Agents & automation
Apify: pricing, free plan, and how to use it
Apify: Runs ready-made scrapers and automations (Actors) and hands you the data as a dataset or API. It is best for teams and builders who need data from websites on a schedule or inside AI agents. Free plan with $5 of platform usage every month and no credit card.
Updated Oct 23, 2026 · By Mishal Brands Editorial
Apify is a platform for running web scrapers and automation tools, called Actors, from its Apify Store or that you build yourself. The free plan includes $5 of platform usage a month with no credit card; paid plans start at $19 a month plus pay-as-you-go usage.
Last checked:
Docs score
Measures documented business features and transparency from official pages, not product performance. How the score works
How do you run your first Apify Actor and export the data?
Here is a practical setup in 5 steps. It follows the features Apify Technologies lists.
- Sign up for a free Apify account (no credit card) and sign in to Apify Console.
- Open Apify Store, search or browse by category and choose an Actor. Apify's own tutorial uses Website Content Crawler. Check the pricing section on the Actor's page first: it says whether you pay per event or per usage.
- On the Actor's Input tab, set what it should collect (start URLs, search terms, limits). Website Content Crawler runs without extra input. Click Start.
- While it runs, open the Log and Storage tabs to watch progress, and use the API button to see the endpoints for this Actor.
- When it finishes, open the Output tab and click Export to download the results in the format you need. To repeat it, save the input as a task and schedule it, or start the Actor from your own code with the Run Actor API endpoint or Apify's JavaScript and Python clients.
What is our verdict?
Apify is documented for teams and builders who need data from websites on a schedule or inside AI agents. Its official pages are strongest on free plan or trial and weakest on business features. This verdict summarizes the vendor’s published facts.
- Who it suits
- Teams and builders who need data from websites on a schedule or inside AI agents (as Apify Technologies positions it).
- Consider an alternative
- Browse AI, which covers the same tasks (automate work, research & answers); compare them on the compare page. Check its free plan and limits on its own page before you choose.
- Main advantage
- Free plan with $5 of platform usage every month and no credit card.
- Main limitation
- Free plan, in the official wording: $5 a month of prepaid usage for Apify Store or your own Actors, $0.2 per compute unit, community support, no credit card. Documentation gap: Free, Starter, Scale and Business prices are published; custom plans go through sales.
- Starting plan
- Start on the Free plan ($0): $5 a month of prepaid usage for Apify Store or your own Actors, $0.2 per compute unit, community support, no credit card. Move up when you reach those limits. The next plan is Starter at $19/month + pay as you go.
See Apify pricing on the official site Not affiliate
Who is Apify for, and who is it not for?
- For: Teams and builders who need data from websites on a schedule or inside AI agents.
- Not ideal for: teams that need seats, admin controls or SSO on a published plan. Official pages say: Organization accounts for shared Actors, permissions and billing; the published plan table shows no SSO on Free through Business.
- Not ideal for: buyers who need every price published before talking to sales. Official pages say: Free, Starter, Scale and Business prices are published; custom plans go through sales.
What are the key features of Apify?
- Free access: Free plan with $5 of platform usage every month and no credit card. This matters when you want to test before you pay.
- Integrations and API: Public REST API, webhooks, JavaScript and Python clients, GitHub integration and an MCP server for AI agents. This matters when it has to connect to your other apps or be automated.
- Team and business features: Organization accounts for shared Actors, permissions and billing; the published plan table shows no SSO on Free through Business. This matters when a team shares the account or you need admin controls.
- Help documentation: Public documentation at docs.apify.com and a web scraping academy. This matters when you set it up yourself without a sales call.
- Privacy and data terms: Privacy policy published; it says customer-processed personal data is not used to train AI models without separate agreement. This matters when client or personal data goes into the tool.
- Starter plan: $19 of prepaid usage, $0.2 per compute unit, chat support, Bronze Apify Store discount. This matters when the free tier is not enough.
What are the limitations of Apify?
- Free tier: Free plan with $5 of platform usage every month and no credit card.
- Published pricing: Free, Starter, Scale and Business prices are published; custom plans go through sales.
- Team and business features: Organization accounts for shared Actors, permissions and billing; the published plan table shows no SSO on Free through Business.
- Plans change: vendors update limits and prices; confirm on the official page before you buy.
Facts in these sections come from official vendor pages (checked Oct 23, 2026).
What do the plans and prices look like?
The how-to comes first. Below are the product facts, plan limits and prices, taken from official vendor pages. Each fact shows the date it was checked; vendors change plans, so confirm on the official page before you buy.
Quick answer
Yes, Apify has a free plan: $0 a month with $5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, compute at $0.2 per compute unit, community support and no credit card. Starter is $19 a month, Scale $199 and Business $999, each with that amount of prepaid usage plus pay as you go; annual billing saves 10%. Custom plans go through sales. Checked October 23, 2026.
No affiliate links. Links to Apify on this page are plain links to the official site.
What is Apify?
Apify runs Actors: serverless programs that scrape websites, crawl content or automate browser tasks. You pick one from Apify Store (Website Content Crawler, Google Maps Scraper, Instagram Scraper and many more) or build your own with Apify's Python, JavaScript or TypeScript templates and the open-source Crawlee library. Each run saves its results to a dataset you export or read through the Apify API. Store Actors are priced either per event (a fixed price per result or start) or per usage (you pay only the platform resources the run uses). Apify connects to the rest of your stack through its REST API, webhooks, client libraries, a GitHub integration and an MCP server that gives AI agents and MCP clients access to Actors, plus agent frameworks such as the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain and the Vercel AI SDK. Organization accounts let a team share Actors and billing without sharing one login.
Official site: apify.com Not affiliate. Category in the Library: Agents & automation.
How much does Apify cost?
Prices from Apify Technologies’s official pricing page Not affiliate, checked Oct 23, 2026, in US dollars before tax. If the official page shows something different, the official page is right.
Plans with no monthly price on the official page are not shown. Prices are the first monthly price in each table row below. “billed yearly” means the per-month figure of an annual plan paid up front; “billed monthly” is the month-to-month price.
| Plan | Price | What the official page says |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 a month of prepaid usage for Apify Store or your own Actors, $0.2 per compute unit, community support, no credit card |
| Starter | $19/month + pay as you go | $19 of prepaid usage, $0.2 per compute unit, chat support, Bronze Apify Store discount |
| Scale | $199/month + pay as you go | $199 of prepaid usage, $0.16 per compute unit, priority chat support, Silver Apify Store discount |
| Business | $999/month + pay as you go | $999 of prepaid usage, $0.13 per compute unit, account manager, Gold Apify Store discount |
| Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom scraping solutions, scalable pricing, SLAs with guaranteed data, dedicated team |
What is Apify’s Docs score?
Apify scores 8 out of 10 on the Docs score (documented business features and transparency, not product performance). Each point comes from a public fact on an official page. How the score works.
| Criterion | Points | Public fact |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | 1 / 2 | Free, Starter, Scale and Business prices are published; custom plans go through sales. |
| Free plan or trial | 2 / 2 | Free plan with $5 of platform usage every month and no credit card. |
| Business features | 1 / 2 | Organization accounts for shared Actors, permissions and billing; the published plan table shows no SSO on Free through Business. |
| Integrations and API | 2 / 2 | Public REST API, webhooks, JavaScript and Python clients, GitHub integration and an MCP server for AI agents. |
| Documentation and support | 1 / 1 | Public documentation at docs.apify.com and a web scraping academy. |
| Privacy and data terms | 1 / 1 | Privacy policy published; it says customer-processed personal data is not used to train AI models without separate agreement. |
| Total | 8 / 10 | Docs score (documented business features and transparency, not product performance) |
Frequently asked questions
Is Apify free?
Yes. The free plan costs $0 and includes $5 of platform usage every month, with no credit card. If you use up the $5 on the free plan, access is blocked until the next monthly cycle; unused usage does not roll over, per Apify's pricing FAQ, checked October 23, 2026.
How much does Apify cost?
Starter is $19 a month, Scale $199 and Business $999, and each includes that amount of prepaid usage; usage beyond it is added to your next invoice. Compute costs $0.2 per compute unit on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Annual billing saves 10%. Checked on apify.com/pricing, October 23, 2026.
How are Actors in Apify Store priced?
Each Actor's page states its model. Pay per event charges a fixed price for events the developer defines, such as each result returned. Pay per usage adds nothing on top and you pay only the platform usage of the run: compute units, data transfer, storage and proxies. Apify suggests a test run to see what a job costs.
Can AI agents use Apify?
Yes. Apify's documentation describes an MCP server that exposes Actors and storage to MCP-compatible AI clients, and integrations for the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain, the Vercel AI SDK and Google ADK.
Does Apify use my data to train AI models?
Apify's privacy policy says it does not use personal data it processes on behalf of customers to train AI models unless the customer has separately agreed.
Sources, all official Apify Technologies pages, checked Oct 23, 2026: Apify pricing Not affiliate; Run Actors (Apify docs) Not affiliate; Integrations (Apify docs) Not affiliate; Organization account (Apify docs) Not affiliate; Apify privacy policy Not affiliate.
Mishal Brands is an independent publisher with no affiliate or business relationship with Apify Technologies. Product names belong to their owners. How we review.