Apify

Apify's own infrastructure (Console, API, proxy, storage, the $19/$199/$999 subscription tiers) is one thing. The 67,900+ "Actors" in Apify Store — the Instagram Scraper, Google Maps Extractor, LinkedIn scrapers, etc. — are mostly built and priced by independent third-party developers, not Apify (source: https://api.apify.com/v2/store?search=&limit=1, checked 2026-09-28). Apify hosts them, takes a cut, and runs them on its platform, but each Actor has its own README, pricing model, update cadence, and quality bar. The flagship Actors that Apify itself maintains (Instagram Scraper: 4.7/5 across 599 reviews; Google Maps Scraper: 4.7/5 across 1.8K reviews) are solid, but plenty of community Actors on the same store sit well below that — LinkedIn Profile Scraper by curious_coder is rated 1.8/5 across 14 reviews, and several lead-gen and job-scraper Actors sit in the 3.0-3.5 range (source: https://apify.com/store.md, checked 2026-09-28). Before committing budget to a specific scraping task, check the rating and review count on that specific Actor, not on Apify as a brand.

Two things stand out. First, breadth and maturity of pre-built scrapers: rather than writing and maintaining your own Instagram/TikTok/Google Maps/LinkedIn scraper against sites that actively fight scraping, you rent one that's already built, with 100K-600K+ existing users on the popular ones and continuous updates as target sites change their markup (e.g., Google Maps Scraper: 621K users; source: https://apify.com/store.md). Second, the AI-agent integration is unusually complete for this category: a hosted MCP server at mcp.apify.com with documented tool-call sequences, agentic crypto payments via x402/MPP for agents with no human to sign in, and a machine-readable agent quickstart at apify.com/agents.md that a coding agent can follow end-to-end without human hand-holding (source: https://apify.com/agents.md, read 2026-09-28). That's a genuinely unusual level of agent-native design compared with most scraping vendors, who bolt on an MCP wrapper after the fact.

Plans are $0 (Free, $5/month usage credit), $19/mo Starter ($17/mo billed annually), $199/mo Scale ($179/mo annual), $999/mo Business ($899/mo annual), each including that amount of platform-usage credit (source: https://apify.com/pricing.md, verified 2026-09-28). Beyond the included credit, usage is metered in compute units (1 CU = 1 GB RAM for 1 hour) at $0.20/CU on Free/Starter down to $0.13/CU on Business, plus separate charges for residential proxy ($7-8/GB), datacenter proxy IPs, and SERP requests. On top of platform usage, most individual Actors add their own per-event or per-result charge set by that Actor's developer — the Instagram Scraper, for example, charges $0.0027 per result on the Free tier ($0.0005 at the Diamond volume tier), on top of any platform CU consumed (source: https://api.apify.com/v2/store?search=&limit=1, checked 2026-09-28). The result is that a monthly bill for a heavy scraping workload is the plan fee plus platform CU/proxy overage plus each Actor's own metered price — three separate lines to estimate, not one flat number.

Apify's Terms put the legality of what's extracted on the customer, not on Apify: "You must use the Services to process only the Customer Data that you are authorized to access and that is in compliance with all applicable laws," and the indemnification clause specifically calls out that a customer using Actors "to extract Customer Data from unauthorized sources" is responsible for resulting third-party damages or claims (source: https://docs.apify.com/legal/general-terms-and-conditions, effective July 9, 2026, read 2026-09-28). Apify also disclaims liability for the content Users upload or scrape, citing EU DSA and Czech law. This is standard for the scraping-infrastructure category — Apify builds the pipes, not the legal clearance — but it means the buyer, not the vendor, carries the compliance risk for scraping sites whose terms of service prohibit it (e.g., LinkedIn, Instagram), which several of the most popular Actors on the Store are built specifically to scrape.

Apify Technologies s.r.o. is a Czech company (Prague) founded 2015 out of Y Combinator's fellowship program. It raised a seed round in 2016, then ran on its own profits until a €2.8M round in April 2024 from J&T Ventures and existing investor Reflex Capital — a deliberately modest raise; founder Jan Čurn told Tech.eu at the time the company had been "growing solely from its own profits" since 2019 and wanted to avoid a large capital influx disrupting the company (source: https://tech.eu/2024/04/15/prague-startup-apify-raises-eur28m-for-ai-data-mining/, published 2024-04-15). Tech.eu reported 2023 revenue of €6.7M and roughly €1M profit, per the same interview — those are 2023-era, vendor-supplied figures relayed by a journalist, not independently audited, and should be read as reported rather than verified. Apify states 84,000 customers worldwide and processing over 1 PB of data monthly on its About page (source: https://apify.com/about, read 2026-09-28) — these are vendor claims, unverified by us. This is a small, profitable, founder-led company rather than a venture-funded rocket ship, which is relevant to continuity risk: it isn't burning outside capital on a runway.

Apify's core open-source projects show recent, real activity rather than abandonment. Crawlee (the scraping framework underlying many Actors) has 25,919 GitHub stars and was last pushed to on 2026-09-26; crawlee-python has 9,557 stars, last pushed 2026-09-26. The apify-mcp-server repo (8,742 stars) was pushed as recently as 2026-09-27, hours before this check. None of Apify's public repos are archived (source: https://api.github.com/orgs/apify/repos, checked 2026-09-28). All core SDK and client repos carry Apache-2.0 licenses. This matters if you're evaluating Crawlee or the SDKs as standalone open-source tools independent of the paid platform, which many developers do.

Apify publishes real pricing with numbers (not "contact us"), full API and SDK docs, a public changelog, and a security page backed by a SOC 2 Type II attestation and a Trust Center at trust.apify.com hosted on Vanta (source: https://docs.apify.com/security, read 2026-09-28). A public status page with incident history exists at status.apify.com. We did not find independent third-party reviews we could read directly — G2 and TrustRadius both returned HTTP 403 to direct fetch, so we're relying on the Store's own per-Actor review counts (which are real user reviews of individual Actors, not of Apify as a platform) rather than an independent platform-level review aggregator.