Apify Free Plan: What $5 in Credits Actually Buys
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 16 GB RAM per Actor, 5 datacenter proxy IPs, and residential proxy at $8/GB. Concurrent-run limits are disputed between Apify's own pages — see below. Credits do not roll over, and the platform blocks new runs when the $5 budget is exhausted.
You can ship a small recurring scraper on the Free plan indefinitely, as long as you stay inside the resource ceilings and respect per-Actor fees. It is not a 14-day trial in disguise: no card, no expiry, no forced upgrade prompt.
What the $5 buys depends on the Actor: about 1,250 Google Maps places, 500 LinkedIn profiles, or 12,000+ tweets. The Apify scrapers we have tested are listed with the Free-plan price of 1,000 results for each.
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 | 16 GB per run (platform limits) |
| Max combined memory | 16 GB across all running jobs |
| Max concurrent runs | 5–25 (disputed, see note below) |
| Datacenter proxy | 5 IPs included |
| Residential proxy | $8/GB, in-platform only on Free |
| SERP proxy | $2.50 per 1,000 SERPs |
| Storage retention | Your 10 most recent runs kept for 4 months; named storages kept indefinitely (storage docs) |
| Tasks & schedules | Included |
| Rented Actors | Trial only |
| Support | Community (Discord, Help Center) |
apify.com/pricing lists Free at 5 concurrent runs. docs.apify.com/platform/limits lists Free at 25, in its "Maximum number of concurrent Actor runs per user" table. Both checked 2026-09-09; the docs page carries no last-updated date. The two pages agree on every paid tier — Starter 32, Scale 128, Business 256. Assume 5 when you plan a schedule, and confirm the real ceiling on your account's Limits page before you rely on it.
When you exhaust $5 in credits mid-month, the platform blocks further Actor runs until the next billing cycle. No overage, no surprise invoice. Apify's own pricing FAQ does not say whether a run already in progress at that instant is killed or allowed to finish — it only documents the before/after state (checked 2026-09-09). If a scheduled job is important, build in a safety margin rather than letting it run right up to your monthly reset. See the full pricing breakdown for how this compares with Starter and Scale.
What $5 actually buys
Two variables dominate: whether you are paying for compute or per result, and whether the Actor needs a browser.
The trap most free-plan guides miss. Store Actors publish a headline price like "from $2 / 1,000 results". That "from" is the best-tier rate, unlocked by a paid subscription. The free plan sits in the FREE pricing tier and gets no discount, so you typically pay two to three times the headline number. This is separate from platform compute and is billed as pay-per-event or pay-per-result on top of it. Every figure below is the actual FREE-tier rate, pulled from each Actor's live pricing API on 2026-09-09.
Try your own numbers: pick an Actor and volume to see whether it fits inside the $5 free credit.
- Google Maps
- Google Maps Reviews
- Google Search
- TikTok
- Amazon
- X / Twitter
- Facebook Posts
- LinkedIn Profile
- Airbnb
- Website Content Crawler (compute-based)
| Plan | Monthly credit | This workload | Covered by credit? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free$0 | $5.00 | $0.0040/place (no Store discount) → $40.00 | +$35.00 over |
| Starter$29/mo | $29.00 | $0.0030/place (Bronze) → $30.00 | +$1.00 over |
| Scale$199/mo | $199 | $0.0020/place (Silver) → $20.00 | Yes |
| Business$999/mo | $999 | $0.0015/place (Gold) → $15.00 | Yes |
Per-result rates follow the Apify Store discount tier attached to your plan (Free = no discount, Starter = Bronze, Scale = Silver, Business = Gold), read from Apify’s API on 2026-08-22; plan prices were checked 2026-08-22. Excludes proxy costs. Confirm current pricing on the Actor’s page before budgeting.
The worked figures below cover the most common Actors.
Compute-billed Actors, at the $0.20/CU rate:
| Workload | Cost per run | What $5 covers |
|---|---|---|
| Cheerio/HTTP Actor, 512 MB, 30-second runs | ~$0.0008 | ~6,000 runs |
| Playwright Actor, 2 GB, 5-minute runs | ~$0.033 | ~150 runs |
Per-result Actors, at their FREE-tier rate:
| Actor | FREE-tier rate | What $5 covers |
|---|---|---|
Google Maps Scraper (compass/crawler-google-places) | $0.004 / place | ~1,250 places |
Instagram Scraper (apify/instagram-scraper) | $0.0027 / result | ~1,850 results |
Amazon Crawler (junglee/Amazon-crawler) | $0.005 / result | ~1,000 listings |
TikTok Scraper (clockworks/free-tiktok-scraper) | $0.003 / result | ~1,666 results |
Google Search Scraper (apify/google-search-scraper) | $0.0045 / page + $0.001 / run start | ~1,100 result pages |
| LinkedIn profile Actors | from $10 / 1,000 profiles | ~500 profiles |
Proxy bandwidth is billed on top of the above. At the free plan's $8/GB residential rate, 1,000 requests averaging 50 KB each costs roughly $0.40. Note that residential proxy on the free plan works only inside the Apify platform, not from your own machine.
Rates change, often. Google Maps Scraper's own pricing API lists eight pricingInfos entries across six separate dates in the first half of 2026 alone — 17 Feb (twice), 23 Feb, 29 Apr, 1 Jun, 22 Jun (twice) and 30 Jun (api.apify.com/v2/acts/compass~crawler-google-places, checked 2026-09-09). It now runs a spend-tier system — Free, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond — and the FREE-tier rate above is what a new account pays before it earns any discount. Always open the Actor's Pricing tab and run a 10 to 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 per-place options.
Free vs. Starter, head-to-head
| Feature | Free | Starter ($19/mo) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly prepaid usage | $5 | $19 |
| CU rate | $0.20 | $0.20 |
| Max Actor RAM | 16 GB | 32 GB |
| Max concurrent runs | 5–25* | 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 |
* Disputed between Apify's own pages — see the concurrency note above. Starter's 32 is not in dispute; both sources agree.
Starter is $19/month, or $17/month billed annually (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09).
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.
What is the platform limit, and can you raise it?
A platform limit is the ceiling on what you can spend beyond your prepaid usage. On the Free plan you cannot raise it at all: $5 of monthly credit is both your budget and your hard stop, which is why a free account blocks rather than bills you when it runs out.
Paid plans each have a maximum you can raise the limit to, edited under Billing → Limits → Edit limit:
| Plan | Prepaid usage | Maximum platform limit |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $5 | Cannot be raised |
| Starter ($19) | $19 | $100 |
| Scale ($199) | $199 | $1,000 |
| Business ($999) | $999 | $5,000 |
Two things about this catch people out. First, overage can be invoiced immediately rather than on your next bill: the threshold is $50 on Starter and $200 on Scale and above. Second, Apify states plainly that limits are estimates, with a deviation of up to 10%, because a scraper cannot know exactly when it will cross a line mid-run. Budget with that margin rather than against the number.
If you hit the maximum on Starter or Scale, the documented route is to upgrade to the next plan. Upgrading mid-cycle is pro-rated, and you can downgrade again at any time, so a one-month step up for a spike is a normal move rather than a commitment. The one-way door: if you are on a legacy plan and leave it, you cannot go back. (Source: help.apify.com — reaching platform limits, checked 2026-09-10.)
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 16 GB of RAM for a single Actor, usually heavy Playwright with anti-bot modules. Starter raises the per-run ceiling to 32 GB.
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, 16 GB max Actor RAM per run, 5 included datacenter proxy IPs, residential proxy at $8/GB (in-platform only on the Free plan), tasks and schedules, and community support. Max concurrent runs is disputed between Apify's own pages: apify.com/pricing says 5, docs.apify.com/platform/limits says 25 (checked 2026-09-09). Plan for 5. Your 10 most recent runs are retained for 4 months; named storages are kept indefinitely. No credit card required.
It depends on the Actor. At FREE-tier rates verified 2026-09-09, $5 covers roughly 1,250 Google Maps places ($0.004 each), ~1,000 Amazon listings ($0.005 each) or ~1,850 Instagram results ($0.0027 each). Watch out for headline 'from $X' prices: those are best-tier rates for paid subscribers, and the free plan gets no discount, so you often pay two to three times the advertised figure. On compute-billed Actors at $0.20/CU, a lightweight Cheerio Actor at 512 MB for 30 seconds costs ~$0.0008, so the $5 budget covers about 6,000 runs. Run a small sample first.
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 16 GB of Actor RAM per run, want chat support instead of community support, require residential proxies you can use outside the Apify platform, or want Store discounts (which begin at the Bronze tier and deepen at Silver and Gold). The Starter plan ($19/month, or $17/month billed annually) is the first paid tier and raises the per-run RAM ceiling to 32 GB.
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.