Apify Review
Apify is a full scraping platform with a marketplace of ready-made actors for popular sites. If someone has already built the scraper you need, this is the fastest path to data.
Review last updated 2026-08-20 · How we rate providers
Scorecard
Pros
- A marketplace of thousands of prebuilt scrapers, so common targets need no code at all
- Full serverless platform: scheduling, storage, webhooks, monitoring and queues
- Maintains Crawlee, a well-regarded open-source scraping library
- Generous free tier with $5 of monthly credit
Cons
- Platform credit pricing is confusing next to simple per-request billing
- Community actors vary in quality and maintenance
- Proxy pricing is not competitive bought on its own
- Costs can surprise you if an actor runs longer than expected
Privacy, jurisdiction & audits
Who the company answers to legally, what it keeps, and whether anyone independent has checked.
| Legal jurisdiction | Czechia outside 5/9/14 Eyes |
|---|---|
| Logging policy | Not a privacy service; operational logs by design |
| Independent audits | Prescient Assurance, 2024 SOC 2 Type II |
| Anonymous payment | Card / PayPal only |
| How IPs are sourced | Aggregated residential supply plus owned datacenter ranges. |
Apify plans & pricing
Advertised rates as of August 20, 2026. VPN promo rates normally require the prepaid term shown and renew at the higher rate; proxy pricing falls with volume. Confirm on Apify's own site before buying.
| Plan | Price | Min spend | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| FreeScraping APIs | Freefree forever | Free | $5 of monthly platform credit |
| StarterScraping APIs | $0.50/1k requestsmonthly platform credit | $39 | |
| Residential proxiesResidential Proxies | $8/GBusage based | $39 | |
| Datacenter proxiesDatacenter Proxies | $1/IP/momonthly per IP | $39 |
Features
Our Apify review
Apify is less a scraping API than a serverless platform for running collection jobs. Its marketplace holds thousands of actors, prebuilt scrapers for specific sites, many maintained by the community and some by Apify itself. If your target is a well-known site, someone has probably already solved it.
The platform underneath handles scheduling, retries, dataset storage, webhooks, monitoring and proxy rotation, which turns a script into a production pipeline without you building any of that infrastructure.
Apify also maintains Crawlee, an open-source crawling library that is genuinely good, and using it makes deploying to the platform straightforward when a project outgrows a laptop.
Pricing is in platform credits that map to compute time, storage and proxy usage rather than simple request counts, which is flexible but harder to predict. A badly written actor can burn credits fast, so set limits.
Community actor quality varies. Official and popular ones are well maintained; obscure ones may be abandoned.
The free tier includes five dollars of monthly credit, enough to run real jobs and evaluate properly. Recommended when the goal is data quickly rather than a bespoke pipeline.
Notable facts
- Marketplace of thousands of prebuilt scrapers, called actors
- Maintains the open-source Crawlee crawling library
- SOC 2 Type II certified
At a glance
| Founded | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Prague, Czechia |
| Service types | Scraping APIs, Residential Proxies, Datacenter Proxies |
| IP pool | 35M addresses |
| Country coverage | 100 |
| Proxy protocols | HTTP(S) |
| Rotation | Automatic session management per actor run |
| Starting price | $8/GB |
| Free tier | Yes |
| Support | chat, email, knowledge-base, account manager on larger plans |
Frequently asked questions
What is an actor?
A packaged scraper or automation that runs on Apify's platform. Many exist for popular sites, so common targets need no code at all.
How does Apify pricing work?
In platform credits covering compute, storage and proxy usage, rather than per request. Set usage limits, since a long-running actor can consume credits quickly.
Should I buy Apify proxies alone?
Not usually. They are priced for platform users; Decodo or IPRoyal are cheaper for standalone proxy needs.
Bottom line
Apify is a full scraping platform with a marketplace of ready-made actors for popular sites. If someone has already built the scraper you need, this is the fastest path to data.
Check current Apify pricing →
