What is Apify Platform?
Apify combines infrastructure and a marketplace: you can run community or official Actors for common sites, or deploy your own Crawlee and Playwright scrapers with scheduling, datasets, and key-value stores. Public platform plans include Free ($0 with about $5 prepaid usage), Starter ($29), Scale ($199), and Business ($999), often with yearly discounts. Compute is billed in CUs (roughly 1 GB RAM for 1 hour), with CU rates falling on higher plans. Individual Actors may also charge pay-per-event on top of platform usage.
That mix makes Apify powerful for multi-step workflows and recurring monitors, but harder to compare 1:1 with a simple scraping-API credit bucket. Start with a free or Starter pilot on one Actor, inspect the dataset schema and CU burn, then scale. Choose Apify when you need orchestration and Actor reuse; choose a scraping API when you only need URL-in HTML-out.
Who Apify Platform is for
Best for
- +Teams that want Actors, scheduling, and a scraping platform
- +Marketplace-style scrapers with cloud runtimes
- +Automation beyond a single HTTP scraping endpoint
Skip if
- -You want one simple credit-per-request scraping API only
- -You need SERP-only structured search
- -You refuse usage-based Actor billing complexity
Apify Platform pricing
Platform + Actor pricing. Verify both the plan and the Actor you will run on apify.com/pricing.
Subscriptions
Fixed monthly plans with included credits or requests
Free
Free tier$5 prepaid usage · $0.20/CU · max 25 concurrent Actor runs · community support
Starter
$26/mo if billed yearly
$29 prepaid usage · $0.20/CU · 32 concurrent runs · chat support
Scale
$179/mo if billed yearly
$199 prepaid usage · $0.16/CU · 128 concurrent runs · priority chat
Business
$899/mo if billed yearly
$999 prepaid usage · $0.13/CU · 256 concurrent runs · account manager
Pricing snapshot · re-verify on the vendor site before committing volume.
Features & capabilities
Values from public docs and pricing pages. n/a means not verified yet, not a “no”.
Limitations
CU/PPE economics differ by Actor. Do not compare platform credits 1:1 with scraping-API page credits. Success rates not verified here.
See Apify Platform in action
Product walkthrough or tutorial video so you can judge the workflow before you start a pilot.
FAQ
Is Apify free?
Apify offers a Free platform tier with platform credits. Actor costs may still apply depending on the Actor’s pricing model.
How is Apify priced?
Platform prepaid credits plus Actor pay-per-event or compute usage. There is no single page-credit number for the whole catalog.
What type of tool is Apify Platform?
Apify Platform is listed as a Cloud scraping platform. Point-and-click scrapers and monitors for operators who need data without maintaining scraping code.
Is there a free plan or trial?
A free plan is indicated: Free plan: $5 prepaid platform usage/month, no card required.
How much does Apify Platform cost?
Public paid plans start at from $29 on our snapshot. Billing units differ by vendor (credits, searches, browser hours).
Does ScraperDB invent success rates?
No. We publish sourced pricing and capability signals and mark unknowns instead of inventing benchmarks.
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