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Apify vs Beat API

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Entry price
Apify from $29/mo, Beat API from $1/credit — different billing units, so no direct winner
Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Higher Trust score
Apify — 96 vs 65 for Beat API
Best fit
Apify: Teams that would rather rent a maintained scraper than babysit their own · Beat API: Agent builders who want one key and one balance across many model and data vendors

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

ApifyMarketplace and cloud platform of ready-made scrapers ('Actors') plus infrastructure to run your ownBeat APIOne prepaid key for 70+ AI models, social-data endpoints and video workflows, callable over HTTP or MCP.

Side by side

FactApifyBeat API
CategoryWeb Scraping & Data ExtractionText-to-Video Generators
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$29/mo$1/credit
Public APIYesYes
Trust score96 / 10065 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIAPI
CompanyApify Technologies s.r.o.—
Launched2015—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

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

Beat API

What used to be a music-video API is now a general gateway: one key and one prepaid balance for text, image and video models, social-media data scrapers and web tools, with an MCP server so an agent can discover and price a capability before calling it. The public rate card is now detailed down to the clip and the image, which fixes the old complaint about opaque costs. What has not changed is the anonymity: the terms and privacy pages name no legal entity, address or governing law, so this is a convenience layer to try with a small top-up, not a vendor to sign a procurement contract with.

Pros

  • Published per-token, per-image and per-clip prices across 70+ models (15 October 2026)
  • Pay-as-you-go balance with no subscription; reservations refunded on eligible failures
  • MCP-compatible catalog lets agents inspect inputs and price before running a capability
  • Music video, ecommerce video and video analysis workflows under the same key

Cons

  • No legal entity, address or governing law on the terms or privacy pages
  • Free models are explicitly 'for a limited time' and rate-limited to one request per minute
  • Purchased balance is non-refundable after use and not transferable
  • Social-data endpoints resell scraped platform data, which carries its own terms-of-service risk

Which one fits

Choose Apify if you need

  • 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

Choose Beat API if you need

  • Agent builders who want one key and one balance across many model and data vendors
  • Developers who still want the async music video or ecommerce video workflow with per-shot storyboards
  • Teams prototyping across models through MCP from Claude Code, Codex or Cursor

Apify vs Beat API: the questions people ask

Is Apify cheaper than Beat API?

They charge in different units, so there is no like-for-like answer: Apify starts at $29/mo, Beat API at $1/credit. Entry price is the lowest paid plan as we last verified it.

Does Apify or Beat API have a free tier?

Both: Apify has a free tier, and Beat API has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Apify or Beat API?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

More comparisons

All Beat API alternatives →Browse all Web Scraping & Data Extraction →