Apify is a Prague-based web scraping and browser automation platform with an Actor marketplace. See 2026 pricing, features, and use cases for developers.
Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping, data extraction, and browser automation. Founded in 2015 in Prague, Czech Republic, by Jan Curn and Jakub Balada, the company built its business around the idea of turning any website into a structured API in minutes.
The platform's central unit is the 'Actor,' a serverless program that runs on Apify's cloud infrastructure. Actors can scrape websites, automate browser tasks, or process data, and they can be published to the Apify Store, a public marketplace with tens of thousands of ready-made Actors that other users can run on demand.
Apify has been largely bootstrapped, with only about 3.5 million dollars in total disclosed funding across a small seed round and a 2024 follow-on seed led by J&T Ventures, and it reportedly generates tens of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue.
The Apify Store gives users instant access to pre-built scrapers for popular targets such as Google Search, Amazon, Google Maps, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok, so many use cases don't require writing any scraping code at all.
For custom needs, developers can build their own Actors using the Apify SDK and Crawlee, Apify's open-source library supporting Puppeteer, Playwright, and lightweight Cheerio-based extraction, then deploy them to Apify's serverless cloud with automatic scaling.
The platform bundles supporting infrastructure that most scraping projects need anyway: a residential and datacenter proxy network, scheduling and webhook triggers, structured storage for scraped data, and integrations with Zapier, Make, n8n, and LangChain for feeding data into automation workflows and AI agents.
Apify uses a subscription-plus-usage model. The Free plan includes 5 dollars of monthly platform credit along with limited concurrency, proxy access, and community support, enough for light testing and small projects.
Paid plans scale from Starter at 29 dollars per month (26 dollars per month if billed annually) up through Scale at 199 dollars per month and Business at 999 dollars per month, each raising concurrent run limits, maximum RAM per run, proxy pricing discounts, and support tier (chat support, then priority chat support, then a dedicated account manager).
Actual monthly cost depends heavily on compute usage (billed per compute unit) and proxy bandwidth (billed per gigabyte, with rates improving at higher tiers), so most teams' real spend is usage-driven on top of the base subscription.
An Actor is a serverless cloud program on Apify, typically a web scraper, crawler, or browser automation script, that can be run on demand, scheduled, or published to the Apify Store.
No. You can rent and run pre-built Actors from the Apify Store without writing code, though building custom Actors requires JavaScript, TypeScript, or Python.
There is a free plan with 5 dollars of monthly platform credit; paid plans start at 29 dollars per month (Starter) and scale to 199 dollars (Scale) and 999 dollars (Business), plus usage-based compute and proxy charges.
Apify was founded in 2015 in Prague, Czech Republic, by Jan Curn and Jakub Balada.
Yes, it includes access to a residential and datacenter proxy network, billed per gigabyte, with better rates on higher-tier plans.
Yes, developers can publish Actors to the Apify Store and earn revenue when other users rent or run them.
Crawlee is Apify's open-source scraping and browser automation library, used to build Actors with support for Puppeteer, Playwright, and Cheerio.
Apify differentiates itself with its Actor marketplace and full automation platform, while Bright Data and ScraperAPI focus more narrowly on proxy and scraping infrastructure rather than a public marketplace of pre-built scrapers.