Apify Pricing, Reviews, Pros and Cons: What You'll Actually Pay in 2026
You open Apify's pricing page and see four clean tiers - Free, Starter, Scale, Business. Straightforward enough. Then you notice compute units, proxy bandwidth, Store Actor fees, storage costs, and data transfer charges. Tab closed.
You're not alone. Across 415 G2 reviews, Apify holds a 4.7/5 rating, yet "Pricing Issues" appears 88 times as a tagged negative - one of the most-cited complaints on the platform. We've dug through the billing model, user feedback, and real-world cost scenarios so you know exactly what to expect before committing.
The 30-second verdict: Apify is a powerful, developer-first scraping platform with a genuinely confusing billing model. If you just need B2B contact data or predictable monthly costs, it's overkill.
Apify Pricing Breakdown (2026)
Many third-party sites list Starter at $39 or $49/month. That's wrong. The official price is $29/mo.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Price (Prepaid Included) | CU Rate | Datacenter Proxy IPs Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/mo ($5 prepaid) | $0.30/CU | 5 |
| Starter | $29/mo ($29 prepaid) | $0.30/CU | 30 |
| Scale | $199/mo ($199 prepaid) | $0.25/CU | 200 |
| Business | $999/mo ($999 prepaid) | $0.20/CU | 500 |
Your monthly fee buys prepaid usage credits. Exceed them and overages hit your next invoice. Unused credits don't roll over.
Proxy Pricing
| Proxy Type | Free/Starter | Scale | Business |
|---|---|---|---|
| Residential | $8/GB | $7.50/GB | $7/GB |
| SERPs | $2.50/1K | $2/1K | $1.70/1K |
| DC Overage | $1/IP | $0.80/IP | $0.60/IP |
The Hidden Costs
Beyond CUs and proxies, Apify charges separately for concurrent runs ($5/run), Actor RAM ($2/GB), dataset timed storage ($1.00 per 1,000 GB-hours on Free/Starter, $0.90 on Scale, $0.80 on Business), and data transfer ($0.20/GB on Free/Starter, $0.19 on Scale, $0.18 on Business). None of these show up on the main pricing grid. In our experience, these extras often add 30-50% on top of the base CU cost for moderate-volume jobs.
What You'll Actually Pay
A compute unit equals 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. A lightweight 128 MB Actor running for one minute costs roughly $0.0006. A 4 GB Actor running for an hour costs $1.20 at the $0.30/CU rate. Here's what real workloads tend to cost monthly:
- Personal research (<100 pages): Free plan covers it
- Google Maps lead gen (~2,000 records): $5-15
- E-commerce monitoring (~30,000 records): $30-80
- Social media tracking (~50,000 records): $80-150
One third-party review ran 50,000 TikTok profile extractions for ~$60 in compute units. Sounds reasonable - until you add proxy costs. Proxy spend often exceeds CU spend at moderate to high volume, and that's the part most people don't budget for. If you're doing web scraping lead generation specifically, this is where costs usually spike.
Apify's hidden costs - proxies, storage, data transfer - can add 30-50% to your bill. If all you need is B2B contact data, Prospeo delivers 143M+ verified emails at 98% accuracy for $0.01 each. No compute units, no proxy bandwidth, no invoice surprises.
Stop scraping for emails. Just get them verified and ready to send.
Honest Pros and Cons
Pros
The Actor ecosystem is massive - 15,000+ ready-made Actors covering everything from Google Maps to TikTok. You can launch many pre-built Actors in under 10 minutes with zero code. The serverless architecture handles scheduling, storage, webhooks, and monitoring out of the box, and Apify is SOC 2 Type II certified with 99.95% listed uptime. For technical teams, time-to-value is genuinely hard to beat.
Cons
On G2, "Pricing Issues" (88 mentions) and "Expensive" (87 mentions) are the two most common negative tags. "Learning Difficulty" shows up 58 times. Capterra reviews echo the theme: credit-based billing confuses people and leads to unexpected costs when scaling. If you're trying to keep lead generation metrics stable month to month, this variability is a real operational headache.
The Actor Continuity Risk
Here's the thing most reviews won't tell you: Apify's biggest risk isn't pricing - it's platform dependency. On r/webscraping, users have reported Apify's Apollo scraper jumping from ~$1.50 per 1,000 leads to $30 before getting suspended entirely. Community developers have also complained that first-party Actors get preferential placement, squeezing out third-party builders. If your workflow depends on a marketplace Actor, you're one policy change away from rebuilding it.
Let's be honest: a 4.7-star product with 88 pricing complaints isn't really a 4.7-star product. It's a great tool with a terrible billing experience.
Apify Reviews Across Platforms
| Platform | Rating | Review Count |
|---|---|---|
| G2 | 4.7/5 | 415 |
| Capterra | 4.8/5 | 401 |
| Trustpilot | 4.8/5 | 412 |
| Software Advice | 4.8/5 | 401 |
Ratings are high across the board, but the qualitative pattern is consistent: users love the capabilities and hate the billing surprises. As one Reddit poster put it, it's "hard to understand exactly how much it would cost" until you've already built a proof of concept. We've seen this pattern with other usage-based platforms too - the sticker price looks fine, but the invoice tells a different story.
Who Should (and Shouldn't) Use Apify
Use Apify if you:
- Have developers comfortable writing or configuring scrapers
- Need custom scraping logic with scheduling, storage, and webhooks
- Want access to 15,000+ pre-built Actors
- Can absorb usage-based billing variability month to month
Skip Apify if you:
- Need predictable monthly costs without usage surprises
- Can't absorb the risk of third-party Actors being deprecated or repriced overnight
- Only need B2B contact data - emails, phone numbers, company info
- Want simple API scraping (ScrapingBee alternatives typically starts around $49-$99/mo) or proxy-only access (Bright Data starter plans commonly run $499/mo)
If your actual goal is finding verified emails and direct dials, you don't need a scraping platform at all. Prospeo covers 300M+ professional profiles with 98% email accuracy, and the free tier gives you 75 verified emails per month. No compute units, no proxy configuration, no broken scrapers. Data refreshes every 7 days versus the 6-week industry average, so you're not dialing stale numbers. For teams building lists at scale, it’s closer to how to generate an email list than it is to running a scraping stack.
One Apify Actor repricing can break your entire lead gen workflow overnight. Prospeo refreshes 300M+ profiles every 7 days with proprietary infrastructure - no third-party dependencies, no marketplace risk. 75 free verified emails per month, no credit card required.
Predictable pricing, verified data, zero platform dependency.
FAQ
Does Apify have a free plan?
Yes - $0/month with $5 in prepaid usage and 7-day data retention. That's enough for roughly 2,500 Google Maps records, ~5,000 Amazon product listings, or 300-500 Playwright-rendered pages monthly. No credit card required to start.
Why is my Apify bill higher than expected?
Apify charges separately for CUs, proxy bandwidth, Store Actor fees, storage, and data transfer. Proxy costs alone often exceed CU costs at moderate volume, and unused credits don't roll over - so overages compound quickly.
Is Apify good for finding B2B emails?
You can scrape contact data with Apify Actors, but it requires technical setup and costs are unpredictable. For B2B email finding specifically, Prospeo provides verified emails and mobiles directly - 98% accuracy across 143M+ verified addresses, no scraping configuration needed. The free tier includes 75 emails/month.
What are the best Apify alternatives for lead generation?
For general web scraping, ScrapingBee and Bright Data are common alternatives with simpler billing. For B2B contact data specifically, tools like Prospeo, Apollo, and ZoomInfo skip scraping entirely and provide structured databases with verified contact info.