Apify Pricing 2026: Free Plan, Plans, Store and How to Get Started

TL;DR

Apify runs web scrapers and automations in the cloud. Its Store lists about 78,000 ready-made programs, called Actors, including the Google Maps Scraper and Instagram Scraper, and you can also build your own with Apify's open-source library Crawlee. The free plan includes $5 of usage every month with no credit card. Paid plans cost $19, $199 or $999 a month, each including the same amount in usage plus cheaper compute and proxy rates. Everything is available through an API, an MCP server for AI assistants, and integrations like n8n.

Free plan	$0, with $5 of usage per month, no card
Starter	$19/month ($17 billed annually)
Scale	$199/month ($179 billed annually)
Business	$999/month ($899 billed annually)
Compute unit	$0.20 on Free and Starter, down to $0.13
Store	About 78,000 ready-made Actors
Ratings	4.7 G2 · 4.8 Capterra

Which one this is: Apify, the web scraping and automation platform at apify.com, and its open-source library Crawlee.

How Much Does Apify Cost?

Every plan is a monthly subscription that includes the same amount of platform usage as its price. Bigger plans also lower the unit prices you pay for compute and proxies, and give you more memory and parallel runs.

Plan	Monthly	Annual (per month)	Usage included	Compute unit	Residential proxy	Parallel runs
Free	$0	$0	$5	$0.20	$8/GB	5
Starter	$19	$17	$19	$0.20	$8/GB	32
Scale	$199	$179	$199	$0.16	$7.50/GB	128
Business	$999	$899	$999	$0.13	$7/GB	256
Enterprise	Custom pricing and dedicated support

Discounts published on the pricing page: about 10% for annual billing, 30% off Starter and Scale for students, 30% off Scale for startups, and custom pricing for nonprofits. Extra concurrent runs cost $5 each and extra memory $1 per GB. Some third-party articles still quote older prices, such as a $29, $39 or $49 entry plan; the official Starter price in September 2026 is $19.

A tip on limits: Apify's pricing page lists 5 parallel runs on the Free plan and its limits documentation lists 25, and Starter's memory is described in more than one place too, so check the Limits tab in your account before you design a job around them.

See Apify's Current Pricing Official pricing page

How Does Apify Pricing Actually Work?

The subscription is really a monthly budget. What you run spends it in one of two ways, and knowing which one an Actor uses is the key to predicting your bill:

Pay per event. Most popular Store Actors now charge a fixed price per result or event, for example a price per 1,000 Google Maps places. Platform usage is not billed on top, so the cost is easy to predict. The price also drops as your plan goes up.
Pay per usage. Other Actors, and anything you build yourself, are billed on what they consume: compute units (one unit is roughly one gigabyte of memory used for one hour), proxy traffic and storage.

In 2026 Apify phased out the old model of renting Actors for a flat monthly fee, so what you will meet in the Store today is almost always pay per event or pay per usage. If you see "rental" in an older tutorial, it no longer applies.

The practical consequence: for common jobs like Google Maps or Instagram data, you can calculate the cost before you run anything. For custom crawlers, set a maximum number of results and a memory limit on each run, which is the simplest way to keep the bill exactly where you planned it.

Is Apify Free, and What Does the $5 Credit Get You?

Yes. The free plan needs no credit card and includes $5 of platform usage every month. It does not roll over: unused credit expires at the end of each billing cycle, as the official pricing page states.

What $5 buys depends on the Actor. Using the free-tier prices in September 2026:

About 1,250 Google Maps places with the most popular Maps scraper, at $4 per 1,000.
About 1,850 Instagram results with the official Instagram scraper, at $2.70 per 1,000.
About 25 compute units for your own crawlers, at $0.20 each.

That is plenty to test whether the data is what you need, and enough for small recurring jobs. The free plan also limits you to 5 parallel runs and 16 GB of memory, and uses community support. When you outgrow it, Starter at $19 mostly buys more usage and more parallel runs at the same unit prices.

What Happens When Your Apify Credit Runs Out?

This is the question behind most questions about the Apify bill. Here is what Apify's pricing page and billing documentation say:

On the free plan, runs stop when the $5 is used. The credit renews at the start of the next billing cycle and unused credit expires.
On paid plans, Apify's billing documentation says services are suspended when you hit your usage limit, unless you enable overage in the Limits tab. With overage on, extra usage is billed at your plan's rates. The pricing FAQ describes it more simply: excess usage is added to your next invoice.
Overage is invoiced early once it reaches $20 on Starter or $200 on higher plans, instead of waiting for the next bill.
Unused included usage never rolls over. If you use $8 of a $19 Starter month, the other $11 is gone.

The practical advice: open the Limits tab on your first day and set the maximum you are willing to spend, then set a result limit on every run. The Limits tab also shows which behavior your account has, so check it before you leave a scheduled job running.

What Else Is on the Apify Bill Besides Compute?

Store discount tiers. Each paid plan carries a Store discount: Starter is Bronze, Scale is Silver and Business is Gold. Actors that take part in the discount program charge less per result on higher tiers; not every Actor does, and the Free plan has no discount.
Residential proxies are $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business. A few gigabytes of proxy traffic can cost more than the compute itself.
Datacenter proxies include 5, 30, 200 and 500 IPs on Free, Starter, Scale and Business; extra IPs cost $1, $0.80 and $0.60 each on the paid plans.
Google search result proxies are $2.50 per 1,000 searches on Free and Starter, $2 on Scale and $1.70 on Business.
Storage is billed too, and Apify's docs offer a calculator that they label an estimate. Storage you do not name is deleted after a retention period that depends on your plan, while named storage is kept indefinitely, so name anything you want to keep.

Is Apify Ideal for You?

You need data from popular sites without building a scraper. For Google Maps, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, a ready-made Actor with a clear price per result is already waiting in the Store.
You run an automation agency or a freelance practice. The API, the n8n node and Make and Zapier integrations turn a scraper into one step of a client workflow.
You want to test before you pay. The free plan gives you $5 of usage every month with no card, enough to see whether the data fits.
You feed websites into AI tools. The Website Content Crawler and the MCP server let AI assistants search the Store, run Actors and read the results.
You are comfortable with inputs and result limits, or happy to learn them in an hour or two, and you like to set a monthly budget and watch it.

If you would rather point and click on a desktop app, our Apify alternatives guide compares the options by job.

How Do You Get Started With Apify?

Create a free account. Sign up with email, Google or GitHub. No card is needed for the free plan.
Pick an Actor in the Store. Search for the site or task, for example "Google Maps" or "Instagram", and open the Actor page to check its price per result and its reviews.
Fill in the input. Each Actor has a simple form: search terms, URLs, how many results, which fields.
Run it and watch the cost. Start with a small number of results, like 50, and check the run's cost before scaling up.
Export or connect. Download the results as CSV, Excel or JSON, or send them automatically to Google Sheets, n8n, Make, Zapier or your own code through the API.
Schedule it. Recurring jobs can run on a schedule, for example a daily list of new places or posts.

Start Free On Apify Takes about two minutes

Free Plan • No Credit Card • $5 Of Usage Every Month

What Is the Apify Store, and Which Actors Are Most Used?

The Apify Store is a marketplace of about 78,000 Actors built by Apify and by independent developers. Categories include AI, agents, lead generation, social media, e-commerce and SEO. The most used, by number of users in September 2026:

Google Maps Scraper, over 620,000 users. See our Google Maps Scraper guide for prices per 1,000 places.
Instagram Scraper, over 400,000 users. See our Instagram Scraper guide.
TikTok Scraper, around 295,000 users.
Website Content Crawler, around 160,000 users, popular for feeding websites into AI tools.
YouTube Scraper, around 128,000 users.

Actors made by Apify or by established developers with many users and reviews are the safest picks, because they are maintained as target sites change. Check the user count, rating, and last update date before relying on one. For general-purpose jobs, Apify's own Web Scraper lets you scrape almost any site with a bit of configuration.

How Do the Apify API, MCP Server and n8n Integration Work?

API

Everything you can do in the Apify console is available through a REST API, with official JavaScript and Python clients and webhooks. This is how most businesses use Apify in production: their own code or automation starts a run and reads the dataset.

MCP server

Apify's MCP server lets AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor or VS Code with Copilot search the Store, run Actors and read the results on your behalf. The server itself is free; the Actor runs it starts are billed to your account like any other run. Anonymous access only covers searching the Store and the docs.

n8n, Make and Zapier

There is an official Apify node for n8n, verified by n8n, plus integrations for Make, Zapier, Google Sheets and AI frameworks like LangChain. For an automation agency or a freelancer, this is the most useful part of Apify: a scraper becomes one step in a workflow that enriches leads or monitors competitors.

What Is Crawlee, and Do You Need It?

Crawlee is Apify's open-source crawling library for JavaScript, TypeScript and Python. It handles the hard parts of building a scraper yourself: plain HTTP crawling, headless browsers through Playwright or Puppeteer, proxy rotation, sessions and avoiding blocks. You can run a Crawlee project anywhere for free, or deploy it to Apify as your own Actor.

You need it only if you are a developer building custom scrapers. If you just want data from a popular site, a ready-made Store Actor is faster and usually cheaper than writing and maintaining your own.

How Does Apify Compare With the Alternatives?

Tool	Free option	Paid from	Best for
Apify	$5 of usage per month	$19/month	Ready-made scrapers plus custom code, API and AI integrations
Bright Data	5,000 records per month	$1.50 per 1,000 records, pay as you go	Large-scale data with heavy proxy needs
Octoparse	Free plan, 10 tasks, local only	$69/month	No-code desktop scraping
ScrapingBee	1,000 free credits	$19/month	Developers who want a scraping API
Browse AI	50 free credits	$19/month billed annually	Point-and-click monitoring of a few sites

Apify's strength is the size of the Store: for most popular sites someone has already built and maintained a scraper, priced per result. With so many options and billing models, it takes an hour or two to feel at home. For a job-by-job comparison, including which alternative fits which job, see our Apify alternatives guide.

Is Apify Legit? What Do Users Say?

Yes. Apify is a well-established platform with thousands of public reviews and about 78,000 Actors in its Store. In September 2026 it rated 4.7 on G2 from about 645 reviews and 4.8 on Capterra from about 580. Its most used Actor, the Google Maps Scraper, has more than 620,000 users.

What users like

Ready-made scrapers for almost any popular site, working in minutes.
A genuinely useful free plan for testing.
Strong API and integrations that fit into real workflows.

What to plan for

Custom crawlers are billed on what they use, so set a result limit and a memory limit on each run.
Pick Actors with many users and recent updates; those made by Apify are maintained by Apify.
Give yourself an hour or two to learn inputs, result limits and billing models.

People who use popular pay-per-result Actors get a price they can calculate before they run anything; for large custom jobs, watching compute usage keeps the bill predictable.

Is Web Scraping With Apify Legal?

Apify's own guide, updated in 2026, summarizes the position well: scraping publicly available data is generally legal, but that does not make everything you collect free to use. Personal data stays protected under laws like the GDPR even when it is public, copyrighted content can be analyzed but not simply republished, and data behind a login carries more risk. If you plan to collect personal data for sales outreach, check the rules in your country before you start.

Apify: Common Questions

How much does Apify cost?

Apify has a free plan with $5 of usage every month, then Starter at $19 a month, Scale at $199 and Business at $999, with about 10% off on annual billing. Each paid plan includes the same amount in platform usage, and heavier users get cheaper compute and proxy rates.

Is Apify free?

Yes, there is a free plan with no credit card required. It includes $5 of platform usage each month, which does not roll over. That is enough to test most scrapers and to run small jobs, for example around a thousand Google Maps places a month.

What does the $5 free credit cover?

It is spent on whatever you run: compute units at $0.20 each, proxies and storage, or the per-result price of Store Actors. At September 2026 prices, $5 buys about 1,250 Google Maps places or about 1,850 Instagram results on the free tier.

What is an Apify Actor?

An Actor is a ready-made program that runs on Apify's cloud, usually a scraper or an automation. The Apify Store lists about 78,000 of them, from Google Maps and Instagram scrapers to website crawlers for AI. You pick one, fill in the inputs and get the data as a table, JSON or CSV.

Does Apify have an API?

Yes. Every Actor and dataset is available through the Apify REST API, with official JavaScript and Python clients, webhooks and integrations such as n8n, Make and Zapier. Apify also runs an MCP server that lets AI assistants search and run Actors.

Is Apify legit and safe?

Yes. Apify is an established platform with thousands of public reviews, rated 4.7 on G2 and 4.8 on Capterra in September 2026. Users like the ready-made scrapers that work in minutes, the useful free plan and the strong API. Costs follow what you run, so set a result limit and a memory limit on custom crawlers and the bill stays where you plan it.

What is the difference between Apify and Crawlee?

Crawlee is Apify's free, open-source library for building your own crawlers in JavaScript or Python. Apify is the paid cloud platform where you run crawlers, including ready-made ones from the Store. You can use Crawlee without Apify, or deploy a Crawlee project to Apify as an Actor.

Is web scraping with Apify legal?

Scraping publicly available data is generally legal, but personal data remains protected under laws like the GDPR, copyrighted content cannot simply be republished, and data behind a login is riskier. Apify publishes its own guide on this; for commercial use involving personal data, get legal advice for your country.

Is Apify Worth It, in One Paragraph?

For anyone who needs data from popular websites without building scrapers from scratch, Apify is one of the easiest places to start: the free plan's $5 a month is enough to test real jobs, popular Actors now charge a clear price per result, and the API, MCP server and n8n node make the data usable in automations. Watch costs if you run custom crawlers at scale, and move to Starter only when the free credit is genuinely the limit.

Prices and plans checked against Apify's official pages in September 2026.

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