Apify
Verified Oct 16, 2026 ActiveMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your own
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $19/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Free plan includes $5 of usage a month with no card. Starter is $19/month, Scale $199 and Business $999 (10% off billed annually), each including that amount as prepaid usage plus pay-as-you-go compute units at $0.20 down to $0.13 per CU (1 GB RAM for 1 hour). Marketplace Actors can charge their own fees on top.
Use tool ↗About Apify
Apify is a web-scraping and automation cloud where thousands of prebuilt Actors extract structured data from social networks, e-commerce sites, maps and search engines, and developers publish or monetize their own crawlers. Usage is metered in compute units on top of subscriptions, from a $29/month Starter plan, while a free plan includes $5 of monthly usage. It ships a REST API, Python and JavaScript SDKs, a CLI and an MCP server, which has made it a common data layer for AI agents. The company was founded in Prague in 2015.
- Platforms
- Web · API
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 16, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page lists Free $0 with $5 usage, Starter $19/month, Scale $199/month, Business $999/month, each plus pay as you go; compute units $0.20/$0.20/$0.16/$0.13; -10% billed annually (15 October 2026)apify.com ↗
- General terms name Apify Technologies s.r.o., Na Prikope 959/27, Prague 1, Czech Republic, reg. no. 04788290 (15 October 2026)docs.apify.com ↗
Is Apify legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- Jun 2, 2009 (17 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar Amazon Registrar, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Amazon, valid until Jan 16, 2027Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 16, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 16, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2015The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- Apify Technologies s.r.o., CzechiaOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of Apify
The Actor marketplace is the draw: for most popular sites someone has already built and maintains the scraper, and agent-facing interfaces (API, MCP) are first-class. Costs need watching, since compute units plus per-Actor fees stack on top of the subscription and are hard to predict before you run at volume.
Pros
- Huge catalog of maintained scrapers for common targets
- Real free tier with $5 of usage and no card required
- SDKs, CLI, proxies and scheduling in one platform
- Published discounts for startups, universities and nonprofits
Cons
- Two-layer pricing (subscription plus usage plus Actor fees) complicates forecasting
- Marketplace Actor quality varies by author
- Large-scale scraping raises site-terms and legal questions the platform leaves to you
Best for
- Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own
- AI builders feeding agents live web data through the API or MCP server
- Developers monetizing crawlers without running infrastructure
Not for
- One-off small extractions a browser extension could handle
- Strictly fixed budgets — metered CUs plus Actor fees fluctuate
Watch out: Community Actors are priced by their authors on top of platform usage — check an Actor's own billing model before scaling it.
Alternatives to Apify
Apify head-to-head
Side-by-side fact sheets against the competitors our research or their makers name — pricing, platforms, API and both verdicts on one page.
- Apify vs AllyHub
- Apify vs Axiom
- Apify vs Beat API
- Apify vs Browse AI
- Apify vs BrowserAct
- Apify vs Browserbase
- Apify vs Context.dev
- Apify vs Firecrawl
- Apify vs Hyperbrowser
- Apify vs Kadoa
- Apify vs KeyAPI
- Apify vs Olostep
- Apify vs Scavio AI
- Apify vs ScrapeGraphAI
- Apify vs SocialKit
- Apify vs SurfSense
- Apify vs WebCrawlerAPI
- Apify vs Webscrape AI
- Apify vs Xpoz