TL;DR: Apify is the largest marketplace for web scraping and automation tools, with more than 56,000 ready-made Actors covering everything from Google Maps to Instagram. It suits people who want web data without building and maintaining scrapers themselves, and the MCP server makes it one of the easiest ways to give an AI agent live data. The catch is cost: your monthly plan is prepaid usage, not a flat fee, and marketplace Actors charge on top. Actor quality also swings depending on who published it. Plans run from a free tier with $5 in monthly credit up to $999 per month, and signing up through Rewardio gets you an effective 15% off, with no code needed.
Most web scraping tools ask you to pick a side. Either you get a no-code interface that breaks the moment a site changes its layout, or you get a developer library that works properly but demands proxies, servers, and a maintenance habit. Apify tries to sit between the two, and it has been doing so since 2015.
The pitch is a marketplace. Someone else has probably already built the scraper you need, so you rent or run theirs instead of writing your own. That works well until you look at the bill.
This Apify review covers what the platform does, what it actually costs once the meters start running, what real users complain about, and whether it earns a place in your stack.
What is Apify?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, data extraction, and browser automation. Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada founded the Apify company in 2015 out of the Y Combinator Fellowship in Mountain View, and it now runs from Prague with roughly 230 staff. It raised around $3.5 million in total, which is unusually little for a platform this size. The team bootstrapped from 2019 until a €2.8 million round in 2024 led by J&T Ventures. Reported 2023 revenue was about $7.5 million on roughly $1 million of profit.
The core unit is the Actor. Apify actors are serverless cloud programs that perform one job on the web, such as pulling Google Maps listings, collecting product prices, or crawling a site into clean text for an AI pipeline. Developers write them in JavaScript or Python, publish them to Apify Store, and earn when other people run them. Apify handles hosting, billing and payouts, and says it paid out $1.4 million to Actor developers in a single recent month.
For everyone else, the Store is the product. It currently lists more than 56,000 Actors. You pick one, fill in a few input fields, hit start, and download the results as JSON, CSV, or Excel. Proxy rotation, headless browsers, retries, and storage all sit underneath, so you never touch them.
Customers include Intercom, Groupon, Siemens, Microsoft, and the European Commission. Apify holds SOC 2 Type II certification and states GDPR and CCPA compliance.
Key features
- Apify Store. Over 56,000 ready-made scrapers and automation tools, organised by category, with per-Actor pricing, ratings and user counts on every listing.
- Apify MCP server. Connect Claude, Claude Code, Cursor or VS Code to
mcp.apify.comover OAuth, and your assistant can search the Store, run Actors and read results without you writing code. It also exposes a documentation search tool, and supports agentic payments through x402 and Skyfire. - Proxy and anti-blocking infrastructure. Residential, datacenter and SERP proxies, plus CAPTCHA handling and browser fingerprinting, all managed for you.
- Scheduling and integrations. Cron-style runs, webhooks, and connectors for Make, Zapier, n8n, Airbyte, LangChain and Google Sheets.
- Build your own. A CLI, SDKs for Node.js and Python, Actor templates, and the open source Crawlee library if you would rather write the scraper yourself and just rent the infrastructure.
- Storage and export. Datasets, key-value stores and request queues, with exports to JSON, CSV, XML, Excel and HTML.
Pricing
Apify runs four public tiers plus a custom enterprise plan. The number on the tin is prepaid usage rather than a flat subscription, which is the single most misunderstood thing about the platform.
| Plan | Monthly cost | Prepaid usage | Per compute unit | Actor RAM | Concurrent runs | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | $0.20 | 16 GB | 25 | Community |
| Starter | $29 | $29 | $0.20 | 64 GB | 32 | Chat |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | $0.16 | 256 GB | 128 | Priority chat |
| Business | $999 | $999 | $0.13 | 512 GB | 256 | Account manager |
| Enterprise | Custom | Unlimited | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom, with SLAs |
The free tier needs no card. Paid plans keep running once you exhaust your credit and bill the overage on your next invoice, whereas the free plan simply blocks further runs until the cycle resets.
One compute unit equals 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. Residential proxy traffic costs $8 per GB on the lower tiers, and storage, data transfer, and extra concurrency all meter separately. Credits expire at the end of each billing cycle and never roll over.
Then there is the second layer, which trips up most new users. Many Store Actors charge their own fee on top of platform compute, either per result or as a monthly rental. A few examples:
| Actor | Pricing model | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Instagram Scraper (first-party) | Pay per result | $2.70 per 1,000 on Free, $1.50 on Business |
| LinkedIn Jobs Scraper (Bebity) | Monthly rental plus usage | $29.99 per month |
| Indeed job scrapers | Pay per result | Around $0.06 to $0.10 per 1,000 jobs |
| Website Content Crawler | Compute units only | No Actor fee on top |
Always open an Actor’s Pricing tab before a large run. Students get 30% off Starter and Scale, startups get 30% off Scale, and nonprofits can request a custom discount. Our full Apify pricing breakdown walks through the compute unit maths with worked examples.
Pros
The Store genuinely removes weeks of work
This is the reason people stay. If you need to scrape Google Maps, Instagram, Amazon or a job board, someone has already solved it, handled the anti-bot layer and published the result. Reviewers describe going from idea to running a pipeline in under an hour on targets they had written off as impossible. One founder documented building verified restaurant catalogues for nine cities, roughly an afternoon each.
The MCP integration is ahead of the field
Apify shipped MCP support early, and it shows in the reviews. Connecting Claude or Cursor to the Apify MCP server takes a URL and an OAuth approval, after which the assistant can discover Actors, run them, and pull structured results into the conversation. Users repeatedly single this out as the feature that changed how they work, including one who deployed seven Actors and collected over 250,000 rows in six weeks without writing production code.
Pay-per-use pricing scales down as well as up
Plenty of scraping platforms start at several hundred dollars a month. Apify starts at nothing, with $5 of credit that resets monthly and no card required. Small jobs really do cost fractions of a cent per result, and the free tier is usable for months if your volumes stay modest.
Where it falls short
You cannot see what a run will cost before you run it
This is the most common complaint across every review site, and it is a fair one. Your bill has two layers: platform compute units, and whatever the Actor’s publisher charges per result or per month. Neither is estimated for you in advance. Reviewers describe burning through credits during testing, discovering per-result fees after the fact, and asking repeatedly for a dry-run cost estimator that still does not exist. Pricing complaints appear 88 times in G2’s tagged negatives, making it the single most cited problem with the platform.
Actor quality varies because anyone can publish
The marketplace model cuts both ways. Search for something common, and you get a dozen overlapping Actors with no clear signal on which is maintained. Some break when the target site changes its layout, and you either wait for the publisher to fix it or debug someone else’s code. Several reviewers noted paying for test runs purely to work out which Actor actually returns the fields they need.
The learning curve is real for non-developers
Apify markets itself to marketers and researchers as well as engineers, but the concepts underneath are developer concepts. Actors, datasets, key-value stores, request queues, compute units, and proxy groups all need understanding before your first stable workflow. Steep learning curve is the second most tagged negative on G2. Error messages come in for criticism too, with users reporting that failed runs often require digging through logs to work out what went wrong.
If those three trade-offs are dealbreakers rather than annoyances, our roundup of Apify alternatives covers the closest options on price, ease of use and billing transparency.
What the review sites say
Apify scores well across the board, and the pattern of praise and criticism is remarkably consistent.
On G2, Apify has a rating of 4.7 out of 5 based on 563 reviews. Reviewers most often praise ease of use, feature breadth, and scraping efficiency. The top negatives are pricing, requests for lower prices or outright Actor purchase, and the learning curve.
When we look at Capterra, Apify has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 from 416 reviews, with ease of use and customer service both at 4.6. Apify has ranked top of Capterra’s web scraping category.
On Trustpilot, Apify has a rating of 4.8 out of 5 across more than 660 reviews, with pricing described as fair and the learning curve flagged as the main friction.
Read enough of them, and one theme dominates. People love what the platform does and struggle to predict what it charges.
Who it is for, and who should skip it
Apify fits you if you need web data from more than one source, you would rather rent a maintained scraper than build one, or you want an AI agent that can pull live information. It is a strong fit for lead generation, competitor and price monitoring, market research, and feeding RAG pipelines. Developers who want to publish and monetise their own scrapers get an unusually good deal, since Apify handles infrastructure, billing, taxes and payouts.
Skip it if you need one simple scraper on a friendly site, in which case a short script is cheaper and clearer. Skip it too if predictable flat-rate billing matters more to you than flexibility, or if you only want B2B contact data, where a dedicated provider will be simpler. If you are weighing it against a purpose-built crawling API, our Apify vs Firecrawl comparison covers where each one wins.
Ease of use and getting started
Signing up takes an email address and no card. From there, a first run looks like this:
- Open Apify Store and search for your target, for example the Apify Instagram scraper or an Apify Indeed scraper.
- Check the Pricing tab before anything else. Note whether the Actor is free, rented monthly, or charged per result.
- Fill in the input fields, then set a low results limit. Ten to twenty items is enough for a first test.
- Click Start and watch the log. Failures at this stage are almost always input format problems.
- Open Storage, preview the dataset, and export to CSV or JSON. Or call the API and pull it into your pipeline.
- Once it works, add a schedule and set a spend limit in billing.
That spend limit step matters more than the interface suggests. Turn it on before your first large run rather than after.
The Apify docs are thorough, covering the platform, API reference, CLI and SDKs, and Apify Academy is a free course on building your own Actors. Documentation quality is one of the few things reviewers rarely criticise, though they note that individual community Actor READMEs vary a lot.
Worth knowing before you search: job data on Apify comes from job-board Actors rather than social platforms. The Apify LinkedIn jobs scraper actor from Bebity is the best known, with around 35,000 total users, though cookieless alternatives charge per result instead of a rental. If you are hunting for an Apify TikTok jobs scraper actor, there isn’t one. TikTok Actors on the Store cover videos, profiles, and hashtags, so career listings need a general jobs or ATS scraper such as the Google Jobs or Workday and Greenhouse crawlers.
How the cashback works
Rewardio is free to use. When you sign up for a paid Apify plan through our link, Apify pays us a commission, and we pass the majority of it back to you as real cashback. There is no code to enter, so you get an effective 15% off your plan.
Three things worth knowing. Tracking depends on the click, so you need to start at Rewardio rather than going direct or arriving through a search result. Cashback typically tracks within 24 hours and confirms once Apify verifies the sale. Withdrawals go to PayPal or your bank with no minimum threshold.
One honest caveat, and it applies to cashback generally. Commissions are paid on new customers, so an existing Apify account usually will not qualify. If you are already subscribed and thinking about upgrading, check the terms on the store page first.
FAQ
What is Apify?
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and browser automation, built around a marketplace of more than 56,000 ready-made tools called Actors. You run someone else’s Actor, or build your own, and Apify handles the proxies, servers, scheduling, and storage underneath.
Which type of company is Apify best for?
Small and mid-sized teams that need web data from several sources but do not want a dedicated scraping engineer. Marketing agencies, sales teams doing lead generation, e-commerce businesses tracking prices, and research teams all fit well. Enterprises use it too, though they tend to go through the custom plan for SLAs.
How does Apify work?
You choose an Actor, give it inputs such as URLs or keywords, and run it. The Actor executes on Apify’s cloud, rotating proxies and rendering JavaScript as needed, then writes results to a dataset. You export that dataset, or pull it through the API into your own systems. Runs consume compute units, and some Actors add a per-result or monthly rental fee on top.
How do I connect Apify to other apps?
Apify offers a REST API, webhooks, and official Node.js and Python clients. Ready-made connectors cover Make, Zapier, n8n, Airbyte, Google Sheets and Google Drive. For AI tools, the MCP server at mcp.apify.com connects Claude, Claude Code, Cursor and VS Code over OAuth, letting an agent run Actors and read results directly.
Why use Apify?
Because building and maintaining scrapers is harder than it looks. Sites change their layouts, block datacenter IPs and add bot detection, and keeping up with that is ongoing work rather than a one-off project. Apify absorbs that maintenance and lets you automate web workflows without running any infrastructure. It also starts free, so testing costs nothing.
The verdict
Apify is the most complete web scraping platform available, and the marketplace model means you rarely start from scratch. The MCP server puts it ahead of most competitors for anyone building AI workflows. The honest ceiling is cost visibility. You cannot reliably predict a bill before you run the job, and Actor quality depends on who published it, so budget for a testing phase. For most teams that need scraped data more than once a month, it earns its place.
Disclaimer: Rewardio earns a commission when you sign up to Apify through our link, and we pass the majority of that commission back to you as cashback. This does not affect what you pay or what we write. Pricing and rates were accurate at the time of writing and can change, so check Apify’s pricing page and our store page for current figures.
