workload →
Free is $0 with $5 of monthly credit and no card required, which is enough to run a real job and read the usage chart before you decide anything. The obvious objection — that $5 evaporates on a per-result Actor — is fair, and it is why we wrote up what the free plan actually covers.
$0.13 to $1.27 for HTTP requests and $1.01 to $16.08 for browser-rendered requests, per zyte.com/pricing (checked 2026-09-09) though not published in the developer docs. The rate depends on which of five difficulty tiers your target site falls into. Monthly commitments lower the band: $500/month brings HTTP to $0.06-$0.61. The commonly quoted $0.13 is the cheapest cell, not a typical rate.
$9 per month per unit, per docs.zyte.com/scrapy-cloud/pricing.html, checked 2026-09-09. Each unit gives a job 1 computing unit, 1 GB of memory and 2.5 GB of disk, with 120-day data retention, unlimited run time, job scheduling and Docker deployment. The free tier is one low-resource unit at half those resources, 7-day retention, and jobs capped at 1 hour.
Yes. Zyte API's Standard plan starts with $5 of free credit on signup, and Enterprise accounts get $200 of free credit but require contacting sales. Scrapy Cloud has a permanent free tier of one low-resource unit. All three figures are from docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/pricing.html and docs.zyte.com/scrapy-cloud/pricing.html, checked 2026-09-09.
Four tiers, per docs.zyte.com/zyte-api/pricing.html, checked 2026-09-09: commit $100 a month for a $200 spending limit and 25% volume discount; $200 for $400 and 40%; $350 for $700 and 48%; $500 for $2,500 and 52%. Pay-as-you-go has no monthly commitment and a $100 spending limit; Zyte states the volume discount is based on monthly commitment and publishes no discount for pay-as-you-go. The published per-tier rates at each commitment level are on zyte.com/pricing, so you can price a workload without talking to sales.
It depends on duty cycle. A 1 GB spider running continuously for 30 days is 720 GB-hours, which costs $9 on one Scrapy Cloud unit and about $144 on Apify at $0.20 per compute unit. Break-even is around 45 GB-hours a month, roughly 90 minutes a day. Below that, Apify's $19 Starter plan is cheaper and includes proxies, storage and scheduling; above it, Zyte's fixed per-unit price wins on compute.
No. Zyte's documentation states that Zyte API is replacing Smart Proxy Manager and that it is no longer possible to sign up (docs.zyte.com/smart-proxy-manager.html, checked 2026-09-09). Existing users are pointed at a migration guide. New customers who want unblocking buy Zyte API instead, or a standalone proxy provider.
Apify. The Apify Store has 70,000+ ready-to-run Actors (apify.com/store, checked 2026-09-09) that a non-developer can configure in a form and export to CSV or JSON. Zyte is developer-facing: Scrapy Cloud hosts code you wrote, and Zyte API is consumed over HTTP. There is no Zyte equivalent of running a scraper without writing one.
Common mistakes and fixes
Your Zyte quote does not match anything published.
It probably includes a commitment tier discount. Zyte's docs list four: $100, $200, $350 and $500 a month, at 25%, 40%, 48% and 52% off. Ask the rep which tier the quote assumes, and what the un-discounted rate is.
You costed Apify on subscription price alone and the bill came in higher.
Plan price and included usage are the same number, not additive. Compute burns that credit at $0.20 per GB-hour, and many Store Actors charge per result on top. Model GB-hours first.
Team is 100% Scrapy and resists new frameworks.
Keep them on Scrapy Cloud. It is the native deployment target and, for long-running spiders, materially cheaper than metered compute. Evaluate Apify for net-new work or for the Store, not as a migration target.