Apify
A marketplace of ready-made web scrapers and automation "actors" you run without writing code, for pulling structured data off websites that don't offer an API of their own.
What you'd use it for
Pulling structured data off a website that has no API of its own, by renting someone else's ready-made scraper instead of writing the extraction code yourself.
- Run a ready-made Actor against a covered site (Amazon, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Maps and thousands more) and get structured data back with no code written
- Export results as JSON, CSV or Excel, or push them straight to Google Sheets
- Schedule an Actor to run on a recurring basis using cron expressions
- Trigger downstream workflows in Zapier, Make or n8n, or pull results over the API with webhooks
- Rotate residential or datacenter proxies to keep pulling data from sites with anti-scraping protection
The verdict
Apify earns its keep when someone else has already built the Actor you need — pulling structured data from a well-covered site like Amazon, Instagram or Google Maps takes minutes and no code. What it costs you in practice is usage-based billing that a JavaScript-heavy site can burn through fast, and reliance on a community-maintained Actor that can break silently the day its target site redesigns. It suits an operator with a data-pulling job to do now who would rather rent than build, not a business that needs guaranteed, actively-maintained coverage of data it depends on.
What it costs
| Tier | Price | For | Includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month | Trying the platform and running a small scraper occasionally. | $5 in monthly usage credit, community support, limited access to rented Actors, 16 GB max RAM, 5 concurrent runs. |
| Starter | $19/month, or $17/month billed annually | Small-scale, regular scraping needs. | $19 in monthly usage credit, chat support, a Bronze Store discount, 64 GB max RAM, 32 concurrent runs. |
| Scale | $199/month, or $179/month billed annually | Growing operations running scrapers as part of a real pipeline. | $199 in monthly usage credit, priority chat support, a Silver Store discount, 256 GB max RAM, 128 concurrent runs. |
| Business | $999/month, or $899/month billed annually | Enterprise users running scraping at production scale. | $999 in monthly usage credit, a dedicated account manager, a Gold Store discount, 512 GB max RAM, 256 concurrent runs. |
Read from Apify's own pricing page on 25 Sep 2026. Vendors change prices without notice.
What you need to start
- An Apify account (email, Google or GitHub sign-in; the free tier needs no credit card)
- An existing Actor in the Store that already covers your target site, or a willingness to build one in Node.js or Python if none does
- An API token if you are calling Actors programmatically rather than through the console
A few minutes to sign up and run an existing Actor against a small job; open-ended if no Actor already covers your target site and you have to build one.
Your first run Sign up free, pick an existing Actor from the Store that already covers your target site, run it against a small job, and get structured data back — commonly done inside 5 minutes with no code written.
Where it breaks
Browser-based console plus an API and CLI for running Actors programmatically. Every plan bills usage beyond the included credit on a pay-as-you-go basis.
First entry in this reference. There is no previous check to compare it against.
When not to use it
Not for anyone who needs guaranteed, actively-maintained scraping of an obscure or unusual site: check the Store for an existing Actor first, since building and maintaining one from scratch is a developer task, not a five-minute setup. Also not the right fit if you need a fixed monthly cost, since usage-based billing means a heavy job can run past the included credit fast.
Apify’s product is not really “a scraper,” it is a marketplace of other people’s scrapers, called Actors, that you can run against your own target site without writing the extraction logic yourself. Someone has already built and maintained an Actor for most popular sites — search results, marketplaces, social platforms — and you rent access to it rather than reverse-engineering the page structure from scratch.
That marketplace model is the reason it has drawn a reported 100,000-plus developers and operators and become the largest actor marketplace in web scraping specifically. The tradeoff is the same one any marketplace has: quality and maintenance depend on the individual Actor’s author, and a site redesign can break a community-maintained Actor until someone patches it.
How the pricing actually works
Every tier is really a monthly credit allowance plus a resource ceiling (max RAM, concurrent runs), not a flat subscription in the usual sense — the “$19/month” you pay on Starter is also the $19 of usage credit you get to spend, and going over it bills as pay-as-you-go. Budget by estimating how many pages you will pull and how compute-heavy the target site’s scraper is, since a JavaScript-heavy site costs more credit per run than a plain HTML one.
If your need is a single one-off extraction rather than an ongoing pipeline, the Free plan’s $5 monthly credit is often enough to test whether an existing Actor already does what you need before paying anything.
Alternatives
Automation & workflowsAgentsBrowse AI
Point it at any website and it extracts the data you want on a repeating schedule, with no scraping code to write or maintain.
Octoparse
Point-and-click web scraping with ready-made templates for common sites, and scheduled cloud runs so it keeps pulling data without you.
Automation & workflowsHarnessMake.com
A hosted place to build workflows that run on somebody else's servers — triggered by an event, on a schedule, or by a webhook — so the work happens whether or not your laptop is open.
n8n
A workflow automation platform you can either pay n8n to host or run on your own server, priced by how many times your workflows execute rather than by how many people use them.
Get Apify
Buying the tool is not the hard part.
The ebook is about what to hand over, in what order, and how you find out when it goes wrong. One payment, no subscription.