ScrapingBee vs Apify Pricing per Page

ScrapingBee and Apify end up on the same shortlist because both let a team stop running its own scrapers. They charge for completely different things. ScrapingBee sells requests: you send a URL, it returns the page, and each request costs a fixed number of credits. Apify sells compute time and storage on a platform where the scrapers, called Actors, run. A page costs whatever the Actor you choose burns to fetch it.

That difference decides which one is cheaper, so this post prices the same jobs on both. Every ScrapingBee figure was read from scrapingbee.com on 31 October 2026 and every Apify figure from apify.com/pricing the same day. Where a number is our arithmetic and not a published rate, the text says so.

ScrapingBee vs Apify pricing at a glance

Why one number per page does not exist on Apify

On ScrapingBee the cost per 1,000 pages is a division. The $19 plan gives 75,000 credits, so a plain page costs $0.25 per 1,000 and a rendered page, at 5 credits, costs $1.27. The $99 Startup plan gives 1,000,000 credits, which is $0.099 per 1,000 plain and $0.495 rendered. Nothing about the target site changes those figures unless you add premium proxies.

Apify has no such division, because a compute unit is one gigabyte of RAM held for one hour and the pages per hour depend on the Actor. We worked this through in our Apify pricing guide. At the Starter rate of $0.20 per compute unit, the derived cost per 1,000 pages runs from about $0.014 for a lean HTTP fetch to about $4.44 for a heavy browser Actor that waits ten seconds a page. Those are our estimates from throughput assumptions, not Apify rates, and the spread between them is roughly 300 times on one plan.

Five workloads priced on both

Read the table for what it is. On paper Apify is cheaper on the first three rows, often by a wide margin, because you pay for machine time and not for a markup per request. But the Apify column assumes an Actor that already exists, works on your target and runs at the throughput we assumed. Somebody has to find it or write it, test it and maintain it when the site changes. The ScrapingBee column assumes nothing: the same API call works on any URL.

Where ScrapingBee is the better purchase

Choose ScrapingBee when the bill has to be a number your finance lead can approve in advance, when you have no appetite to maintain scraper code, or when the targets change often. A monthly credit plan also suits teams that scrape many different sites a little each, since there is no Actor to build per site. The weak spot is cost at the top end: premium proxies at 25 credits a rendered page turn $99 into $249 quickly.

Where Apify is the better purchase

Choose Apify when you scrape one or two well-known targets at volume and a maintained Actor for them exists in the Store. Then you pay for compute, you can run scheduled jobs, store datasets and chain Actors, and the per-page cost can sit far below any request-priced API. Check the Actor's own pricing tab before you commit, since a Store Actor can add a per-result fee, a per-event fee or a monthly rental on top of compute.

Neither one hands your model clean text

Both products return a page. ScrapingBee returns HTML, with optional extraction rules you write yourself. Apify returns whatever the Actor outputs. If the goal is markdown or typed records for a model, a third step sits after both of them: strip the page, split it, and map fields. A crawl API does that in the same call. ClawEngine crawls from a start URL, renders JavaScript and returns markdown or JSON against your schema for a flat per-page price, but it does not defeat anti-bot systems, so for defended sites ScrapingBee with premium proxies is the better buy. For a priced head-to-head, see our ScrapingBee vs Firecrawl pricing, and the ScrapingBee pricing breakdown for every tier.

Whichever you pick, a scheduled job that quietly returns empty pages is the most expensive failure, because you still pay for it. Put an uptime check on the endpoint your scraping job feeds so a dead run is noticed the same hour and not at the end of the month.

How much does Apify cost per page?

There is no single figure. Apify bills compute units at $0.20 on Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business, and a page costs whatever its Actor consumes. A lean HTTP Actor can come in under $0.06 per 1,000 pages by our arithmetic, a browser Actor $0.44 to $4.44. Run your Actor on 500 URLs and read the compute units off the run to get your real number.

How much does ScrapingBee cost per 1,000 pages?

On the $19 Hobby plan, $0.25 per 1,000 plain pages and $1.27 per 1,000 rendered ones. On the $99 Startup plan, $0.099 and $0.495. Premium proxies cost 10 credits, or 25 with rendering, so a rendered premium page on Startup is about $2.48 per 1,000. These are the plan price divided by the credits, using the credit costs ScrapingBee lists.

Is Apify cheaper than ScrapingBee?

Often yes per page, if an efficient Actor already exists for your target and you have measured it. The honest caveat is effort and variance: Apify's cost depends on the Actor and can be a few hundred times higher for a heavy browser job. ScrapingBee costs more on paper at volume, but the price is fixed and the same call works on any URL.

Does ScrapingBee have a free plan?

It gives every new account 1,000 free API credits with no card, enough for about 200 rendered pages. There is no recurring free tier on the pricing page. Apify has a Free plan with $5 of platform credit each month, which is enough to run a 500-URL measurement on a lean Actor before you subscribe.

The decision, in one line

Buy ScrapingBee for a predictable per-request price on mixed or defended targets, buy Apify for volume on a few known targets where you will measure the Actor first, and buy a crawl API when the deliverable is clean markdown or typed records for a model.