Apify vs ScraperAPI
At 100,000 JavaScript pages a month: Apify no public price, ScraperAPI $149.00. One side has no complete public price for this job, so no saving can be stated.
Apify checked Oct 9, 2026 · ScraperAPI checked Oct 12, 2026
Both bills at the same volume · required
100,000 pages per month. The verdict above follows your volume; the write-up below uses 100,000 pages per month.
Apify
ScraperAPI
The difference
Charge by charge
| Charge | Apify | ScraperAPI |
|---|---|---|
| Plain pages, per 1,000 | not published | $0.49 |
| JavaScript pages, per 1,000 | not published | $1.49 |
| Sites that block bots, per 1,000 | not published | $1.49 (protected-site rate) |
| Failed requests billed | not published | no |
| Past the plan's allowance | no plan covers this job | move to a bigger plan |
| Paying yearly | no yearly price | saves 10% |
| Concurrent requests on this plan | not published | 50 |
| Free tier | size not published, renewal not published | 5,000 credits for a 7-day trial, no card |
Choose Apify when
- no published charge favours it for this job; weigh what it offers beyond price
Choose ScraperAPI when
- no published charge favours it for this job; weigh what it offers beyond price
How the Apify bill adds up
- Base rateNot publishedNo matching published billing rule
- × JavaScript renderingNot publishedSee the stated assumption in the calculation
- × Premium proxyNot requiredNot part of this workload
- ÷ Success rate0.95Failure billing is not published; this is an assumption
- = per 1,000 pages keptTotal unknownNo public price for this job: Actor prices, RAM-hours, storage, transfer and proxy usage cannot be calculated from this page-count workload.
Credits and multipliers
JavaScript rendering
Billed failures
Success rate
Concurrency
Free tier
Renews monthly How the ScraperAPI bill adds up
- Base rate1 creditper request
- → JavaScript rendering10 creditsper request; replaces the base rate
- × Premium proxyNot required
- ÷ Success rate1Failed requests are not billed
- = Billed units per page you keep10 creditsFrom this bill’s calculation
- = per 1,000 pages kept$1.49Startup, billed monthly
Credits and multipliersJavaScript renderingBilled failuresSuccess rateConcurrencyFree tierRenews monthly Both bills, step by step
Apify
-
Successes you want
100,000 pages
Your stated workload. Every vendor on this site is priced against this same number.
- ÷ 0.95
Attempts you are billed for
105,263 requests
Failure billing is not published, so this assumes all 105,263 attempts are billed.
- ∅
Cash per month
No public price for this job
See the note above.
Bars share one linear scale across the 2 counted stages, so a multiplier shows as length. Units differ by stage and are labelled. Cash is not on that scale.
ScraperAPI
-
Successes you want
100,000 pages
- × 1
Attempts you are billed for
100,000 requests
ScraperAPI does not bill failed fetches, so failures cost nothing here.
- × 10
What the meter counts
1,000,000 credits
One attempt is not one billed unit here: this workload multiplies by 10 before any money is involved.
- =
Cash per month
$149.00 /mo
Startup: the cheapest way to buy this volume, not just the first plan big enough.
Bars share one linear scale across the 3 counted stages, so a multiplier shows as length.
Both ladders share one linear scale, topping out at 1,000,000 counted units, so a longer bar means more billed work rather than a different drawing.
These figures are for one stated workload: 100,000 JavaScript-rendered pages a month at a 95% success rate. Change the volume above and both bills, the verdict and the curve follow it.
Decision boundary: ScraperAPI sells a price per page; Apify sells computing time. A ScraperAPI request costs a published number of credits, 1 for a plain page and 10 with JavaScript rendering or premium proxies, so a monthly bill follows from the page count. An Apify bill follows from how long an Actor runs and how much memory it uses, at $0.13 to $0.20 per compute unit (one GB of memory for one hour), plus proxies and any charge the Actor’s author sets. Choose ScraperAPI when you need to know the bill before you start; choose Apify when you want a ready-made scraper for a site, scheduling and storage in one place, and can measure an Actor’s cost on a sample first. (Apify pricing, checked Oct 12, 2026; ScraperAPI pricing, checked Oct 11, 2026)
Billing models side by side
ScraperAPI’s plans buy credits each month: Hobby is $49 for 100,000 and Startup $149 for 1,000,000, with 20 and 50 requests at once. Only responses with status 200 or 404 are charged, and a request you cancel before ScraperAPI’s 70 seconds are up is charged too. Credits do not roll over, and the three smaller plans stop at their limit unless you upgrade. A free plan gives 1,000 credits a month. (ScraperAPI pricing, ScraperAPI documentation, checked Oct 11, 2026)
Apify’s plans are prepaid usage: Starter at $19 a month gives $19 to spend, Scale $199 and Business $999, and the free plan gives $5 a month with no card. Usage past the prepaid amount goes on the next invoice; on the free plan, access stops until the next month. Compute costs $0.20 per unit on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business; residential proxies cost $7 to $8 per GB, and Apify’s own unblocker $1 to $1.50 per 1,000 requests, by plan. Unused prepaid usage expires at the end of the month. (Apify pricing, checked Oct 12, 2026)
What each provides that the other does not
Apify is a platform: ready-made Actors for many sites in its Store, your own code run on its servers, schedules, datasets and storage, and up to 32 Actor runs at once on Starter. ScraperAPI is one endpoint that fetches a page, renders it if asked and handles proxies and retries, with structured endpoints for sites such as Amazon and Google priced in credits per request. A team that writes its own parser and wants a fixed price per page fits ScraperAPI; a team that wants a scraper someone else maintains, or a place to run and schedule its own, fits Apify. (Apify pricing, checked Oct 12, 2026; ScraperAPI documentation, checked Oct 11, 2026)