Apify alternative: pricing compared

Apify sells monthly plans. Each paid plan includes the same amount of usage as its price, and you pay for extra usage as you go. Any unused allowance expires at the end of the month. The Free plan gives $5 of usage a month, no card needed.

• —Plans. Free at $0, Starter at $19 a month, Scale at $199 a month, and Business at $999 a month.
• —Compute units. $0.20 per unit on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, and $0.13 on Business. One unit is 1 GB of memory for one hour.
• —Actor prices. Some actors charge per result or per event. Others charge only for the compute, proxies, and storage they use.
• —Instagram Scraper. Apify’s own Instagram actor costs $2.70 per 1,000 results on Free and drops to $1.50 on Business. Each post, comment, or profile counts as one result.
• —Proxies. Residential proxies cost $7 to $8 per GB, depending on the plan.

Example: 100,000 Instagram results a month with the Instagram Scraper. On Starter, that is about $230. On Scale, it costs about $190 and fits inside the $199 plan.

• —Many prices to track. Your bill depends on the plan, the actor, and sometimes compute and proxy use. It takes a test run to know what a job costs.
• —A different shape per actor. Each actor returns its own fields. An Instagram actor and a TikTok actor need separate parsers, and a new actor can mean a new parser.
• —Usage that expires. Plan usage resets every month. You still pay the full plan price during a quiet month.
• —Picking an actor. There are often many actors for one site, made by different authors. You have to check which one is kept up to date.

• —Breadth. Apify has actors for many sites beyond social media, like maps, shops, and search engines. We go deep on Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, and YouTube, and add platforms as customers ask.
• —Custom logic. If no actor does what you need, you can write your own and run it on Apify.
• —Big batch jobs. On the $999 Business plan, the Instagram Scraper costs $1.50 per 1,000 results. Openhandle charges per request, and one request can return a page of posts. Test both with your own workload.
• —Runs on a schedule. Apify can run actors on a schedule and store the results for you.

• —No plan. Add any amount from $10. One rate per request, and it never expires while you use your account. Every top-up includes an invoice.
• —One price per call. A profile, a post, a page of posts, or a page of comments costs the same. Your bill is requests times price.
• —One shape. Profiles, posts, and comments look the same on Instagram, TikTok, X, Reddit, and YouTube.
• —Failed requests are free. You pay only when Openhandle returns an answer.
• —Hard limits. Your balance is the limit. You can also set a monthly request cap on each key.
• —Direct team support. A direct chat with our team.
• —Lower prices for older data. Openhandle lowers costs when you can use older data. A 30-day cache hit is free.

1. 01Start with a Test key. Create a Test key in the dashboard. Use the synthetic identifiers in the quickstart to validate your integration without charges.
2. 02Map your calls. Match your required data to the API reference. Check endpoint coverage, parameters, and returned fields before switching. Keep unsupported operations with your current provider. The table below lists common Openhandle calls.
3. 03Update paths, parameters, and authentication. Use https://api.openhandle.dev/v1 with Authorization: Bearer followed by your key. Update each endpoint path and parameter using the API reference. Profile usernames need an @ prefix in REST paths. Use the documented identifier for each post.
4. 04Map response fields. Successful responses contain platform, resource, capturedAt, source, and data. Map shared fields and platform-specific fields using the response schemas. Keep unavailable metrics as null.
5. 05Handle pagination and errors. Pass meta.cursors.next back as cursor for list requests. Cursors from another provider cannot be reused. Handle Openhandle error codes and retry only when retryable is true. See pagination and errors.
6. 06Set a cap. Pick a monthly spending cap before you go live. We stop before it, so a bad loop cannot run up a bill.
7. 07Validate before switching. Check success, empty, private, and not-found cases with a Test key. Then move to Live and compare a small sample with your current provider before switching production traffic.