Apify Pricing 2026 vs Zyla: Plans, Costs & Alternatives

If you are reading this, your Apify bill was probably higher than you expected: a scraper run that cost more than the estimate, credits that ran out halfway through the month, or an actor that stopped working while you were still paying for it. This guide breaks down Apify pricing in 2026 (plans, compute units, proxies and pay-per-event actors) and compares it with Zyla API Hub on what costs you money and time. Every Apify fact comes from its own pricing page, terms and docs, with the date we checked it.

Quick comparison: Apify vs Zyla API Hub

The two products are built differently, and Apify actors do not all use the same pricing model. A fair price comparison therefore has to pick one specific job that both can do. Below we use Google Maps business data.

How Apify pricing works

Apify pricing plans and credits

According to the Apify pricing page (22 October 2026), every plan is prepaid usage credit that you spend on the platform:

Usage-based billing: compute units, proxies and storage

When an actor is billed by platform usage, the cost of a run depends on several meters at once:

• Compute units, which measure memory multiplied by run time: $0.13–$0.20 each, depending on your plan.
• Residential proxies: $7–$8 per GB. SERP proxies: $1.70–$2.50 per 1,000 requests.
• Storage and data transfer: datasets, key-value stores and request queues are billed per GB-hour and per read or write, and external transfer costs $0.20 per GB.

Apify’s own FAQ says the cost of a run depends on proxies, data transfer, memory and run duration. Retries add to it. That is why the same scrape can cost a different amount from one run to the next.

Actor pricing: pay per result and pay per event

Most popular actors charge per result (Apify pay per result) or per event, and some only bill platform usage. The developer sets the price, and Apify keeps 20% of the actor’s revenue as commission (Apify docs). Two details are easy to miss:

1. The headline price is the cheapest one. The “from $X per 1,000” on an actor page is the Business-plan price. On Free or Starter, the same actor can cost up to about 2.7 times more per result.
2. Prices are changing. Apify retired rental pricing on 1 October 2026 and is moving actors to pay-per-event (Apify blog, 25 Aug 2026). Users get a 14-day window to review each price change.

What happens when you exceed your Apify credits?

Unused credit “disappears at the end of the billing cycle.” On the Free plan you are blocked until the next cycle when the $5 runs out. On paid plans you keep running and are charged for overage, up to the usage limit you configure in billing.

Apify vs Zyla: Google Maps pricing example

Here is a real, like-for-like case: Google Maps business data. It is one of the most-searched uses of Apify, and the Google Maps Scraper on Apify is one of its most popular actors (45,000 monthly users on 22 October 2026). On Zyla, the same job is done by the Google Maps API. All prices were checked on 22 October 2026.

For this workload the monthly bill is about 6 times lower on Zyla ($24.99 vs $150). Keep the assumptions in mind. The 20 places per request come from one test search; overlapping searches can return the same place twice, so count unique places when you test. The two tools do not return exactly the same fields, and Apify’s paid add-ons (emails, social profiles, verified contacts) have no one-click equivalent in a single Zyla call. Zyla is not cheaper for every kind of data, so compare the exact job you run.

Apify cost calculator: estimate your monthly data extraction costs

API requests vs extracted places: understanding the real cost

The two services count different things. The Google Maps Scraper on Apify bills per place it extracts. Zyla bills per API request, whatever that request returns. One request does not always produce the same number of useful places: pagination, duplicates across overlapping searches, empty responses and small areas with few matches all change the count. So the honest way to compare is to estimate how many useful places you get per request.

These are illustrative assumptions, not guaranteed output. Even in the conservative case, 50,000 places fit the Basic plan’s 100,000 requests, so the monthly bill stays at $24.99, or $0.50 per 1,000 places. The scenarios start to matter at higher volumes: at 5 useful places per request, 1,000,000 places would need 200,000 requests (the Pro plan, $49.99). Run a few of your real searches on the trial to find your own number.

Technical comparison: Apify vs Zyla

Here is the same search on both services. The Apify call runs the actor synchronously and returns its dataset items; the Zyla call is a plain REST request. Both were checked against the official docs on 22 October 2026, and the Zyla response below is from a live test.

# Before: Apify actor run (input fields depend on the actor)
import requests
items = requests.post(
    "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/compass~crawler-google-places/run-sync-get-dataset-items",
    params={"token": "YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN"},
    json={"searchStringsArray": ["coffee shops in Austin, TX"], "maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch": 20},
).json()

# After: Zyla API Hub
r = requests.get(
    "https://zylalabs.com/api/10107/google-maps-api/19301/search",
    params={"query": "coffee shops in Austin, TX", "limit": 20},
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
)
places = r.json()["data"]

This is the real response from our test on 22 October 2026 (one of the 20 places, trimmed):

curl --location --request GET 'https://zylalabs.com/api/10107/google-maps-api/19301/search?query=coffee%20shops%20in%20Austin,%20TX&limit=20' --header 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY'

{
  "status": "ok",
  "data": [
    {
      "name": "Flora Coffee & Culture",
      "full_address": "Flora Coffee & Culture, 3300 W Anderson Ln. Ste 300, Austin, TX 78757",
      "website": "http://floracoffee.co/",
      "rating": 4.9,
      "review_count": 413,
      "latitude": 30.362347,
      "longitude": -97.7421123,
      "place_id": "ChIJK_G24QHrRIYRFsqJnuQaKv0",
      "types": ["Coffee shop"]
    }
  ]
}

The two return overlapping but not identical data. Map the fields you use, and check coverage on your own searches before switching:

• Authentication: Apify uses your API token; Zyla uses Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY.
• Pagination: on Apify you raise maxCrawledPlacesPerSearch; on Zyla you page with offset and limit.
• Errors: on Zyla, 401 means you are not subscribed to the API and 429 means the rate limit or the plan quota was reached, each with a JSON message. Retry 429s with a short backoff.
• Rate limits: the Zyla Basic and Pro plans allow 120 requests per minute (240 on higher plans). Apify runs scale with the memory and concurrency of your runs.

Support and reliability: who fixes a broken actor?

On the Apify Store, the company that bills you is usually not the one that maintains the scraper. The Terms say actors “are not part of the Services provided by Apify” (Apify Terms, July 2026, §3.1). The Store Publishing Terms make the developer responsible for keeping an actor working and for answering issues within 14 days. The Apify help center explains that support “cannot evaluate whether a run was successful” on community actors. The developer decides.

Public issue pages show what that looks like in practice:

• A widely used LinkedIn profile actor showed 72 open issues. In one thread, users reported “not a single scrape works” and asked whether to keep waiting after about two weeks with no reply from the developer (public issue on the actor page, late September 2026).
• On the same actor, a recruiting firm reported missing and partial profile data affecting its clients, with no developer response on the page (public issue, September 2026).
• A company-data actor ended runs with “Actor is under maintenance” after the user had paid for a test. It was marked fixed, then reported broken again about a month later (public issue, July 2026).

Apify does flag failing actors as “under maintenance” and eventually deprecates them, but until then the fix depends on the developer, and you keep paying for the runs.

On Zyla API Hub, support is always Zyla’s job. Most of the catalog is built in-house, every listing shows its average response time, and APIs that keep failing are discontinued. When a listing comes from a third party, Zyla takes it up with the provider for you.

Predictable billing: how Zyla Soft Limit works

On Zyla you pay a fixed price for a fixed number of requests. Compute, proxies and retries are not billed separately. If you go past the quota, Soft Limit keeps your app running for up to one extra quota at a per-request price printed on the plan card. Then requests stop.

A worked example with real prices. The Google Maps API Basic plan includes 100,000 requests for $24.99, and its card lists the extra-request price as $0.0003249. Say you make 120,000 requests in a month:

1. The first 100,000 are covered by the plan.
2. The next 20,000 keep working under Soft Limit: 20,000 × $0.0003249 = $6.50, billed at the end of the cycle.
3. Requests stop at 200,000, so the extra charge on this plan can never exceed about $32.49.

Soft Limit is on by default for paid plans. You can turn it off for any subscription if you prefer a hard stop. Extra requests are not free, and if you keep landing in Soft Limit, a bigger plan is usually the better deal. We explain the same model in more detail in our RapidAPI pricing comparison.

When should you choose Apify instead of Zyla?

Apify fits when there is no ready-made API for what you need and you have to build the scraper yourself: crawling arbitrary websites, browser automation, your own actors or scheduled extraction jobs. In that case, budget for compute, proxies and the time it takes to keep those scrapers working.

When Zyla API Hub is the better choice

Zyla is usually the better fit when the data you need already exists as an API, for example maps, social profiles, sports, finance or vehicle data:

• A REST call, not a run. Send a request and get JSON back in the same response. There are no actors to configure and no datasets to poll.
• A price you know before the month starts. The plan sets the bill, without compute units, proxy gigabytes or storage meters on top.
• One team for support. Zyla answers for every API in the catalog, whoever built it.
• One key for everything. The same Bearer key works across all your Hub subscriptions, and over MCP for AI agents at mcp.zylalabs.com. Your first Hub API comes with a 7-day trial (up to 50 requests).

For many teams the answer is both: keep Apify for custom crawling and move standard data feeds, such as Google Maps places, to APIs with a fixed monthly price.

Can’t find an API for the data you collect with Apify? Tell us what you need and we’ll help you look for an alternative.

How to evaluate a migration from Apify to Zyla

Moving a scraping workflow to an API changes how you call it, not only where:

1. From runs to requests. An Apify actor runs as a job and writes to a dataset. A Zyla API answers each request directly with JSON.
2. Authentication. Replace the Apify token with Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY.
3. Inputs. Map the actor’s input fields (search terms, limits, language) to the API’s query parameters, such as query, limit, offset and lang on the Google Maps API.
4. Output fields. Field names differ. Put a small adapter between the API and the rest of your code.
5. Pagination. Use offset to page through results instead of raising a “max places” setting.
6. Enrichment. If you rely on Apify add-ons (emails, social profiles), check which Zyla endpoints or APIs cover them, and keep the rest where they are.
7. Testing. Run the same searches on the 7-day trial and compare row counts and fields with your last Apify dataset.
8. Rollback. Keep the Apify schedule paused rather than deleted until the new pipeline has run for a full cycle.

Endpoints for nearby search, place details, reviews and photos are all in the Google Maps API docs. For business profiles and reviews outside the US, see the Global Places Business Profiles and Reviews API.

Apify pricing FAQ

How does Apify pricing work?

You buy a plan that includes prepaid usage credit: $5 on Free, $19 on Starter, $199 on Scale or $999 on Business. You spend it on actors, which are priced per result or per event, and on platform usage: compute units, proxies, storage and data transfer. Unused credit expires at the end of each billing cycle.

Is Apify free?

There is a Free plan with $5 of usage credit a month. When it runs out you are blocked until the next billing cycle. Store actors also cost more per result on the Free plan than on paid plans.

What is an Apify compute unit?

A compute unit measures the memory an actor uses multiplied by how long it runs. It costs $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business (October 2026).

How much does the Apify Google Maps Scraper cost?

On 22 October 2026 it charged $4.00 per 1,000 places on Free, $3.00 on Starter, $2.00 on Scale and $1.50 on Business. Add-ons such as contact enrichment are billed separately.

Does Apify charge per result?

Many Store actors do: the Google Maps Scraper, for example, charges per place. Others charge per event or only bill platform usage (compute units, proxies and storage). Check the pricing tab of each actor before you run it.

What happens when I run out of Apify credits?

On the Free plan, runs are blocked until the next cycle. On paid plans, usage continues as overage until the usage limit you set in billing.

Does Apify give refunds?

Its Terms (July 2026) say fees are non-cancellable and non-refundable. When Apify or a developer compensates a failed run, it is usually paid as platform credit.

Is Zyla API Hub cheaper than Apify?

For standard data available as an API, often yes. Fetching 50,000 Google Maps places a month cost about $150 on Apify’s Starter plan and $24.99 on Zyla’s Google Maps API (22 October 2026), an effective $3.00 vs $0.50 per 1,000 places. If there is no API for your data and you need a custom crawler, Apify is an option.

What are the best Apify alternatives?

It depends on the job. Data APIs such as those on Zyla API Hub replace scrapers for common sources with a fixed monthly price. Self-hosted frameworks suit teams that want to run their own crawlers. Other scraping platforms compete with Apify on custom crawling.

Start exploring Zyla API Hub