Apify pricing (2026): free plan, compute units, verdict

What Apify is

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and automation, run by Apify Technologies in Prague. Its unit of work is the Actor, a scraper or automation that runs in Apify’s cloud, and its store lists tens of thousands of them built by Apify and by outside developers, from Google Maps and listings extractors to social media and search scrapers. Developers can also write their own. For cold email it is the industrial option at the start of the chain: the place a lead source gets scraped before enrichment, verification and sending.

How Apify’s pricing works

Each plan’s fee becomes prepaid usage, and usage beyond it is pay-as-you-go, metered in compute units, where one unit is one gigabyte of memory running for one hour. Free costs nothing and includes $5 of usage a month at $0.20 a unit, 16 GB of Actor memory, five concurrent runs and community support. Starter costs $19 a month, or $17 billed yearly, as $19 of usage at $0.20 a unit with 64 GB, 32 concurrent runs and chat support. Scale costs $199, or $179 yearly, at $0.16 a unit with 256 GB, 128 runs and priority chat. Business costs $999, or $899 yearly, at $0.13 a unit with 512 GB, 256 runs and an account manager. Enterprise is custom.

Proxies and add-ons scale with the plan. Residential proxies cost $8 a GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business. Datacenter IPs are included, 5, 30, 200 and 500 by plan, then $1, $0.80 and $0.60 an IP. Google SERP proxies run from $2.50 to $1.70 per thousand, the unblocker from $1.50 to $1 per thousand requests, and training costs $150 an hour, with an hour a quarter included on Scale and an hour a month on Business. Many store Actors charge per result instead of per unit, drawn from the same balance, and the higher plans get bronze, silver and gold discounts in the store. Fees are paid in advance and renew automatically at the then-current price unless auto-renewal is switched off before the term ends, VAT is added, unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the cycle, and fees are non-refundable except pro rata when Apify fails to fix a material service failure within 30 days of notice.

Actors, proxies and integrations

Running a store Actor is filling in a form: a search term, a location, a result limit. The platform schedules it, rotates proxies, stores the dataset and exports it as JSON, CSV or Excel, to Google Sheets or cloud storage, or through the API and webhooks, with Zapier, Make and n8n integrations and an MCP server for AI agents. Writing your own Actor means code, SDKs and deployment, which is where the platform earns its developer reputation.

Who Apify is for, and who should look elsewhere

Apify suits developers and technical growth teams who want ready-made scrapers for lead sources, with proxies and scheduling handled, and are comfortable with metered billing. It is a poor fit for non-technical users who want a point-and-click builder, or for budgets that need a fixed monthly cost.

Apify alternatives

Octoparse is the no-code builder with a free plan and flat monthly prices. Browse AI trains scrapers by example and monitors pages for changes. Instant Data Scraper is the free browser extension for a table on one page. The enrichment and scraping category compares them.

Using Apify with PureMail

Apify produces the rawest list in the stack, so treat the chain with care: scrape the source, find emails with an enrichment tool, verify every address, and only then send from PureMail’s warmed Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 inboxes at a few dozen emails a day each. Keep personal-data law in mind for the people on the list, and watch bounce and reply rates on the first sends, because a scraped list tells you nothing about who wants to hear from you.