Apify Free Tier Pricing: What Can You Actually Do?
Yes. Apify's Free plan is permanent, requires no credit card, and grants $5 in prepaid platform usage every billing cycle at a $0.20/CU compute rate. You get full access to the Apify Store, up to 8 GB RAM per Actor, 25 concurrent runs, 5 datacenter proxy IPs, and pay-as-you-go residential proxy at $8/GB. Credits do not roll over, and the platform blocks new runs when the $5 budget is exhausted.
The Free plan is not a 14-day trial in disguise. It's a permanent $0/month account with $5 of prepaid platform usage that resets every billing cycle, and no credit card required (apify.com/pricing). You can ship a small recurring scraper on it indefinitely, as long as you stay inside the resource ceilings and respect per-Actor fees.
What's in the Free plan
| Resource | Free plan limit |
|---|---|
| Monthly prepaid usage | $5 (does not roll over) |
| CU rate | $0.20/CU (apify.com/pricing) |
| Max Actor RAM | 8 GB |
| Max concurrent runs | 25 |
| Datacenter proxy | 5 IPs included |
| Residential proxy | $8/GB, pay-as-you-go |
| SERP proxy | $2.50 per 1,000 SERPs |
| Storage retention | Unnamed storages expire after 7 days; named storages kept indefinitely |
| Tasks & schedules | Included |
| Rented Actors | Trial only |
| Support | Community (Discord, Help Center) |
When you exhaust $5 in credits mid-month, the platform blocks further Actor runs until the next billing cycle. No overage, no surprise invoice. See the full pricing breakdown for how this compares with Starter and Scale.
What $5 actually buys
Two variables dominate: whether the Actor charges per-result, and whether it needs a browser. Rough guidance at the $0.20/CU rate:
| Workload | What $5 covers |
|---|---|
| Cheerio/HTTP Actor at 512 MB, 30-second runs | ~600 runs (cost is ~$0.0008/run in CUs) |
| Playwright Actor at 2 GB, 5-minute runs | |
| Google Maps-style pay-per-result at ~$2/1k places | ~2,500 records (CUs roughly free at this rate) |
| Amazon/ecommerce pay-per-result at ~$1/1k listings | ~5,000 product listings |
| LinkedIn/Instagram pay-per-result at ~$2/1k profiles | ~2,500 profiles |
| Residential-proxy-heavy run at 50 MB/request | $5 in CUs + ~$0.40 in proxy bandwidth per 1,000 requests |
These are directional. Open the Actor's Pricing tab and run a 10–20 item sample before extrapolating. The best Apify Actors guide flags which Store Actors are cheapest to run on the free budget, and the Google Maps scraper roundup covers the pay-per-place options.
Free vs. Starter, head-to-head
| Feature | Free | Starter ($29/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly prepaid usage | $5 | $29 |
| CU rate | $0.20 | $0.20 |
| Max Actor RAM | 8 GB | 32 GB |
| Max concurrent runs | 25 | 32 |
| Datacenter proxy | 5 IPs | 30 IPs, then $1/IP |
| Rented Actors | Trial only | Deducted from prepaid usage |
| Support | Community | In-app chat |
| Store discount | None | Bronze |
| Over-quota behavior | Blocked until next cycle | Billed as overage on next invoice |
The most consequential difference is neither RAM nor credits. Starter lets you rent premium community Actors and keeps running when you exceed prepaid usage. Free blocks you cold.
When to upgrade
Upgrade to Starter or Scale when any of these become true for three billing cycles in a row:
- You exhaust $5 before month-end and pause work waiting for reset.
- You need an Actor that only runs on the rental model (many well-maintained LinkedIn, Twitter, and marketplace scrapers).
- A scheduled production job cannot tolerate a mid-month block.
- You need more than 8 GB of RAM for a single Actor, usually heavy Playwright with anti-bot modules.
Students, researchers, and early-stage startups should check Apify Discounts before paying list price. If you are still evaluating Apify against other free tiers, the free web scraping tools comparison puts the $5 budget alongside Octoparse, ParseHub, and ScrapingBee. Or, when you are ready to ship, walk through the how-to-use-Apify quickstart.
Apify offers a Creator Plan that gives developers $500 in extra usage for 6 months to build and publish their own Actors. Learn more about the Creator Plan.
The free plan provides the perfect environment to learn, experiment, and run small-scale projects.
Sign up for your free Apify account and claim your $5 in monthly credits.
$5 of prepaid platform usage every month, 8 GB max Actor RAM, 25 concurrent runs, 5 included datacenter proxy IPs, residential proxy at $8/GB pay-as-you-go, tasks and schedules, and community support. Unnamed (default) storages expire after 7 days; named storages are kept indefinitely. No credit card required.
It depends on your usage. Typical free-plan workloads include around 2,500 Google Maps places (~$2/1k rate), ~5,000 Amazon product listings (~$1/1k rate), or hundreds of Playwright browser runs. At the $0.20/CU compute rate, lightweight Cheerio Actors can run 600+ times on the $5 budget. Run a small test first and use compute unit math to estimate costs.
No. Unused credits expire at the end of each billing cycle and do not carry over.
No. Apify does not require a credit card to sign up for the free plan. You can use the platform indefinitely with your monthly $5 credits for testing, learning, and small projects without ever entering payment details.
Consider upgrading when you consistently exceed $5/month in usage, need more than 8 GB of Actor RAM, want chat support instead of community support, require residential proxies for difficult sites, or need to rent a premium Actor from the Store. The Starter plan ($29/month) is the first paid tier.
With the free plan you can run Store Actors (scraping Google Maps, social media, ecommerce, AI content extraction), schedule recurring tasks, store data in datasets, and build and test your own Actors. Developers can also apply for the Creator Plan, which adds $500 in usage for 6 months to build and publish Actors.
Common mistakes and fixes
My free credits run out too quickly.
Reduce run scope, lower frequency, and validate outputs on small batches before scheduling bigger jobs. See [cost optimization](/docs/what-is-apify/apify-cost-optimization).
I cannot tell when to upgrade.
Track two weeks of real usage. Upgrade when your recurring baseline consistently exceeds free credits.
A scraper asks for paid features.
Check that Actor's pricing model. Some Store Actors use rental or event-based charges beyond platform credits.