# Apify vs ScrapeCreators

A scraper marketplace on metered compute against flat credit packs, two very different ways to buy social data.

Checked August 2026. Public pricing pages. No affiliate links.

Apify and ScrapeCreators sit at opposite ends of the same market. Apify is a marketplace of thousands of community-built scrapers ("actors") running on metered compute, covering effectively any platform. ScrapeCreators is one founder-run vendor selling 36 social APIs at a flat one-credit-per-request rate. The choice usually comes down to whether you want a platform to build on or a product to call.

## At a glance

| Criteria | Apify | ScrapeCreators | Openhandle |
|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Third-party actors, billed on metered compute | Prepaid credit packs, 1 credit per call | Pay after use. No credits, no subscription |
| Pricing | Plans $0-$999/month plus $0.13-$0.20 per compute unit. Actors can add per-result fees on top | $47 for 25k credits (~$1.88/1k). ~$0.99/1k needs a $497 pack | $3 per 1k, down to $1.50 per 1k at volume. 30-day cache hits are free |
| Free tier | $5 of usage a month, spent in compute units | 100 credits, one time | 100 free requests, no card |
| Platform depth | Depth depends on the actor you pick. Thousands of actors, any platform, quality differs per actor | 22 TikTok and 19 Instagram endpoints, plus 34 other platforms, each its own API | 45 Instagram, 28 TikTok, and 17 X endpoints. More platforms and data added by demand |
| Schema | No shared schema. Every actor defines its own | Unpredictable raw payloads, different on every platform | One schema across Instagram, TikTok, and X |
| Who maintains scrapers | Individual actor authors, who can abandon them | A single founder runs the whole vendor | Openhandle handles platform changes |
| Rate limits | No limit published | No limit published | 10 per second per key. Higher on request |
| Extras | Custom logic means writing your own actor | Prepaid, paid up front. Credits never expire, cached results free | REST, OpenAPI, MCP server, SDKs for TypeScript, Python, and Go |

Figures from public pricing pages, August 2026.

## Cost predictability

ScrapeCreators is trivially budgetable: one credit per request, ~$0.99 to ~$1.88 per thousand depending on pack size, credits never expire, and cached results are free. You can price a job from its request count before you run it.

Apify prices the work, not the output. A compute unit is 1 GB of RAM for one hour, billed at $0.20 on Free and Starter down to $0.13 on Business, and store actors are priced either pay-per-event (per-result fees the author sets) or pay-per-usage on compute alone. An efficient actor can beat ScrapeCreators' rate; an inefficient one can cost multiples. You only learn which by running the specific actor against your targets.

## Maintenance and depth

Social platforms break scrapers constantly. On Apify, maintenance depends on the individual actor author: schema, parameters, and quality all vary per actor, so check before you depend on one. ScrapeCreators is a single vendor with direct founder support and consistent per-platform APIs (22 TikTok endpoints, 19 Instagram, plus TikTok Shop, Twitch, Spotify, ad libraries, and transcripts), but no published SLA or status page.

Apify's counterweight is reach: if no actor covers your niche platform, you write your own with full control over logic and output. ScrapeCreators is limited to the 36 APIs it ships.

## Verdicts

- **Predictable per-request budgets on mainstream social platforms.** ScrapeCreators: flat credits, free cache hits, no expiry.
- **Custom scraping logic or niche platforms no vendor covers.** Apify. Find a maintained actor or write your own.
- **Cost-sensitive at volume.** measure a real Apify actor against ScrapeCreators' ~$0.99/1k top pack; compute metering can land either side of it.
- **Uptime guarantees.** neither. ScrapeCreators publishes no SLA or status page, and actor reliability on Apify varies per author.

## How we checked

Pricing and platform claims come from apify.com and scrapecreators.com public pages, read in August 2026. Vendors change pricing; check their pages before deciding. Tell us about an error and we will correct it.