Apify is the largest scraping marketplace there is, and most people who search for an alternative are not unhappy with the scrapers. They are unhappy with one of four specific things.
This page names the four, then tells you which alternative fixes which — and where Apify is still the right answer, because for a lot of jobs it is.
We have a full page on Apify itself with the pricing table and the compute-unit arithmetic. This page does not repeat it.
What it costs today
| Plan | Price/month | Usage included | Max concurrent | Max RAM |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | 5 | 16 GB |
| Starter | $19 | $19 | 32 | 64 GB |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | 128 | 256 GB |
| Business | $999 | $999 | 256 | 512 GB |
Compute is billed in compute units: "1 CU = 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour", and the rate has three steps, not two: $0.2/CU on Free and Starter, $0.16/CU on Scale, $0.13/CU on Business.
⚠️ Unused credits expire at the end of the billing cycle, on every tier. And the Free plan blocks access once the prepaid usage runs out, until the next cycle.
⚠️ A number you will see elsewhere is wrong. Several comparison pages — and the search summary we got while researching this one — say Apify Starter is $29/month. Their own pricing page said $19 when we read it on 2 October 2026. We mention it because it is the cheapest demonstration of why this family reads prices at the source instead of quoting each other.
The four reasons people leave, and what fixes each
1. You cannot forecast a compute-unit bill
A CU is RAM × time. That means your invoice depends on how slow the target site was, whether a retry fired, and how much memory the Actor's author allocated — three things you do not control and cannot estimate before running.
What fixes it: a flat per-call or per-credit price. Scrape.do at $0.070 per 1,000 and ScrapingBee at $0.075 are the cheapest flat units in this market. We bill per call with a per-endpoint cost owned by one database row.
What does not fix it: Scrapfly, Oxylabs and Xpoz all have a multiplier inside the plan — by feature, by target site, by platform. Different unpredictability, not less.
2. Credits expire monthly
Unused usage does not roll over on any Apify tier. If your traffic is spiky — a launch, a monthly report, a client onboarding — you pay for the peak every month and throw away the trough.
What fixes it: Supadata, where purchased credits do not expire, and our own purchased balance, which also does not. Exa fixes it differently and more completely: no monthly plan at all, pay for what you used, nothing when idle.
3. Marketplace quality varies by author
24,000+ Actors means someone wrote each one. Breadth is Apify's best feature and its most honest risk: the Instagram Actor you depend on has a maintainer who may or may not still be there when the page changes.
What fixes it: a vendor that owns every endpoint it sells. ScrapeCreators, EnsembleData, SocialCrawl and we do — one maintainer, one response shape, and the blame is ours when a field moves.
4. You are paying for breadth you do not use
If you scrape three social platforms, a 24,000-Actor marketplace is a catalogue you will never open. The Starter tier's $19 is cheap; the mental overhead of choosing between nine Instagram Actors is not.
What fixes it: a specialist. An Instagram-only vendor goes deeper on one platform than any marketplace does; we go for twelve platforms in one response shape, which is a smaller catalogue on purpose.
The options, side by side
| Unit | Entry price | Credits expire? | Platforms | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | compute unit | $19/mo | yes, monthly | marketplace, 24,000+ Actors |
| Bright Data | delivered record | $1.50 / 1,000 | pay-as-you-go | ~8 social, plus the web |
| ScrapingBee | fetch | $19/mo · $0.253/1K | n/a | any URL |
| Scrape.do | fetch | $29/mo · $0.116/1K | n/a | any URL |
| ScrapeCreators | credit | see page | — | social, vendor-owned |
| SocialCrawl | credit | see page | — | social, vendor-owned |
| Exa | request | no monthly plan | free tier renews | the open web |
| HonestHook | API call | free, 1,000 credits/mo | purchased never expire | 12, one response shape |
Bright Data's free tier is 5,000 records a month, no card — the most generous entry in this table, ours included.
Where Apify is still the right answer
Any target that is not a social platform. We serve twelve platforms and name them. If your eleventh target is a niche marketplace or a government site, Apify probably already has an Actor and we have nothing.
Scheduled no-code runs. Their scheduler, datasets and exports are a product; we are an API and you bring the orchestration.
One bill. Compute, proxies, storage and scheduling arrive together. We bill credits and nothing else, which is simpler only if credits are all you need.
The $19 entry with 32 concurrent runs is hard to beat for throughput at that price.
Where we are better, stated narrowly
Twelve platforms with one response shape and
a published per-field contract — followers is an
integer in the same place on all twelve, or it is null and we say why. No
Actor to choose, no author to depend on.
And an hourly archive of what is rising, never deleted. No marketplace sells that, because it cannot be scraped retroactively: the past was not photographed.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
Apify plan prices, included usage, concurrency, RAM limits, compute-unit rates and the credit-expiry terms read from apify.com/pricing on 2 October 2026 and re-read on 3 October 2026 — primary source, fetched for this page. Bright Data's $1.50/1,000, the $499 Scale tier and the 5,000-record free tier read from brightdata.com on 2 October 2026 via search restricted to that domain, because the site refused direct fetch — one grade below a direct page read, and flagged as such. Prices of the other competitors are on their own pages, each with its own reading date. Verify before deciding.