October 14, 2026

Apify pricing · the plan is a wallet you fill

Apify's $19 Starter plan is $19 of prepaid usage. Compute units, proxies and each Actor's own fee decide how fast it runs out. Plan for the job.

The short answer

Apify is worth it when you need a ready-made data collector for a tricky site, like maps, marketplaces or social profiles. If you only need to read web pages into clean text, Firecrawl is easier to plan for, because it charges one credit per page.

Apify is a marketplace of ready-made programs that collect data from websites, plus the cloud to run them. Apify calls each program an Actor.

The plan fee is prepaid usage

Each Apify plan fee buys the same amount of usage. Starter is $19 a month, and it gives you $19 to spend. Past that, you pay as you go, per Apify's pricing.

| Plan | Price a month | Price per compute unit | | --- | ---: | ---: | | Free | $0, with $5 of usage | $0.20 | | Starter | $19 | $0.20 | | Scale | $199 | $0.16 | | Business | $999 | $0.13 |

Billing yearly takes 10% off.

Handsketch of a RAM stick times a clock equals 1 compute unit, with highlighter on memory times time — Memory × time = compute units.

Three meters run at once

A compute unit is 1 GB of memory used for 1 hour. The more memory an Actor uses, and the longer it runs, the more compute units it burns.

A proxy is a middle server that sends your requests so the site doesn't block you. A residential proxy uses home internet addresses. Apify charges $8 per GB for them on Free and Starter, and $7 on Business.

Store Actors can also charge their own fee, per event, per usage or both. The Actor's builder sets that fee, and it shows on the Actor's Store page.

So two people running the same Actor can pay very different amounts, depending on memory and proxies.

Handsketch of three gauges labelled compute $0.20, proxy $8 per GB, and Actor fee with a circled question mark — Three meters, one wallet.

Bigger plans barely cut the compute price

The math: $0.20 to $0.13 is a drop of $0.07, or 35%.

The math: the plan fee goes from $19 to $999, about 53 times bigger.

So a bigger plan mostly buys more usage in the wallet. The compute price drops only a little.

The same job on Firecrawl

Take a RevOps lead who needs to read 10,000 company homepages a month as plain text. Prices are from October 14, 2026.

Firecrawl reads web pages for your code and charges 1 credit per page, per Firecrawl's pricing.

The math on Firecrawl: 10,000 pages = 10,000 credits. Hobby is $16 a month billed yearly for 5,000 credits, and extra credits are $5 per 1,000. So $16 + 5 × $5 = $41. Standard is $83 a month billed yearly for 100,000, so Hobby with extra credits is cheaper at this size.

On Apify, the bill is Starter's $19 of usage plus the compute units and fee of the Actor you pick. Apify has no single price per page, so run a small test first.

Handsketch of two receipts for 10,000 pages, Firecrawl 10,000 credits $41, and Apify plan plus Actor plus compute with blanks — One receipt you can fill in before the run.

When Apify is the right buy

Apify wins when a site needs custom logic, like map listings, marketplaces or social profiles. Its Store has ready-made Actors for those jobs. Firecrawl is built to read web pages.

If you need Google results as data, SearchApi is $40 for 10,000 searches, per SearchApi's pricing.

What to do this week

Run 100 of your real URLs on each free plan, look at what each one charged, and multiply by your month.

If you read company sites into text, try Firecrawl's free plan with 1,000 credits.
If you only need Google results, use SearchApi.
If you need maps, marketplace or social data, stay on Apify.

Try SearchApi · Try Firecrawl

Next · Firecrawl pricing shows every Firecrawl plan · Web search APIs compares search tools.