How Apify pricing work, and how do I cap monthly usage?

Subscription plans and prepaid credits

Every Apify subscription gives you a pool of prepaid platform usage credits each month. You spend those credits on your own custom Actors or on ready-made scrapers in Apify Store.

If you don't burn through your entire prepaid balance by the end of the month, you lose it. Unused prepaid usage credits do not roll over to the next billing cycle and expire at the end of the billing cycle. That makes right-sizing your plan important from day one. You can reduce your ongoing cost by choosing annual billing, since Apify offers a 10% discount when plans are billed annually instead of monthly.

Special discounts exist for specific groups. Students are eligible for a 50% discount on the Starter, Scale, and Business plans. Startups can receive a 30% discount on the Scale plan, while nonprofits can get a personalized discount.

Support levels scale with your plan tier. The Free tier includes community support. Starter upgrades you to chat support, Scale offers priority chat support, and Business provides a dedicated account manager.

Compute units, proxy bandwidth, and storage costs

What is an Apify compute unit? One Apify compute unit (CU) equals 1 GB of RAM used for 1 hour. If you run a scraper configured with 4 GB of RAM for 30 minutes, that run consumes 2 compute units. On the Free and Starter tiers, those 2 CUs cost $0.40.

Compute units aren't the only resource that draws from your prepaid usage balance. Proxies, storage operations, and data transfers also deduct credit:

• Residential proxies: Cost $8 per GB on the Free and Starter plans, $7.5 per GB on the Scale plan, and $7 per GB on the Business plan.
• Datacenter proxies: Free includes 5 IPs. Starter includes 30 IPs (then charges $1 per IP). Scale includes 200 IPs (then $0.8 per IP), and Business includes 500 IPs (then $0.6 per IP). On the Free plan, Apify Proxy is restricted to use within the Apify platform and cannot be used by external clients.
• Google SERP proxies: Cost $2.5 per 1,000 SERPs on Free and Starter, $2 per 1,000 on Scale, and $1.7 on Business.
• Unblocker requests: Cost $1.5 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale, and $1 on Business.
• Dataset and Key-value storage: Timed storage costs $1.00 per 1,000 GB-hours on Free and Starter, $0.90 on Scale, and $0.80 on Business. Dataset reads run $0.0004 per 1,000 reads and writes cost $0.005 per 1,000 writes on Free and Starter. Key-value store reads cost $0.005 per 1,000 reads, while writes and lists each cost $0.05 per 1,000 operations on Free and Starter.
• Request queues: Timed storage is $4.00 per 1,000 GB-hours on Free and Starter ($3.60 on Scale, $3.20 on Business). Reads cost $0.004 per 1,000 reads and writes cost $0.01 per 1,000 writes on Free and Starter.
• Data transfer: External egress costs $0.20 per GB on Free and Starter ($0.19 on Scale, $0.18 on Business). Internal data transfer costs $0.05 per GB on Free and Starter ($0.045 on Scale, $0.04 on Business).

Need more capacity without jumping tiers? Subscription plan add-ons are only available to users on a paid subscription plan and can be purchased via the Buy add-ons button in the Subscription section of Apify Console at console.apify.com/billing/subscription. Available add-ons include Concurrent runs for $5 per run, Actor RAM for $1 per GB, Datacenter proxy starting from $0.6 per IP, and Personal training for $150 per hour.

Store Actor pricing: pay per event versus pay per usage

When you run third-party Actors from the Apify Store, they charge under one of two pricing models:

In the Pay per event model, you pay a fixed price for developer-defined events such as starting the Actor or returning a single result. Most pay-per-event Actors include the Apify platform usage in the event price, though some charge for platform usage separately. Check the pricing section on the Actor's store page before launching a batch run.

In the Pay per usage model, the developer adds no extra fee and you only pay for the platform usage consumed by runs (compute units, data transfer, storage operations, and residential or SERP proxies).

Both models draw on the prepaid platform usage credits included in your plan. If you pull data out of Apify via the API later, keep in mind that reading from or writing to a run's dataset after the run finishes also counts as platform usage.

Paid plans also get Store discounts on select Actors: Bronze on Starter, Silver on Scale, and Gold on Business. For automated workflows, autonomous AI agents with a crypto wallet can pay for Actor runs without an Apify account via the x402 and MPP protocols at agi.apify.com, receiving a temporary API token with a fixed spend cap.

Overage invoices and mid-cycle threshold billing

What happens when your workload burns through all your prepaid usage?

If you're on the Free plan, access to Apify's services is blocked until the start of the next monthly billing cycle. No invoices are generated, and no surprise charges can land on your card because the Free plan requires no credit card to start.

Paid plans behave differently. If a paid plan's platform usage in a billing cycle exceeds its prepaid amount, the excess usage is added to the next invoice and the user receives a notification.

You might not have to wait until month-end to see an overage bill. If overage platform usage reaches $20 on the Starter plan or $200 on higher plans before the next billing cycle, Apify invoices for the overage charges immediately rather than waiting for the next subscription invoice.

Upgrading or downgrading also changes how usage is billed:

• Upgrading: Upgrading an Apify subscription plan in Billing settings is prorated, so you only pay the difference between the old and new plan prices for the remainder of the billing cycle.
• Downgrading: Downgrading an Apify subscription plan is not prorated, except that unused platform usage rolls over to the new plan.
• Canceling: Canceling an Apify subscription keeps the plan active until the end of the current billing cycle without renewing, though excess platform usage may still be charged.

How to set a monthly spending cap in Apify Console

You don't have to leave your card exposed to unconstrained overages. Apify includes native controls to stop runs when they cross a specific threshold.

To inspect and limit your usage, log into Apify Console:

1. Check your current burn: Open Apify Console Billing and view the Current period tab. It shows your total usage, start and end dates of the current billing period, a Plan Consumption Graph, and service breakdowns for Actors, Data transfer, Proxy, and Storage.
2. Review past runs: Open the Historical usage tab to inspect usage by calendar months (excluding free Actor compute units or plan discounts) and look at the Usage by Actors table to see compute units and costs broken down per Actor.
3. Set your spending ceiling: Open the Limits tab in Apify Console Billing. The Limits tab displays platform usage limits and lets you adjust them.
4. Choose your overage posture: You can adjust platform usage limits and enable pay-as-you-go overage in the Limits tab. If you leave pay-as-you-go overage disabled, Apify will not let your bill exceed the set limit.
5. Monitor enforcement: Apify sends notifications as you approach the defined limits. If your usage exceeds the specified limits, Apify platform services will be suspended to prevent incurring charges beyond your subscription plan.

Setting your platform usage limit to match your prepaid amount (for instance, $19 on Starter) ensures you never pay more than the base subscription fee.

Automated spend monitoring with Costbrake

Native platform limits help, but cloud bills rarely live in a single dashboard. Many infrastructure providers lack built-in hard spending limits entirely, as outlined in our guide on which cloud and AI providers let you set a hard spending cap.

Costbrake watches what you spend across 23 cloud, AI, and SaaS providers, including Apify, AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, and Anthropic. It alerts you on spikes (an hour costing more than 3x the 7-day baseline and at least $5 extra), tracks budget milestones at 50%, 80%, and 100%, and warns you if the trailing 72-hour pace projects an overage by month-end.

For Apify, Costbrake monitors monthly usage and active limits. When unexpected spend hits, you can use the opt-in killswitch brake from the dashboard:

• Cap monthly usage: The brake lowers the account's maximum monthly usage to what this cycle has used so far. Once usage passes it, Apify suspends platform services for the account until the limit goes up or the next cycle starts.
• Reversible undo: Clicking undo restores the exact previous limit. Costbrake never triggers brakes on its own; an admin must click and confirm.

Connecting Apify requires a full-access API token (with "Limit token permissions" turned off) because Apify hides billing usage and limit configurations from restricted tokens. You can set this up manually via app.costbrake.com/signin or tell your coding agent to handle it using the agent setup instructions.