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A store of ready-made web scrapers and automations you rent by the run — prepaid usage instead of building scrapers yourself
The data-collection specialist — $0 to test and $19 to run real jobs — the catch is usage metering where Actor fees sit on top of compute.
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Apify is a marketplace of ready-made web scrapers and automations (Actors) on a prepaid-usage platform — you rent data collection by the run instead of building scrapers yourself.
You repeatedly need structured data from the web — prices, listings, reviews, leads, search results — and want a ready Actor, a schedule and an API or export instead of maintaining your own scraper.
You want a general trigger-and-action automator for your SaaS apps (that is Zapier or Make), or your scraping volume is so steady and large that the $199 Scale step becomes your real entry price.
Workflows are built only from verified capabilities in our listing research — no vendor copy, nothing invented.
Starts You pick a ready-made Store Actor for the marketplace or site you track
You get A fresh, structured price dataset on a timetable
Manual copy-paste research becomes a recurring feed
Starts You need listings, businesses or profiles matching a search
You get A structured list ready to work through
Approval Check data-use and site terms before reusing scraped data commercially
Prospect research that took evenings takes one run
Starts You need web pages converted to clean text or Markdown
You get Clean page text at scale
Source gathering for content stops being the bottleneck
Pick the exact job you need done, run it small, and read the dataset before paying anything.
Check that Actor's per-event or per-result fee plus compute and proxy use, then project a month at your real volume.
Schedule the Actor and connect its dataset to your sheet, CRM or API consumer so runs land where you work.
Time to first useful result: An hour or two to run a first Actor and wire its output somewhere useful · no-code 3/5
Plan fee is prepaid usage: Free $0 with $5 usage/month, Starter $19/month ($17 billed annually), Scale $199/month ($179 annually), Business $999/month ($899 annually), Enterprise custom. Each paid fee returns as the same amount of usage, spent on compute units ($0.20 Free/Starter, $0.16 Scale, $0.13 Business per 1 GB RAM-hour), proxies, storage and per-event Actor fees. Annual billing is 10% off; unused usage does not roll over.
$0/month — $5 of prepaid usage included
Custom / quoted · $0/mo for one person
$19/month billed monthly; $17/month billed annually — $19 of prepaid usage included
Custom / quoted · $19/mo for one person
$199/month billed monthly; $179/month billed annually — $199 of prepaid usage included
Custom / quoted · $199/mo for one person
$999/month billed monthly; $899/month billed annually — $999 of prepaid usage included
Custom / quoted · $999/mo for one person
Custom — contact for pricing
Custom / quoted · $null/mo for one person
| Plan | Published price | Solo monthly | Billed by | Limits & overage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0/month — $5 of prepaid usage included | $0/mo | Custom / quoted | Runs are blocked when the $5 usage is exhausted · No Store discount; $0.20 per compute unit |
| StarterSolo pick | $19/month billed monthly; $17/month billed annually — $19 of prepaid usage included | $19/mo | Custom / quoted | $0.20 per compute unit — same rate as Free · Unused prepaid usage expires each month |
| Scale | $199/month billed monthly; $179/month billed annually — $199 of prepaid usage included | $199/mo | Custom / quoted | A tenfold step up from Starter — priced for steady, high-volume scraping |
| Business | $999/month billed monthly; $899/month billed annually — $999 of prepaid usage included | $999/mo | Custom / quoted | Enterprise-scale volume pricing, far beyond a typical solo workload |
| Enterprise | Custom — contact for pricing | $null/mo | Custom / quoted | Quoted individually |
The ladder jumps hard: Starter $19 to Scale $199 is a tenfold step, taken mainly to cut the compute rate from $0.20 to $0.16 and raise concurrency. Inside any plan, per-event Actor fees plus proxies and storage sit on top of compute, so a busy Actor can burn the prepaid balance faster than the headline fee suggests.
Price record · 2026-11-08: Checked 2026-11-08. DISCLOSED METHOD: apify.com/pricing could not be text-fetched directly in this run (fetch blocked), so figures were corroborated from multiple independent dated reads of that same official page in October-November 2026, all agreeing: Free $0 with $5 usage, Starter $19 ($17 annual), Scale $199 ($179 annual), Business $999 ($899 annual), Enterprise custom; compute $0.20/$0.20/$0.16/$0.13 per CU (1 GB RAM-hour); annual billing 10% off; prepaid usage equals the plan fee and does not roll over. No directory or blog figure was used as the price source — third-party pages were read only as dated witnesses to the official page.
The same fields on every deep listing in this job, so agents compare field by field. “Not verified” means our research has not confirmed it yet — it never means “doesn't have it.”
Apify solves a specific solo-founder problem: the data you need already exists on the web — competitor prices, marketplace listings, reviews, business leads, search results — but getting it repeatedly, in a structured form, normally means building and babysitting a scraper. Apify replaces that project with a store. Its programs, called Actors, are ready-made scrapers and automations maintained by Apify and third-party developers: you choose one, set its inputs, run it in Apify's cloud, and receive a clean dataset you can export, pull through an API or push onward. Actors can run on schedules, so a weekly price check or a monthly listings harvest becomes a feed rather than a chore. If no Actor fits, you can build your own in code, including with the vendor's open-source Crawlee framework, and run it on the same platform. The economics need reading carefully. Your plan fee is not just access: it returns as an equal amount of prepaid usage, which runs then spend on compute, proxies, storage and, for many Actors, a per-event or per-result fee set by that Actor. That makes small jobs remarkably cheap — the free plan alone carries five dollars of usage a month — and makes careless jobs surprisingly expensive, because three meters run at once. Apify is not a general business automator: it will not replace Zapier for moving form submissions into your CRM. It is the data-collection layer you call when the input to your work lives on someone else's website.
Solo Fit stays the public score: the qualitative roll-up of these four published inputs under the How We Rank method. Store Actors are point-and-run, but scheduling, inputs and output plumbing still reward technical confidence, which caps the no-code score.
The difference: The general SaaS automator — triggers and actions across your apps — the catch is per-task billing, and it does not give you a store of ready-made web scrapers.
The difference: A cheaper, visual scenario builder for app automation — the catch is you build every data-collection flow yourself instead of renting a maintained Actor.
The difference: The self-hostable workflow engine with a code escape hatch — the catch is you run and maintain the infrastructure Apify hosts for you.
Free is $0 with $5 of usage a month. Starter is $19/month billed monthly ($17 billed annually) and is the realistic solo plan; Scale is $199 and Business $999. The directory's True Solo Cost is $0 low and $19 typical. Each paid fee comes back as the same amount of prepaid usage.
Your plan fee is prepaid usage, not just access. Runs spend it on compute units (1 GB of RAM for one hour: $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business), proxies, storage and any per-event fee the Actor itself charges. Unused usage expires monthly, paid plans can run into pay-as-you-go overage, and Free runs stop when the $5 runs out.
Often, yes. Many Store Actors charge per event or per result on top of the platform usage they consume, at rates set on each Actor's own page. Price the specific Actor at your volume before you commit to a plan tier.
Running a Store Actor is point-and-configure; building your own Actor is code. Most solo founders live on the Store side, but input configuration, scheduling and piping datasets into other tools still reward some technical confidence.
Apify is not in a published stack yet — stacks are edited buying guides, and memberships are added only when the combination has been worked through.
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