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Apify pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Apify (apify.com) is a web scraping tool. Monthly subscription that includes usage credit equal to its price; compute units, proxies and per-event Actor charges draw on that credit, and paid plans bill overage beyond it.. Free plan: $5 of platform usage each month, no card needed; access pauses until the next billing cycle once it is used up..

What Apify costs

  • 10k pages: $199/mo (Website Content Crawler in headless-browser mode. Apify publishes only an approximate $0.5-$5 per 1,000 pages ('depends on the website'). The top of that range is used so the scenario is fully covered: 10 x $5 = $50 of usage a month. Starter's $19 usage credit does not cover $50, and Scale's $199 credit does, so $199 (monthly billing). At the bottom of the range ($5 usage) Starter's $19 would cover it; Starter plus overage would total about $50 at the top of the range.)
  • 5k searches: $19/mo (Google Search Results Scraper, pay per event: $1.80 per 1,000 scraped search result pages (about 10 results each), so $0.0018 per search. 5,000 x $0.0018 = $9 of usage a month; Starter's $19 usage credit covers it, so $19. The Free plan's $5 credit does not cover it.)
  • 100 browser hours: not offered (n/a: Apify runs your Actors but does not expose remote browser sessions for Playwright, Puppeteer or Selenium control.)

Plan compared: Scale plan ($199/mo, monthly billing); its $199 usage credit covers the top-of-range headless usage of $50 a month.. Prices are USD per month on monthly billing for three jobs: scraping 10,000 JavaScript-rendered pages (the headline), running 5,000 web search queries and using 100 hours of cloud browser time, each on the cheapest self-serve plan or pay-as-you-go rate that fully covers it. A product that does not do a job shows no price for it.

What Apify does

Core: Custom code steps, Browser and desktop RPA (partly), URL scraping API, Site crawling, Pre-built scrapers, Custom scraper hosting.

Important: Webhooks and HTTP requests (partly), Custom connector builder (partly), Tools for external agents, Anti-bot unblocking (partly), Proxy network (partly), LLM-ready output, Search engine results, Cloud browsers (partly), Scheduling & change alerts (partly), Exports & integrations, AI agent integrations.

Also has: Multi-step workflows (partly), Built-in AI steps (partly), AI agents (partly), Built-in tables and forms (partly), Team collaboration and governance (partly), Security and compliance (partly), AI data extraction (partly), Web search API (partly), No-code visual scraper (partly), Open source & self-hosting (partly), Compliance & ethical sourcing (partly).

Apify price hikes

  • Apify cut its free tier · Aug 31, 2026
    Free plan concurrent-run limit cut from 25 to 5; paid tiers unchanged.
  • Apify cut its free tier · Jan 2024
    Free plan's included compute units cut from 10 CUs to 0; quarter 2024Q1, exact day not published.

Cheaper alternatives to Apify

At 10,000 pages scraped a month, Apify costs $199/mo. 2 web scraping tools cost less:

  • Bright Data: $15/mo (Pay as you go: Web Unlocker at $1.5 per 1,000 requests), covers 77% of Apify; missing or partial: URL scraping API (partly), Site crawling (partly), Custom scraper hosting (partly), LLM-ready output (partly), Exports & integrations (partly)
  • Firecrawl: $44/mo (Hobby plan at $19/month billed monthly, plus 5,000 extra credits bought at $5 per 1,000), covers 77% of Apify; missing or partial: Pre-built scrapers, Custom scraper hosting (partly), Search engine results (partly), Exports & integrations (partly), No-code visual scraper

Apify alternatives: 2 web scraping tools compared, at every size.

Every change we logged

  • Sep 7, 2026 · Price cut: Starter base price cut from $29 to $19 a month (34%).
  • Aug 31, 2026 · Free tier cut: Free plan concurrent-run limit cut from 25 to 5; paid tiers unchanged.
  • Apr 27, 2026 · Price cut: Compute-unit rates cut: Free/Starter $0.3 to $0.2 per CU, Scale $0.25 to $0.16, Business $0.2 to $0.13; RAM add-on $2 to $1 per GB.
  • Apr 8, 2026 · Price cut: Starter cut from $39 to $29 a month ($10 less).
  • Jul 2025 · Price cut: Compute-unit rates cut: Starter $0.4 to $0.3 per CU and Scale $0.3 to $0.25 per CU; quarter 2025Q3, exact day not published.
  • Apr 2025 · Price cut: Starter cut from $49 to $39 a month (20%) in the same 2025Q1 comparison; exact day not published.
  • Apr 2025 · Price cut: Scale cut from $499 to $199 a month (60%); Starter concurrent runs rose from 25 to 32. The change falls between captures dated 2025-01-01 and 2025-04-01, so the exact day is not published.
  • Jan 2024 · Free tier cut: Free plan's included compute units cut from 10 CUs to 0; quarter 2024Q1, exact day not published.

Sources

Pricing page: apify.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Plan prices and usage credits come from apify.com/pricing (checked 2026-10-17); the Starter cut to $19 and the 2025 Scale cut from $499 are corroborated by PricingSaaS. Headless-browser cost is only Apify's approximate published range, so pages10k is an estimate, and Starter plus overage (about $50 at the top of that range) would cost less than the Scale plan the plan rule selects.