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✓ last verified 2026-10-02 · every rate below was read from Apify’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify
Apify is a platform rather than an endpoint: a marketplace of pre-built scrapers (“actors”), plus scheduling, storage, proxies and an API wrapping all of it. You buy the workflow layer, not just the request.
Where Apify sits in the verified market
Among the 3 scraping APIs whose plans we have verified, Apify’s entry plan ($19.00/month) is tied for cheapest with ScrapingBee’s Hobby plan ($19/month for 75,000 credits).
Apify pricing (verified 2026-10-02)
| Product | Plan | Rate | Monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| scraping-api | Starter | $19.00/mo | $19.00 | $19 platform usage incl; Free $0 w/ $5 usage; Scale $199; Business $999; -10% annual |
Source: provider pricing page, checked 2026-10-02.
How the pricing is structured
Plans run from $19/month (Starter) to $999/month (Business) on the published ladder. Products with verified pricing here: scraping-api.
What to know before you buy
Billing is platform usage, not requests, which makes direct comparison with request-priced APIs misleading. Verified tiers: Free ($0 with $5 of monthly usage included), Starter $19/month, Scale $199/month, Business $999/month, with roughly 10% off annual billing.
Who it fits
Apify makes sense if you want scheduled, repeatable jobs, ready-made scrapers for common targets, and team features around them.
Look elsewhere if you only need fetch-and-parse at volume. A request-priced API will cost less for the same work.
Is Apify legit? What we can verify, and what we can’t
What we verified ourselves: its published pricing is real and current — we read every rate in the table above from its live pricing page on 2026-10-02; it operates a public partner programme with published terms (verified 2026-10-02), which requires payment infrastructure, tax handling and a business entity behind it; its terms pages and checkout are publicly reachable rather than gated behind sales contact.
What we have not verified: Apify’s success rates, pool quality, support responsiveness, or refund behaviour in practice. Nobody publishes independently audited numbers for those — including the review sites that quote precise success percentages. Our benchmark panel is on the methodology roadmap; until it ships we say “unmeasured” rather than guess.
Checking Apify’s reputation yourself: read its Trustpilot profile and recent Reddit threads (r/webscraping and related subreddits) with the standard filters — discount review bursts around promotions, weight detailed complaints about billing and refunds over star averages, and look for how the company responds to problems rather than whether problems exist. Then run the cheapest possible test against your own targets before committing real budget; no third-party opinion substitutes for that.
What we have not verified
Trial length, refund window and payment methods are marked pending until we confirm them by signing up — we do not copy terms from other review sites.
We publish no success-rate or speed benchmark for any provider yet. The testing panel is on the methodology roadmap; until it exists, any site quoting precise success percentages for every provider is either running a real lab or making it up.
Price history
Baseline recorded 2026-08-07. Every subsequent change to Apify’s published pricing is logged here and in the changelog with the date we caught it, which is the point of this site: the current price is easy to find, the trend is not.
FAQ
How much does Apify cost?
Verified 2026-10-02: plans from $19/month (Starter) to $999/month (Business) on the published ladder. Compare on effective cost per successful request rather than plan price, since credit consumption varies by feature.
Does Apify offer a free trial?
Trial and refund terms are marked pending on this profile until we confirm them by signing up. We do not copy trial claims from other review sites, because those are frequently out of date.
Is Apify safe and legit?
Apify is an established commercial operation: we verified its published pricing against its live site on 2026-10-02, and it runs public terms and a partner programme. What no one has independently verified — here or elsewhere — is performance. Check its Trustpilot and recent Reddit threads for reputation, then test small against your own targets; that beats any review site’s verdict, including ours.
Is Apify scraping legal?
Yes — using Apify is legal. Web scraping itself is lawful in most jurisdictions when it targets public data; risk concentrates around bypassing access controls, personal data, and contractual terms of the sites you scrape. Apify executing the requests does not transfer that responsibility away from you.
Why is Apify so expensive?
Because you are buying a platform, not requests. Apify bills platform usage — compute, storage, scheduling and marketplace actors — so a heavy actor can consume a Starter plan quickly. Verified plans run $29–$999/month. For pure fetch-and-parse workloads, request-priced APIs are structurally cheaper: Scrape.do’s verified $0.06–$0.11 per 1,000 successful credits is the benchmark to compare against.
Is Apify scraping legal?
Running scrapers on Apify is legal; what determines risk is the target and the data. Public pages, no authentication bypass, no personal data — generally fine. Apify publishes compliance guidance, but responsibility for what an actor scrapes remains with the person running it.
Why is Apify so expensive?
Verified plans run $19–$999/month. Premium pricing in this market buys one of three things: platform features beyond raw requests (compute, scheduling, marketplaces), compliance and procurement paperwork, or brand. Whether Apify is expensive *for you* depends on whether you use what the premium buys — the verified cheaper end of the table exists precisely for workloads that don’t.
Is Apify legal?
Using Apify is legal in the US and EU — proxies and scraping services are ordinary infrastructure, and being a customer is not the exposure. Risk lives in conduct through the service (authentication bypass, terms breaches at scale, personal data) and, industry-wide, in how residential IPs are sourced — the question the July 2026 NetNut domain seizure made concrete.
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