Apify
Apify is a cloud marketplace of ready-to-run web scraping Actors that feed live web data to your AI agents, LLM pipelines, and apps.
If your bottleneck is feeding real, structured web data into an AI pipeline, Apify's Store of roughly 79,600 Actors plus the MCP server and x402 per-run payments is the shortest path I know of. The free tier gives you $5 to spend in the Store, and Starter is $19/mo plus pay-as-you-go at $0.20 per compute unit, so entry cost stays near zero while you test. Compare that to Bright Data or Zyte, where a managed scraping stack typically starts higher and is priced around committed volume. The catch: Apify is cloud-only and metered — proxy IPs, Unblocker requests, and storage reads/writes all bill separately on top of compute. If you need air-gapped deployment or a fixed monthly bill you can
Verified 5d ago · liveness 78/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/apify
- Developers building AI agents that need live web data via MCP
- Data scientists assembling RAG pipelines and LLM training datasets
- Lead generation teams scraping Maps, directories, and social sources
- Market researchers monitoring social platforms and e-commerce prices
- Teams needing on-premise or air-gapped deployment — Apify is cloud-only
- Non-technical users who need results without touching an API or code
- Projects running a single narrow scrape, where a custom script is cheaper
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Skip Apify if you need on-premise or air-gapped deployment, want results without touching an API or code, or are running a single one-off scrape where a short custom script costs less than learning the platform.
Storage reads and writes bill separately from compute — on Free, dataset reads cost $0.0004 per 1,000 and writes $0.005 per 1,000, and request-queue storage runs $4.00 per 1,000 GB-hours.
Free ($0 with $5 prepaid) suits evaluation; Starter at $19/mo plus pay-as-you-go fits solo developers and small projects; Scale at $199/mo plus pay-as-you-go is the first tier with priority chat support, 256 GB Actor RAM, and $0.16/compute unit; Business at $999/mo plus pay-as-you-go adds an account manager and $0.13/compute unit; Enterprise is custom with SLAs and SSO. Competitors like Bright Data and Zyte generally start above this for managed scraping, so Apify is cheaper to enter — but
In short
Apify — Apify is a cloud marketplace of ready-to-run web scraping Actors that feed live web data to your AI agents, LLM pipelines, and apps. Best for Developers building AI agents that need live web data via MCP, Data scientists assembling RAG pipelines and LLM training datasets, Lead generation teams scraping Maps, directories, and social sources. Free to start; paid plans from $19/mo.
What's new in Apify
Checked 6 days agoAcross the latest 3 updates: 3 feature updates.
New Apify AI beta is live
Natural-language search now finds the right Actor for your scraping task in seconds.
We're live on x402
AI agents can now run Actors and pay per run using the x402 protocol.
MCP server for AI agents
Give your AI access to Actors via the Model Context Protocol, enabling direct integration.
What people actually say about Apify — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
63 mentions across 4 sources (Hacker News, Product Hunt, Bluesky, Lemmy) · researched Jul 3, 2026.
Average across the 4 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +46,000+ pre-built Actors for instant data extraction.
- +Cloud execution removes infrastructure management overhead.
- +Pay-as-you-go pricing with $0.001/result for many Actors.
- +MCP server directly integrates with AI agents like Claude.
- +Strong integration with n8n, Make.com, and OpenRouter.
- −Costs can escalate quickly for high-volume scraping.
- −Anti-blocking still fails against sophisticated bot mitigation.
- −Custom Actor development requires significant developer skill.
- −Free tier compute limits are restrictive for production work.
- −Search and discovery of Actors could be improved.
- • Running long or memory-heavy Actors can consume credits faster than expected
- • Residential proxies incur additional surcharges per GB
- • Data transfer out to third-party services may incur egress fees
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Apify? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Marketplace of roughly 79,600 pre-built web scraping Actors in the Apify Store
- Natural-language Actor search with the Apify AI beta
- MCP server so AI agents call Actors directly via the Model Context Protocol
- x402 protocol support so agents can run Actors and pay per run
- Website Content Crawler extracts clean Markdown for LLM, vector DB, and RAG pipelines
- Documented LangChain and LlamaIndex integration paths for LLM workflows
- Serverless Actor execution billed per compute unit (1 GB RAM/hour)
- Anti-blocking via rotating datacenter, residential, and Google SERP proxies
- Dedicated Unblocker charged per 1,000 requests for protected sites
- Browser fingerprinting toolkit (Fingerprint Suite) for Playwright and Puppeteer
- Built-in storage: datasets, key-value stores, and request queues
- Schedules plus API and webhook triggers for automated recurring runs
- Publish your own Actors to the Store and earn paid revenue share
- Open-source Crawlee library for custom crawlers in Python and JavaScript
- Works with Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, Scrapy, Cheerio, and BeautifulSoup
About Apify
Apify is a marketplace of pre-built web scraping and automation programs it calls Actors. Instead of writing a scraper from scratch, you browse the Apify Store — the homepage currently shows roughly 79,600 Actors — and run one in Apify's cloud. The catalog covers social media (TikTok Scraper with 299K users, Instagram Scraper with 414K, Facebook Posts Scraper), local business and lead gen (Google Maps Scraper with 630K users), e-commerce price monitoring (E-commerce Scraping Tool), and content extraction (Website Content Crawler, which turns pages into clean Markdown for LLM apps, vector databases, and RAG pipelines, with documented LangChain and LlamaIndex paths). You run an Actor through the web UI or the API and the results land in built-in storage — datasets, key-value stores, and request queues — ready to export or read back programmatically. For AI builders, three recent additions matter. The Apify MCP server lets an AI agent call Actors directly, so an agent can pull live web data on demand rather than from a stale index. The platform went live on x402, which lets agents run Actors and pay per run. And the Apify AI beta adds natural-language Actor search, so you describe the job in plain English and it finds the Actor for you. Anti-blocking is handled at the platform level: rotating datacenter, residential, and Google SERP proxies, a dedicated Unblocker charged per 1,000 requests, and browser fingerprinting. Runs can be scheduled, triggered by API or webhook, and scaled through pay-as-you-go compute units. If no existing Actor fits, you build your own with Crawlee — Apify's open-source crawling and browser-automation library for Python and JavaScript — and deploy it alongside Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium, Scrapy, Cheerio, or BeautifulSoup. You can also publish your own Actors to the Store and get paid; Apify states $1.6M was paid out last month and that many developers earn over $3k. It is built for developers, data teams, and businesses — solo builders through enterprises — who need web data at volume without running their own scraping infrastructure. The tradeoff is a cloud-only, usage-metered model: you pay per compute unit, per proxy IP or GB, and for storage operations, so a fixed-budget project can surprise you.
Behind the Verdict
Apify's real product is the Store. A single-purpose scraper for Google Maps has 630K users and a 4.7 rating from 1,817 reviewers; the Instagram Scraper sits at 414K users and 602 reviews. That volume of usage and ratings is the moat — it means the popular Actors are battle-tested across sites that fight back, and someone else has already absorbed the maintenance cost of keeping them working. Buying a run on an existing Actor is almost always cheaper than writing and maintaining your own, which is the argument Apify makes against DIY Crawlee projects, and it's a fair one. The AI wiring is where Apify has moved fastest and where it differs from a plain scraper vendor. The Website Content Crawler does the specific, unglamorous work of turning websites into clean Markdown for LLM and RAG pipelines, and it names LangChain and LlamaIndex as supported paths rather than leaving you to figure it out. The MCP server means an agent can call Actors directly instead of you wiring an API by hand. x402 lets an agent run an Actor and pay per run. The Apify AI beta lets you describe the task in natural language and get pointed at the right Actor. Stacked together, that is a genuinely current answer to "how does my agent get live web data" rather than a re-labelled 2023 scraper API. Where it fits: developers and data teams running recurring extraction at volume — social monitoring, lead lists from Maps and LinkedIn-style sources, price tracking across retailers, and RAG ingestion. Where it doesn't: teams that need on-prem or air-gapped deployment, since Apify is cloud-only; non-technical buyers who want a click-and-run tool with no API surface; and one-off jobs, where a small custom script is cheaper than learning the platform. The honest friction is billing. Compute units, rented and datacenter proxies, residential proxies at $8/GB on Free and Starter, Google SERP proxies at $2.50 per 1,000, Unblocker at $1.50 per 1,000 requests, and dataset/key-value/request-queue reads and writes are all metered separately, each cheaper on higher tiers. That structure rewards volume and punishes unpredictability — you should model your expected run volume before committing, not after.
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Apify actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You pick the Website Content Crawler from the Store, point it at your documentation and a handful of competitor sites, and export clean Markdown into your vector database, following the documented LangChain integration path.
Outcome: You get a populated vector store from real web pages without writing a crawler, and re-run the same Actor on a schedule to keep the index current.
You connect your agent to the Apify MCP server so it can call Actors as tools, and enable x402 so the agent pays per run instead of you pre-buying capacity.
Outcome: Your agent answers questions with live web data pulled on demand, and per-run costs are attributed to the agent's actual usage.
You run the Google Maps Scraper against a list of postcodes and regions to pull business names, addresses, phone numbers, and reviewer details into a dataset, then schedule it to refresh weekly.
Outcome: A recurring, structured lead list in Apify storage that you export to your CRM, maintained without a local scraping stack.
Use Cases
- Feed live scraped web content into an LLM or RAG pipeline as clean Markdown
- Let an AI agent pull current web data on demand through the MCP server
- Build lead lists from Google Maps business listings including contact details
- Monitor competitor and retailer prices across multiple e-commerce sites
- Track TikTok influencer performance and video metrics at scale
- Collect Facebook page posts, captions, and engagement for brand monitoring
- Scrape Instagram profiles, reels, hashtags, and comments for audience research
- Publish your own Actors in the Store and earn revenue from other users' runs
Limitations
- Apify runs only in its own cloud — there is no on-premise or air-gapped deployment option, which rules it out for regulated or isolated environments.
- It assumes technical comfort: you interact through the UI, API, CLI, or SDKs, and the value comes from wiring Actors into your own pipelines.
- Scraping success is not guaranteed on every site; Apify provides anti-blocking proxies and an Unblocker, but heavily protected targets can still fail.
- Billing is layered and metered: compute units, rented and datacenter proxies, residential proxies, Google SERP proxies, Unblocker requests, data transfer, and storage reads/writes are all charged separately, with cheaper rates on higher tiers.
- SSO is only available on the Enterprise tier.
- Free and Starter plans include just $5 and $19 of prepaid usage respectively, so heavy testing burns through prepaid credit and moves you to pay-as-you-go quickly.
as of 2026-10-02
Verification history
We have re-verified Apify 7 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 7 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Apify tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Free
$0/mo
Ideal for
Developers evaluating Apify or running occasional small Jobs who want to try Store Actors before committing to a paid tier.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: $0/mo with $5 to spend in the Store or on the platform, $0.20/compute unit, up to 5 concurrent runs, and 16 GB Actor RAM.
Starter
$19/mo + pay as you go
Ideal for
Solo developers and small projects that need chat support, a modest concurrency bump, and slightly more Agent RAM than the free tier allows.
What this tier adds
Adds paid support, more concurrency, and a Store discount over Free: $19/mo plus pay-as-you-go, $19 prepaid usage, up to 32 concurrent runs, 64 GB Actor RAM, and a Bronze Store discount.
Scale
$199/mo + pay as you go
Ideal for
Growing data teams running production extraction at volume who need priority support and materially cheaper per-unit rates.
What this tier adds
Cuts compute to $0.16/unit and raises limits: $199/mo plus pay-as-you-go, up to 128 concurrent runs, 256 GB Actor RAM, priority chat support, and a Silver Store discount.
Business
$999/mo + pay as you go
Ideal for
Established businesses with high-volume, business-critical scraping that want an account manager and the lowest published per-unit rates.
What this tier adds
Adds account management and the deepest discounts: $999/mo plus pay-as-you-go, $0.13/compute unit, up to 256 concurrent runs, 512 GB Actor RAM, and a Gold Store discount.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large organizations needing custom volumes, contractual data guarantees, and single sign-on that lower tiers do not include.
What this tier adds
Custom pricing replacing the standard tier ladder, adding SLAs with guaranteed data, custom limits, a dedicated expert team, and SSO.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Apify's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Free ($0 with $5 prepaid) suits evaluation; Starter at $19/mo plus pay-as-you-go fits solo developers and small projects; Scale at $199/mo plus pay-as-you-go is the first tier with priority chat support, 256 GB Actor RAM, and $0.16/compute unit; Business at $999/mo plus pay-as-you-go adds an account manager and $0.13/compute unit; Enterprise is custom with SLAs and SSO. Competitors like Bright Data and Zyte generally start above this for managed scraping, so Apify is cheaper to enter — but
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Apify — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
Developers: running a Store Actor takes minutes — pick one, supply URLs or search terms, and read results from the dataset. Wiring an API or MCP integration into your own app: an afternoon, using the REST API and client libraries for JS, Python, Go, PHP, Java, .NET, or Rust. Building and deploying a custom Actor with Crawlee via the CLI: a day or more depending on the target site. Data teams with
Switching to or from Apify
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From a DIY Scrapy or BeautifulSoup script: run the equivalent Store Actor first to see whether maintaining your own scraper is still worth it, then move custom logic into Crawlee and deploy as an Actor.
- →From Playwright or Puppeteer automation: port the browser logic into an Actor and let the platform handle proxies, scheduling, and storage.
- →From Bright Data or Zyte: point your existing extraction targets at equivalent Store Actors and route results through Apify's API and datasets.
- →From manual spreadsheet collection: replace it with a scheduled Store Actor writing to a dataset you export on a cadence.
- ↗To a self-hosted Crawlee or Scrapy deployment: export your Actor's source and run the open-source library on your own infrastructure if you need on-premise control.
- ↗To a single-purpose scraping API: if you only ever need one target, replace the Actor with a narrower service and drop the metered platform overhead.
- ↗To a no-code extraction tool: if you never touch the API, a point-and-click scraper may be simpler, though you lose scheduling and agent integrations.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Apify”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Apify” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Apify.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Apify
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Apify, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud is a web scraping and crawling API that turns live pages into markdown or JSON for agents and RAG pipelines.
Hyperbrowser
Cloud browser sessions, sandboxes, and AI agents for web scraping and agentic automation.
Olostep
Developer-first web data API that searches, scrapes, crawls, maps, and monitors the web through one endpoint for AI agents and RAG pipelines.
Featured Head-to-Head Comparisons
Apify vs Screenplayiq
If you're a screenwriter or producer needing data-driven feedback on a feature film's marketability, ScreenplayIQ is the clear choice. For anyone building AI agents or collecting web data at scale, Apify's vast marketplace and automation capabilities are unmatched. These tools serve completely different purposes – choose based on your core need.
Apify vs Truleo
Truleo and Apify serve entirely different domains. Truleo is purpose-built for law enforcement to extract leads from siloed internal data, while Apify is a general-purpose web scraping platform for developers. Choose Truleo if you're in a police department needing automated intelligence; choose Apify if you need to collect public web data at scale. They are not alternatives.
Apify vs Presto Voice
Choose Presto Voice if you're a QSR chain aiming to automate drive-thru ordering and lift revenue; its proven upselling engine and high automation rate are unmatched for that niche. Choose Apify if you need to scrape web data at scale for AI or analytics—its marketplace of 46k+ Actors and serverless platform make it the go-to for developers, not restaurant operators. These tools are fundamentally different; your choice depends entirely on whether your problem is in the drive-thru or on the web.
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Spider Cloud
Spider Cloud is a web scraping and crawling API that turns live pages into markdown or JSON for agents and RAG pipelines.
Hyperbrowser
Cloud browser sessions, sandboxes, and AI agents for web scraping and agentic automation.
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