⚡ Quick Answer
Apify is an online platform of ready-made web scrapers. You pick one from a Store of more than 90,000 tools, type a search term or paste a link, and get the data back as a file you can open in a spreadsheet. There is a free plan with $5 of usage every month, no card needed, and paid plans start at $19 a month. You pay for what you run, so a small test costs almost nothing. Score: 8.4/10, a very good fit if you need lists, prices or posts from the web and do not want to write code.
You need a list of every dentist in a city. Or the last 200 posts from a competitor’s Instagram. Or the prices on a hundred product pages, every Monday. You can do it by hand, one copy and paste at a time, and lose a weekend. Or you can hand the boring part to a robot and spend that weekend on what the data is for.
That is the pitch behind Apify: skip the coding, grab a tool somebody already built, and press start. There is a free plan, so the fastest way to judge it is to run one tool on a real task. This review covers what Apify does, what it costs, where it can surprise you and who gets the most out of it.
Free plan · $5 of usage every month · No credit card required
What Is Apify?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and automation. Its building blocks are called Actors: small programs that each do one job on the web, such as pulling places from Google Maps, posts from Instagram or prices from a store. The Apify Store lists more than 90,000 of them, from tools built by Apify itself to ones published by independent developers.
You do not install anything. Actors run on Apify’s servers, so your laptop can be closed while a big job finishes. The platform also covers the awkward parts of scraping: proxies, scheduling, storage and an API for connecting results to other software. It has an open-source library, Crawlee, for developers, and an MCP connection that lets AI assistants run Actors.
How Apify Works in Three Steps
- Pick an Actor. Search the Store for the site or the data you want, such as Google Maps, Instagram or product prices. Ratings, user counts and prices are shown on every Actor’s page
- Fill in the form. Type a search term, a location or a list of links, and choose how many results you want
- Run it and download. The Actor works in the cloud and puts the results in a dataset you can download, schedule to repeat or send to other tools
That is the whole routine. The first run takes a few minutes to set up. After that, a repeat job is one click, or no click at all if you schedule it.
What You Can Collect With It
The Store is huge, so here are three of the most used official Actors, with the numbers the Store shows today:
| Actor | What it collects | Price on the Free tier | Store rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Maps Scraper | Businesses, contact details, opening hours, reviews | $0.004 per place | 4.71 from 1,818 ratings |
| Instagram Scraper | Public posts, reels, profiles, hashtags, comments | $0.0027 per result | 4.67 from 602 ratings |
| Google Maps Reviews Scraper | Review text, date, owner replies, reviewer details | $0.0006 per review | 4.85 from 198 ratings |
Do the math and the free plan looks generous. At the base price, the $5 of monthly credit covers roughly 1,250 Google Maps places or around 1,800 Instagram results, before any optional add-ons. The Google Maps Scraper alone lists more than 650,000 users in the Store.
Free plan · $5 of usage every month · No credit card required
Apify Pricing
Apify uses a plan plus pay-as-you-go model. Each plan includes prepaid usage equal to its monthly price, and you spend that credit on Actors, proxies, storage and data transfer. Prices below are from the official pricing page, checked on 17 October 2026, billed monthly. Billing annually takes 10% off.
| Plan | Price | Prepaid usage | Compute unit | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 a month | $0.20 | Community |
| Starter | $19 a month | $19 | $0.20 | Chat |
| Scale | $199 a month | $199 | $0.16 | Priority chat |
| Business | $999 a month | $999 | $0.13 | Account manager |
A compute unit is one gigabyte of memory running for one hour. You rarely do that math yourself, because most Store Actors charge per result or per event and show the price on their page. Paid plans also raise limits: 16 GB of Actor memory and 5 concurrent runs on Free, 64 GB and 32 runs on Starter, and more above that. Residential proxies cost $8 per GB on Free and Starter.
If you plan to build your own Actors or AI agents, Apify also advertises $500 of free usage for six months on its pricing page.
Why People Choose Apify
- Someone already built it. Before you spend a day on a custom scraper, search the Store. For the big sites there is usually a tool with thousands of users behind it
- No coding to start. The ready-made Actors work through a form, so a marketer or a researcher can run them on day one
- You can try it free. The Free plan runs real jobs on real sites, with no card on file
- You pay for what you use. A job that returns 300 results costs about a dollar at these prices, not a monthly subscription for a tool you open twice
- It grows with you. Schedules, the API and integrations are there when a one-off task becomes a routine
What to Plan For
- Usage-based pricing means the bill depends on the job. Run one small test first, then check your billing page to see what a result really costs
- On the Free plan, once the $5 is spent the platform is blocked until the next monthly cycle. On paid plans the excess is added to your next invoice. Unused credit does not roll over
- Extras such as residential proxies and optional add-ons (reviews, images, email enrichment) are priced separately
- The Store mixes tools made by Apify with community tools. Check the rating, the user count and the last update before you rely on one
- Scraping has rules. Read the terms of the site you collect from, and be careful with personal data, which privacy laws such as GDPR cover
Is Apify Worth It?
Score: 8.4 / 10
The score is high because Apify solves a real, boring problem, gives you a free plan to prove it and charges by the job instead of by the month. It stops short of a 9 because usage pricing takes one test run to understand and because the legal side of scraping stays your responsibility.
Breaking that down by who is asking:
- Need lead lists, local business data or competitor research? Yes. Google Maps and Instagram Actors cover a lot of that ground for under a cent per result
- Watching prices or products across many pages? Yes, especially with a schedule that repeats the job for you
- Building with AI agents? Worth a look, since Actors can be connected to AI assistants
- Need one table from one page, once? Copy and paste will do. Apify earns its place when the job repeats or gets big
Who Is It For?
Apify is a strong fit if you:
- Do marketing, sales or research and keep asking for data that lives on other websites
- Want to start without writing code or setting up servers
- Prefer to pay by result and test before committing to a plan
It is not the right tool if:
- You need a single page copied once
- You want data you are not allowed to collect, such as private or protected content
Free plan · $5 of usage every month · No credit card required
Verdict
If you have ever lost an afternoon to copying data from a website, Apify is the shortcut. Pick a tool, press start, download the file. The free plan lets you prove it with your own task before you spend anything, and the pay-per-result prices keep a small experiment small.
Start with one job you already do by hand, run it on the Free plan and look at what it cost. You will know within a few minutes whether Apify earns a place in your routine.
Related Reading
Once you have data, you often want to show it to someone. Our Tiiny.host review covers a no-code way to put a finished page or a report online with a link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Apify?
Apify is an online platform where you run ready-made web scrapers and automation tools, called Actors, to collect data from websites. You pick an Actor from the Apify Store, fill in a short form, run it in the cloud and download the results. You can also build and publish your own.
Is Apify free?
Yes. The Free plan costs $0, includes $5 of platform usage every month and asks for no credit card. When the $5 is used up, access to the platform is blocked until the next monthly cycle. Unused credit does not roll over.
How much does Apify cost?
Plans are Free ($0), Starter ($19 a month), Scale ($199 a month) and Business ($999 a month), each with prepaid usage equal to the plan price plus pay as you go beyond that. Compute units cost $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Annual billing is 10% cheaper. Prices are from the official pricing page, checked on 17 October 2026.
What is an Apify Actor?
An Actor is a cloud program on the Apify platform that does one job, such as scraping Google Maps places or Instagram posts. Each one has an input form and a pricing section on its Store page, and every run produces a dataset you can download.
Do I need to code to use Apify?
No, not for the ready-made Actors. You open one, type in a search term or paste a link, press start and download the data. Coding is optional and only matters if you want to build your own Actor or connect Apify to other software through its API.
Can Apify scrape Google Maps?
Yes. The official Google Maps Scraper Actor lists $0.004 per scraped place on the Free tier, plus optional add-ons for reviews, images and contact enrichment. At that base price the $5 monthly free credit covers roughly 1,250 places. Prices are from the Store, checked on 17 October 2026.
Can Apify scrape Instagram?
Yes. The official Instagram Scraper Actor collects public posts, reels, profiles, hashtags and comments from the URLs or searches you give it. It lists $0.0027 per result on the Free tier, checked on 17 October 2026.
Is web scraping legal?
It depends on what you collect, where it comes from and how you use it. Public business data is treated very differently from personal data, and websites set their own terms. Check the terms of the site you are collecting from and privacy rules such as GDPR before you scrape, and treat this as general information, not legal advice.
Is Apify good for beginners?
It is one of the easier ways to start. Ready-made Actors turn scraping into a form and a button, the Free plan lets you test with real data, and you only pay for what you run. The main thing to learn is how usage is priced, and a single test run shows you.
Sources & References
- Apify pricing page: plans, compute units, proxies and billing rules, checked 17 October 2026
- Apify Store: Google Maps Scraper, Google Maps Reviews Scraper and Instagram Scraper pages (prices, ratings and user counts), checked 17 October 2026
Related reviews
How this review was made: we read the official page and checkout ourselves, verify prices, dates and recurring charges at the source, and never repeat a figure taken from another review site. Read our full review methodology and affiliate disclosure.