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 more than 76,000 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: 76,000+ ready-made Actors
Ratings: 4.7 G2 · 4.8 Capterra · 4.8 Trustpilot

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 $39 or $49 entry plan; the official Starter price in September 2026 is $19.

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 protection against the most common complaint about Apify, costs that grow faster than expected.

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. Some reviews say otherwise, but the official pricing page is clear.

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.

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 more than 76,000 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.

Quality varies. Actors made by Apify or by established developers with many users and reviews are usually maintained; small community Actors can break when the target site changes. 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. We cover that business model in is an AI automation agency worth it.

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 advantage is the size of the Store: for most popular sites someone has already built and maintained a scraper, priced per result. Its disadvantage is complexity: with so many options and billing models, it takes an hour or two to feel at home.

Is Apify Legit? What Do Users Say?

Apify is a well-established platform with thousands of public reviews. In September 2026 it rated 4.7 on G2 from about 645 reviews, 4.8 on Capterra from about 580, and 4.8 on Trustpilot from about 760, with 90% five-star ratings.

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 users complain about

Costs that are hard to predict for custom crawlers and can grow quickly.
Community Actors of uneven quality that break when sites change.
A learning curve for anyone new to scraping concepts.

The pattern is consistent: people who use popular pay-per-result Actors are happy with the value; people running large custom jobs need to watch compute usage closely.

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 more than 76,000 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 company with thousands of public reviews, rated 4.7 on G2 and 4.8 on Capterra and Trustpilot in September 2026. The common complaints are about costs being hard to predict at scale and community Actors breaking when target sites change.

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.

How this was assessed: this page is based on Apify's official pricing and product pages, its terms, public ratings on review platforms and the pages that currently rank for these searches, all read in September 2026. It is not a report from inside a paid account, and it does not claim to be.

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About the author

Carlos D.

I have worked in affiliate marketing since 2020, mostly on global product launches: the coordinated releases where a program opens for a fixed window and partners drive registrations and sales. Across those launches I have generated more than $1 million in tracked sales as an affiliate.

That is the lens these reviews are written through. I read the official pages and partner terms before writing, I cover programs I am a partner for, and I say so at the top of every review. More about how these reviews are made.

These were our results. Your results will vary based on a variety of factors, including your education, effort, and market factors. There is no guarantee you will make any money.

This is an independent guide. It is not the official Apify website and it is not operated by, affiliated with or endorsed by Apify. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. We may earn a commission from sign-ups and purchases made through links on this page, at no extra cost to you. Prices and plans were checked on the official pages in September 2026 and can change at any time: confirm them at checkout.

Apify Pricing, Free Plan and How to Get Started