Tool profile
Apify: cost, fit and limits
Apify is a cloud platform made by Apify Technologies s.r.o., a company in the Czech Republic, that runs web scrapers and automations as serverless programs called Actors, sells them through the Apify Store marketplace and exposes them to AI agents through a hosted MCP server.
What to know first
Apify bills in platform usage rather than per page. The free plan includes $5 of usage a month, Starter costs $19 a month with $19 of usage, Scale $199 and Business $999. Most scrapers in the Apify Store are built by independent creators, so quality and pricing vary by Actor. Compute units drop from $0.20 on Starter to $0.13 on Business.
Apify at a glance
| Maker | Apify Technologies s.r.o., Czech Republic |
|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes |
| Entry price | $19 per month for Starter, plus pay as you go |
| API access | Yes |
| Category | Best AI Web Scraping Tools in 2026, rank 10 of 12 |
| Website | apify.com |
Who Apify is best for
Developers who want ready-made scrapers
The Apify Store lists Actors for common sites, so a developer can run one with JSON input and receive structured output in a dataset instead of writing and hosting a crawler.
Teams building agents on Claude or ChatGPT
A hosted MCP server lets AI clients such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor discover Actors, run them and read the results, which suits agent builders who need live web data.
Engineers with their own crawlers
The open-source Crawlee library has templates for Playwright, Puppeteer, Cheerio, Selenium, Scrapy and BeautifulSoup, and the SDKs for Node.js and Python deploy that code as an Actor.
Apify plans and pricing
| Plan | Price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, no credit card | $5 of platform usage a month, 5 datacenter proxy IPs, 16 GB maximum RAM, 5 concurrent runs and community support. |
| Starter | $19 per month, or $17 billed annually | $19 of usage, Store Bronze discount, $0.20 per compute unit, 30 datacenter proxy IPs, 64 GB RAM, 32 concurrent runs and chat support. |
| Scale | $199 per month, or $179 billed annually | $199 of usage, Store Silver discount, $0.16 per compute unit, 200 proxy IPs, 256 GB RAM, 128 concurrent runs and priority chat support. |
| Business | $999 per month, or $899 billed annually | $999 of usage, Store Gold discount, $0.13 per compute unit, 500 proxy IPs, 512 GB RAM, 256 concurrent runs and an account manager. |
Checked October 2026.
What Apify does
- Actors
- An Actor is a serverless cloud program that takes JSON input, runs on Apify infrastructure and writes structured output to a dataset or key-value store, which keeps scraping code separate from your own servers.
- Apify Store
- The Store is a marketplace of Actors built mostly by independent creators and searchable through an API, which gives breadth but means support and upkeep depend on each author.
- Scheduling
- Actor and task runs start from cron expressions set in the Console or through the API, so a nightly price check needs no external scheduler.
- Hosted MCP server
- AI agents and LLM clients can find Actors, run them and retrieve results through a hosted MCP server, with Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor named as clients.
- Apify Proxy
- Proxy IPs change by geography to reduce blocking. On the free plan the proxy works inside the platform only and does not extend to outside clients.
How Apify handles your data
The privacy policy says Apify does not use personal data it processes as a data processor for customers to train AI models unless the customer has separately agreed. Data is kept no longer than needed for the purpose of collection, then deleted or anonymized. Processing happens mainly in the European Union and the United States, and may also occur in other places where Apify or its providers operate. The apify.com/security page returned HTTP 404 and no other security page was opened, so certifications were not checked.
Where Apify falls short in practice
- Free usage ends access. When the free plan's $5 of monthly usage runs out, access is blocked until the next cycle, so a busy test month stops the work instead of billing overage.
- Usage does not roll over. Unused platform usage on paid plans does not carry to the next month, and the Starter overage limit can be set at most to $100, which caps heavy spikes.
- Store quality varies. Because most Actors come from independent creators, a buyer has to judge each one for maintenance, output fields and per-run price before building a workflow on it.
Works with
Alternatives to Apify
Apify: common questions
What does Apify cost to start?
The free plan costs nothing and includes $5 of platform usage a month with no credit card. Starter is $19 a month, or $17 billed annually, with $19 of usage. Paid plans save 10 percent on annual billing, and unused usage does not roll over to the next month.
What is an Apify Actor?
An Actor is a serverless program that runs on Apify infrastructure. It takes JSON input and returns structured output to a dataset or key-value store. You can run Actors from the Store, schedule them with cron expressions, or build your own with the Apify SDK for JavaScript or Python.
Can AI agents use Apify directly?
Yes. Apify offers a hosted MCP server that lets clients such as Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor discover Actors, run them and retrieve results. The pages read do not list per-call limits for the MCP server, so check how runs are billed against your usage.
Does Apify train AI on scraped customer data?
The privacy policy says personal data Apify processes on a customer's behalf as a data processor is not used to train AI models unless the customer separately agrees. The policy covers personal data, so ask Apify how it treats other inputs and outputs, such as Actor code or datasets.
What are the free plan limits?
The free plan allows 5 concurrent runs, 16 GB of maximum RAM and 5 datacenter proxy IPs. Usage beyond $5 a month blocks access until the next monthly cycle, and the proxy works only inside the platform. Paid plans raise runs to 32, 128 and 256.