Apify Pricing: Real Costs, Free Plan Limits & Hidden Fees
Verified against apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09. This is an independent explainer, not an official Apify page — confirm current rates before you buy.
Apify's Free plan is $0/month with $5 in monthly platform credits and 16 GB RAM, no credit card required. The cheapest paid tier is Starter at $19/month ($17/month billed annually), with $19 of included usage, 64 GB total Actor RAM, and 32 concurrent runs. The catch: many Store Actors add pay-per-result or pay-per-event fees on top of compute units — a $4/1,000-results Maps scraper can burn a $19 budget without the usage chart ever looking scary.
Apify's bill has two layers, and most first-time buyers only budget for the first. Layer one is your plan: a monthly fee with a matching dollar amount of prepaid platform usage. Layer two is per-Actor pricing: many Store Actors charge per result, per event, or monthly rental on top of the compute your run consumed — and that second layer is the one that surprises people.
Quick reference: plans and credits
| Plan | Price / month | Monthly credits | CU price | Actor RAM (total) / concurrent runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 (does not roll over) | $0.20/CU | 16 GB / 5–25* |
| Starter | $19 ($17 annual) | $19 included | $0.20/CU | 64 GB / 32 |
| Scale | $199 | $199 included | $0.16/CU | 256 GB / 128 |
| Business | $999 | $999 included | $0.13/CU | 512 GB / 256 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
* Apify's own pages disagree on Free-plan concurrency: apify.com/pricing states 5 concurrent runs, docs.apify.com/platform/limits states 25 (both checked 2026-09-09). Plan for 5 and confirm on your account's Limits page before you rely on it.
Actor RAM is the combined memory across all your running jobs, as listed on apify.com/pricing. A single run is capped separately, at 16 GB on Free and 32 GB on every paid plan (platform limits). Numbers verified against apify.com/pricing on 2026-09-09. For deeper cost-per-run math, see our compute units explainer.
Hidden-cost gotchas: (1) Monthly credits expire each cycle; they do not roll over. (2) Many Store Actors add per-result or per-event fees on top of CUs, so check each Actor's Pricing tab. (3) Heavy Playwright runs burn CUs fast (GB × hours), so memory tuning matters more than people expect. See cost optimization tips.
How Apify pricing works (3 steps)
- Pick a plan for account limits and monthly credits.
- Spend credits on compute units (CUs) as your Actors run.
- Add Actor-level fees if a Store Actor charges per result/event or monthly rental.
Annual billing saves approximately 10%. Unused monthly credits expire at the end of each billing cycle; they do not roll over. Paid plans include Bronze/Silver/Gold Store discounts. See Apify Discounts for details.
Key Takeaways
- The Free plan gives you $5 in monthly credits, enough to run hundreds of small scrapes for common targets (Google Maps, Amazon product pages, Instagram profiles).
- The Starter plan at $19 is sufficient for most individual developers and small teams with regular scraping needs.
- The Scale plan at $199 is the right tier for teams running scheduled pipelines at volume or using memory-intensive Actors.
- Business and Enterprise are for high-frequency, large-scale operations with SLA requirements.
What Are Compute Units (CUs)?
A Compute Unit (CU) is Apify's billing metric: 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM used for 1 hour, so CUs = memory in GB × runtime in hours. Most scraping jobs cost $0.001–$0.05 in CU terms. Apify's own benchmarks put Cheerio-based scraping at roughly 3,000 pages per CU and browser-based scraping at 300 pages per CU (help.apify.com). For the full formula, worked examples by plan, and memory-tuning tactics, see the compute units guide.
Actor-Level Pricing Models
On top of platform CUs, Store Actors can choose their own pricing model:
| Model | How It Works | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| Pay per usage | You pay only CUs consumed | Generic scrapers and crawlers |
| Pay per result | Fixed price per output record | High-value data (leads, products) |
| Pay per event | Price per specific action (search, download, etc.) | Action-driven workflows |
| Rental | Monthly flat fee for unlimited access | Heavy users of one Actor |
Important: Check an Actor's Pricing tab before using it at scale. Some Actors combine platform CUs with result-level charges. Example rates vary by Actor and target site.
Realistic Monthly Cost Estimates
Estimate your own bill first. Pick an Actor, enter your volume, and see the cost against each plan's monthly 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 table below shows typical workloads for reference:
| Use Case | Volume | Estimated Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Personal research (occasional scrapes) | < 100 pages/month | Free plan covers it |
| Lead gen for small biz (Google Maps, 500 records/wk) | ~2,000 records/month | ~$5–15 (Free or Starter) |
| E-commerce price monitoring (1,000 products daily) | ~30,000 records/month | ~$30–80 (Starter to Scale) |
| Social media tracking (Instagram + TikTok, daily) | ~50,000 records/month | ~$80–150 (Scale) |
| Large enterprise crawl (entire website monthly) | Millions of pages | Business or Enterprise |
These are rough estimates based on typical Actor configurations. Always run a sample and measure actual CU consumption before projecting.
Add-ons and proxy costs
Beyond CUs, these line items land on your invoice. Support is bundled into the plan, not sold as an add-on: Community (Free), Chat (Starter), Priority chat (Scale), Account manager (Business) (apify.com/pricing, checked 2026-09-09).
| Item | Free | Starter | Scale | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datacenter proxy IPs (extra) | included allotment | from $1/IP | from $0.80/IP | from $0.60/IP |
| Residential proxy | $8/GB | $8/GB | $7.50/GB | $7/GB |
| SERP proxy | $2.50/1k | $2.50/1k | $2/1k | $1.70/1k |
| Extra concurrent runs | n/a | $5/run/month | $5/run/month | $5/run/month |
| Extra Actor RAM | n/a | $1/GB/month | $1/GB/month | $1/GB/month |
| Personal training | n/a | $150/hour | $150/hour | $150/hour |
At moderate volume on protected sites (ecommerce, social), residential proxy bandwidth often becomes the dominant cost, not CUs. Always measure GB/run, not just CU/run. If proxies dominate your bill, run the math against dedicated providers in our web scraping pricing guide.
Free plan reality check
No credit card. $5 in credits each month. Credits reset on your billing anniversary and do not roll over.
What $5 realistically covers depends almost entirely on whether the Actor is pay-per-usage or pay-per-result:
- Pay-per-usage Cheerio Actors on light pages: thousands of records, since you are only paying CUs at $0.20.
- Pay-per-result Actors (common for Google Maps, Instagram, LinkedIn): the Actor sets the rate. A Maps Actor at $4/1,000 places burns $5 in 1,250 records regardless of how efficient its compute is.
- Playwright crawls at 2 GB: a single 30-minute run costs $0.20, so ~25 runs per month before credits are gone.
Run your specific Actor on 20 items first, then read Usage in the run detail view. Extrapolating from blog-post averages is how budgets blow up. For a deeper breakdown of what really fits in $5, see the Apify free plan guide.
Building your own Actors? The Creator Plan costs $1/month plus pay-as-you-go and includes a one-time $500 prepaid-usage bonus you can spend within 6 months. It is capped at 10 GB residential proxy and 10,000 SERPs per month and limited to Apify's universal Actors. Learn more →
See the full free plan guide for limits on storage, data retention, and concurrent runs.
Where do you actually see what you are being charged?
In Apify Console under Billing, which is six tabs. Knowing which one answers which question saves most of the guesswork:
| Tab | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Current period | What have I spent this cycle, and when does it reset? Shows a plan-consumption bar plus a breakdown across Actors, data transfer, proxy and storage. |
| Historical usage | What is the trend? Filterable monthly or daily, absolute or cumulative. Its Usage by Actors section is the fastest way to find an unexpected cost. |
| Subscription | Current plan and payment details. |
| Pricing | Per-unit costs for compute units, proxies and storage. |
| Invoices | Full billing history. |
| Limits | Set the spending cap. See platform limits for the per-plan maximums. |
Two traps live in these numbers. Historical usage is shown before discounts, which are applied to the final invoice, so that view reads higher than what you pay. And it is reported on a calendar month, which will not line up with your billing cycle unless you happen to have subscribed on the 1st. Reconcile against Invoices, not against the chart.
Worth repeating because it is the most expensive assumption on this page: prepaid usage expires at the end of each billing period and does not roll over. Unused credit is gone, not banked. (Source: help.apify.com — navigating Apify billing, checked 2026-09-10.)
How to Reduce Your Apify Bill
The two biggest levers are Actor choice and memory: Cheerio-based scraping costs 8–16× less than Playwright, and most Actors run reliably well below their default memory setting. The full cost optimization guide covers batching, maxItems caps, and schedule tuning in detail.
Apify vs Competitors: Pricing Comparison
| Apify Free | Bright Data | Firecrawl | Self-Hosted Crawlee | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $0 ($5 credits) | No free tier (trials available) | $0 (1,000 credits/month) | $0 (hosting costs) |
| Billing model | Compute units + Actor fees | GB bandwidth + dataset pricing | API credit per page | Server cost only |
| Scalability | Plan upgrade | Volume-based | Plan upgrade | Infra-limited |
| Maintenance | Fully managed | Fully managed | Fully managed | You manage |
| Best value for | Pre-built scraping at moderate volume | High-volume proxy and datasets | LLM content pipelines | High-volume, custom needs |
- Apify vs Bright Data: full comparison
- Apify vs Firecrawl vs Jina: head-to-head on price-per-page for LLM pipelines
- Apify Alternatives: all major alternatives reviewed
- Best Apify Alternatives 2026: pricing-first ranking of the top 6 alternatives
Choosing the Right Plan
Start on Free if:
- You're evaluating Apify for the first time
- Your monthly scraping volume is low or irregular
- You want to test a specific workflow before committing
Choose Starter ($19) if:
- You run scheduled Actors daily or weekly
- You need more concurrent runs than the Free plan allows, or in-app chat support
- You need a longer storage retention window than the Free plan's default, where unnamed storages follow run retention (10 most recent runs kept 4 months). See the data retention guide
Choose Scale ($199) if:
- You run multiple simultaneous pipelines
- You use memory-intensive browser-based Actors at volume
- Your team needs 128+ concurrent run slots
Choose Business or Enterprise if:
- You have SLA requirements or compliance needs (SOC2, GDPR audits)
- You need dedicated support and custom contract terms
- Your usage regularly exceeds Scale plan limits
Apify has four main plans: Free ($0, includes $5 credits), Starter ($19), Scale ($199), and Business ($999). Most small to medium projects run comfortably on Starter or Scale. Enterprise pricing is custom. See the live pricing page at apify.com/pricing for current rates.
A Compute Unit equals 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. CU cost = (memory in GB) × (runtime in hours). Most scraping runs consume 0.01–0.5 CUs. CU rates as of September 2026 range from $0.13/CU (Business) and $0.16/CU (Scale) to $0.20/CU (Free and Starter).
Yes. The Free plan is $0 with no credit card required and includes $5 in monthly credits, enough for hundreds of moderate scraping tasks. Credits do not roll over between months.
The Creator Plan costs $1/month plus pay-as-you-go and includes a one-time $500 prepaid-usage bonus usable within 6 months, for developers building and publishing their own Actors. It is capped at 10 GB residential proxy and 10,000 SERPs per month and limited to Apify's universal Actors. Learn more at apify.com/pricing/creator-plan.
Named storages (datasets, key-value stores, request queues you give a name) are retained indefinitely. Default unnamed storages follow run retention: on the Free plan your 10 most recent runs are kept for 4 months, and older unnamed storages are removed at the retention period. Paid plans configure the window in Billing. Rename or export anything you need to keep.
Plan pricing covers your CU budget and account limits (concurrent runs, RAM, retention). Actor pricing is an additional layer set by the Actor developer: some Actors charge per result, per event, or via monthly rental on top of CUs. Check the Actor's Pricing tab before scaling.
Run a small sample (10–50 records), look at actual CUs consumed in the Run detail view, then extrapolate to your full volume. Add a 2× safety buffer. For pay-per-result Actors, check the price per result shown on the Actor page.
Depends on the use case. For pre-built scraping at low to medium volume, Apify is typically more cost-effective. For very high-volume proxy usage or large managed datasets, Bright Data may be more predictable. The two tools serve different primary needs: Apify is a scraping platform, Bright Data is primarily a proxy and data network.
The Free plan includes limited proxy access. Paid plans include higher proxy usage. For heavy proxy needs (thousands of requests/day), you may need to add extra proxy units or upgrade to a higher plan.
Sources
- Apify pricing page: official plans and pricing (verified 2026-09-09)
- Apify docs: Pricing and costs
- Apify docs: Pay per event
- Apify help: Compute unit estimation
- Apify docs
- Apify Storage Guide
Common mistakes and fixes
My bill is higher than expected.
Check both platform usage and Actor-level pricing. Some Actors charge per event or result in addition to CU consumption. Review the Actor's Pricing tab before scaling.
I cannot predict costs before production runs.
Run a small sample first (10–20 records), inspect Run usage, then project to your full volume with a 2× safety buffer.
I'm unsure which plan to choose.
Run your actual workflows on Free first. Once monthly CU usage is measurable, pick the lowest plan that covers observed baseline plus 30% growth headroom.