Apify Review 2026: Honest Pros, Cons and Pricing

Apify is a web scraping and automation platform out of Prague, founded in 2015 by Jan Čurn and Jakub Balada. Most people who land on it go there for “Actors”, the pre-built scrapers for Amazon, Instagram, Google Maps and a few thousand other targets in the Apify Store. Fewer people notice that wired into every one of those Actors is Apify’s own proxy layer: datacenter IPs, residential IPs sourced through partner networks, and a Google SERP proxy built for search scraping. That proxy layer is what this review covers, not the Actor marketplace itself.

If you’re shopping for proxies in isolation, comparing Apify against Bright Data or IPRoyal on a spreadsheet, it’s not really a fair fight, because Apify doesn’t sell proxies as a standalone product. The proxy is metered usage inside a bigger platform subscription, billed through the same compute-unit system that runs your scraper code. That distinction matters more than anything else here: judged as a pure proxy vendor, Apify is expensive and narrow. Judged as a scraping platform with proxies bundled in, it’s one of the more convenient setups I’ve used, because you’re not stitching together a scraper, a proxy rotator and a captcha solver from three different vendors and three different invoices.

I’ve run Apify Actors for e-commerce price monitoring and tested the residential pool against sites that fingerprint hard, ticketing pages and sneaker-drop checkouts mostly. Headline verdict: buy it if you’re already building on the Apify platform or plan to. Skip it if you just want cheap proxies to feed a scraper running somewhere else, you’ll pay a platform tax for a feature you can get cheaper elsewhere.

what Apify actually does

Apify’s core product is the Actor, a containerized scraper or automation script that runs on Apify’s cloud and bills by compute unit (CU), roughly one CU per GB of RAM used per hour of runtime. Actors are either built by Apify, built by third-party developers who sell them in the Store, or written by you using the Apify SDK in Node.js or Python.

Apify Proxy sits underneath all of that as three tiers, per the official proxy documentation:

Datacenter proxy, described in Apify’s own docs as “the fastest and cheapest option”, routed through IPs in Apify’s datacenters.
Residential proxy, IPs assigned to real home and office internet connections, marketed as the option least likely to get blocked.
Google SERP proxy, a purpose-built pool for pulling Google search results pages without tripping rate limits.

Geo-targeting works through the proxy username string, you append a country parameter and Apify routes you through an IP in that country. Residential proxies go a step further and support US state-level targeting in ISO 3166-2 format, so country-US_CA gets you a California exit node specifically. Session stickiness also runs through the username: datacenter sessions hold an IP for up to 26 hours, residential sessions hold for roughly 30 minutes, and SERP proxies don’t support sessions at all since each search is a one-off request. Outside of Actors, you can also point any HTTP client at Apify Proxy directly, useful if you want the IP pool without running your scraping logic on Apify’s compute.

pricing

Apify runs four public plans, all billed through the same CU-and-credit system, per Apify’s pricing page as of July 2026:

Free: $0/month, $5 of platform usage credit, 8GB max Actor RAM, 25 concurrent runs, 5 datacenter proxy IPs included.
Starter: $29/month, $29 of usage credit, $0.20/CU, 32 concurrent runs, 30 datacenter IPs included.
Scale: $199/month, $199 of usage credit, $0.16/CU, 128 concurrent runs, 200 datacenter IPs included.
Business: $999/month, $999 of usage credit, $0.13/CU, 256 concurrent runs, 500 datacenter IPs included, SLA-backed support.
Enterprise: custom pricing, custom scraping solutions, dedicated account support.

Proxy usage draws down from that same monthly credit pool rather than being billed separately:

Datacenter IPs beyond the included allotment: $1/IP on Starter, $0.80/IP on Scale, $0.60/IP on Business.
Residential proxy: $8/GB on Free and Starter, $7.50/GB on Scale, $7/GB on Business.
Google SERP proxy: $2.50 per 1,000 queries on Free and Starter, $2 per 1,000 on Scale, $1.70 per 1,000 on Business.

Unused credit doesn’t roll over, it resets to zero at the end of each billing cycle. Annual billing knocks 10% off, and Apify offers a 30% student discount on Starter and Scale. If you’re doing serious volume, the residential rate is the number to watch, at $7-8/GB it’s easy to blow through a $199 Scale plan’s entire credit allotment on 25-28GB of residential traffic alone, before you’ve paid for a single second of Actor compute.

what works

The proxy is one line of code away from the scraper, not a separate integration. Inside an Actor you set proxyConfiguration in the run input and Apify handles rotation, retries and session assignment without you touching a separate proxy API or SDK. For anyone who’s previously had to glue together Puppeteer, a rotating proxy endpoint, and manual retry logic across two vendors, this alone saves real setup time.

Datacenter IPs are genuinely cheap at volume. The Business plan bundles 500 datacenter IPs into the base $999/month, and overage past that is $0.60/IP. For scraping targets that don’t fingerprint hard, e-commerce catalog pages, public APIs without aggressive rate limiting, that’s a reasonable cost per IP compared to buying datacenter proxies retail.

Compliance is independently audited, not just claimed. Apify completed a SOC 2 Type II audit covering security, availability and confidentiality, verified by Prescient Security, and states GDPR and CCPA compliance on its SOC 2 announcement post. If you’re scraping data that touches EU residents, that audit trail is worth more than a vendor’s word.

Session control is straightforward and well documented. Passing a session ID in the proxy username locks you to one IP for up to 26 hours on datacenter proxies, which is long enough to hold a login session or multi-step checkout flow without the IP changing mid-task.

The free tier is actually usable for testing. $5 of credit plus 5 datacenter IPs is enough to validate your rotation and retry logic before you commit a card number, something not every proxy vendor offers without a sales call first.

what doesn’t

Residential pricing is on the expensive end. At $7-8/GB, Apify’s residential rate sits well above budget providers like IPRoyal, which advertises rates starting around $1.75/GB for non-expiring traffic. If residential bandwidth is your main cost driver, that gap compounds fast at scale.

There’s no mobile or ISP proxy tier at all. If your use case needs carrier-grade mobile IPs, ad verification, mobile app testing, or platforms that specifically distrust datacenter and residential ASNs, Apify simply doesn’t have that product. You’d need a dedicated mobile proxy vendor.

Pool size and sourcing aren’t disclosed. Apify’s own proxy docs point you to the pricing page for cost but say nothing about how many residential IPs are in the pool or how those IPs are acquired. Given that 2026 has seen major residential proxy networks dismantled for running on hijacked consumer devices, most visibly the FBI and Google’s July 2026 takedown of the NetNut network, per the FBI’s cyber alert on residential proxy networks, sourcing transparency isn’t a nitpick anymore. It’s a real diligence question I’d want answered before routing production traffic through any residential pool, Apify included.

Support quality tracks the invoice size closely. Free, Starter and Scale users work through Apify’s community forum and documentation. SLA-backed, direct support starts at the $999/month Business plan. If you hit a proxy-specific issue on a $29 Starter plan, expect to solve it yourself or wait on a forum reply.

You can’t just buy the proxy. There’s no proxy-only SKU. Even if all you want is the residential IP pool, you’re subscribing to the full Actor platform, concurrent run limits, RAM caps and all, whether or not you ever run a single Actor.

who should buy and who should skip

Buy it if: you’re already building scrapers or automations on Apify and want proxy rotation handled inside the same billing and dashboard, without adding a second vendor relationship. It also fits teams that need SOC 2 paperwork for a compliance review and don’t want to chase that certification down separately. A small e-commerce ops team running scheduled Actors for competitor price checks is a good fit, the datacenter tier is cheap enough for that traffic pattern and the platform integration removes a moving part.

Skip it if: you need mobile or ISP proxies, since Apify doesn’t offer either. Skip it too if residential bandwidth is your primary cost and you’re pushing more than a few tens of GB a month, the $7-8/GB rate will outpace dedicated residential vendors quickly. And skip it if you just want raw proxies for a scraper you’ve already built on your own infrastructure, paying for Apify’s concurrent-run and RAM allowances when you’ll never use them is dead weight on the bill. Operators doing multi-account work, browser-profile-heavy antidetect setups, are usually better served by a proxy vendor built around that use case specifically, see our related coverage on the proxyscraping.org blog for provider-by-provider breakdowns.

alternatives to consider

Bright Data carries a larger and more disclosed proxy portfolio (mobile, ISP, residential, datacenter) if you need a proxy-only account without a scraping platform attached, see our Bright Data review for the full pricing breakdown.
IPRoyal is worth checking if residential cost per GB is your main constraint, its published rates start meaningfully below Apify’s $7-8/GB.
singaporemobileproxy.com fills the gap Apify leaves open entirely, carrier-grade mobile IPs, if your workload specifically needs mobile ASNs rather than datacenter or residential ones.

For multi-account and antidetect-browser workflows specifically, the proxy sourcing and session-persistence tradeoffs are covered in more depth on multiaccountops.com’s blog, worth a read before you commit a residential budget to that use case.

verdict

Apify is a strong scraping platform that happens to sell proxies, not a proxy company that happens to scrape. If you’re already writing Actors or plan to, the bundled datacenter and residential proxies remove a vendor and a bill from your stack, and the SOC 2 audit is a genuine plus for compliance-sensitive work. As a standalone proxy source it’s overpriced on residential and simply absent on mobile and ISP, so buy it for the platform, not for the IPs alone.

Written by Xavier Fok

disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-07-11.