Apify Alternative with One Price per Successful Page
WebScrap is an Apify alternative for teams that collect data from protected public pages and want the bill to be a page count. Apify bills compute units, residential proxy gigabytes and storage from a prepaid budget. WebScrap bills one request per successful page, with rendering and rotating proxies included. For a platform of custom scrapers or a ready Store Actor, Apify is the better tool.
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This console sends a real request and shows you the real response. Five live fetches per session, and the sample targets run as often as you like.
Why an Apify bill grows on protected sites
Every Apify plan fee is also the usage it includes: 19, 199 or 999 USD to spend on compute at 0.20, 0.16 or 0.13 USD per unit, plus residential proxy traffic at 8, 7.50 or 7 USD per GB. A rendered 1 MB page on residential addresses costs about 8.67 USD per 1,000 pages on Starter, nearly all of it proxy bytes.
On open sites this model is excellent. A Cheerio crawl of plain HTML over bundled datacenter IPs costs a few cents per 1,000 pages, and nothing on this page beats that. The surprise arrives on retailers, marketplaces, travel and job boards, where datacenter ranges are refused and every page has to travel through residential traffic.
A flat per page plan moves that risk to us. Page weight, retries and proxy choice stay inside the request price. Our Apify cost per 1,000 pages breakdown walks through every rate, so you can check the math against your own crawl logs before moving anything.
What 1,000 pages cost on each service
Apify figures are the Starter plan using Apify's own averages of about 300 pages per compute unit for browser crawls and 3,000 for Cheerio, plus residential proxy traffic at 8 USD per GB. Page weights are illustrative, so replace them with what your crawler logs.
| Scenario | Apify Starter | WebScrap Starter |
|---|---|---|
| Plain HTML, Cheerio, datacenter IPs | About 0.07 USD | 0.98 USD |
| Browser, datacenter IPs | About 0.67 USD | 0.98 USD |
| Cheerio, residential, 250 KB per page | About 2.07 USD | 0.98 USD |
| Cheerio through the Unblocker | About 1.57 USD | 0.98 USD |
| Google results pages | 2.50 USD plus compute | 0.98 USD |
| Browser, residential, 1 MB per page | About 8.67 USD | 0.98 USD |
The first two rows favor Apify and we left them in on purpose. If your crawl looks like that, stay. WebScrap rates fall to 0.60 USD per 1,000 on Growth and 0.33 USD on Scale, and Apify rates fall too on its upper plans, so compare at your own volume.
Apify and WebScrap compared by job
Apify figures come from its published monthly plans, with 10 percent off for annual billing. WebScrap rates use monthly plans too.
| Question | Apify | WebScrap |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Prepaid usage budget spent on compute units, proxy GB, storage, data transfer and Store Actor charges | One unit per successful page, from 49 USD |
| Plans | Free 5 USD usage, Starter 19, Scale 199, Business 999, then custom | 49 USD for 50,000, 149 USD for 250,000, 499 USD for 1,500,000 |
| Residential proxies | 8, 7.50 and 7 USD per GB on Starter, Scale and Business | Included in the request price |
| Failed requests | Memory time and proxy bytes are spent on retries | Blocked pages and failed requests are never billed |
| Concurrency | 5 runs on Free, 32 on Starter, 128 on Scale, 256 on Business | Starter 5, Growth 50, Scale 200, Enterprise 400 |
| Ready made scrapers | Store with over 100,000 Actors, each with its own pricing model | Dedicated endpoints for common targets, no third party store |
| Custom code | Runs your own Actors, schedules, datasets and integrations | Not offered, a request returns the page or fields |
| Who it suits | Many custom scrapers, undefended HTML at scale, teams that want a platform | Protected retail, listings, Google results and mixed target lists |
Three monthly budgets for protected pages
Each row spends the whole Apify plan on residential traffic at the plan's compute and proxy rate. Light pages are Cheerio crawls at 250 KB, full pages are browser crawls at 1 MB. Pages are rounded down.
| Apify plan | Light pages | Full pages | WebScrap plan and pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter, 19 USD | about 9,200 | about 2,200 | Starter, 49 USD, 50,000 |
| Scale, 199 USD | about 103,000 | about 24,800 | Growth, 149 USD, 250,000 |
| Business, 999 USD | about 557,000 | about 134,000 | Scale, 499 USD, 1,500,000 |
Apify's Starter fee is lower than ours, and so is its per page cost on light pages at small volume, so a hobby sized crawl of open sites belongs there. Apify also negotiates Enterprise deals, so ask before ruling it out at high volume. WebScrap Enterprise includes 3,000,000 successful requests for 998 USD monthly. See WebScrap pricing for every plan.
Where flat pricing changes the collection budget
If your Actor exists only to load a URL and read fields, you are paying for a machine you do not need to tune.
Protected retail prices
A price monitor needs the current price after a store adds bot checks. Our Cloudflare scraping API keeps the page rate fixed when proxy needs change.
Marketplace and job listings
Listings sit behind DataDome and similar systems. The job scraping API returns postings as JSON at the same rate as a plain page.
Whole site crawls
The website crawler API takes a seed URL and depth and returns every page as JSON, with no crawler to configure.
Google results
Rank tracking over many queries and locations is a count of results pages. The WebScrap SERP API bills each successful results page once.
Move an Apify reading job in four steps
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01
Find your cost per 1,000 pages
Divide a month of Actor spend by pages returned. Under about 1 USD per 1,000, Apify is likely cheaper. Above 2 USD, flat pricing usually wins.
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02
Sort scrapers by target
Scrapers that fetch and parse public pages can move. Actors that log in, run long workflows or feed other Apify tools stay put.
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03
Replace the fetch call
Send the URL in a POST body and set render to browser. Drop the proxy configuration and retry loops, because they are inside the request price.
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04
Compare the extracted fields
Run matching URLs through both and check prices, availability and empty values before you switch the whole job.
# before, compute units and proxy GB
run = actor.call(run_input={
'startUrls': [url], 'proxy': 'RESIDENTIAL' })
# after, 1 request per successful page
POST /v1/scrape
{ "url": "https://shop.example.com/item/linen",
"render": "browser",
"country": "us",
"schema": { "price": ".price" } }
See authentication and response handling in the WebScrap request documentation.
When to stay on Apify
A one request, one page API is the wrong tool for some work. Moving only makes sense if the job is reading protected pages.
Platform
Many custom scrapers
Scheduling, datasets, storage and integrations around scrapers your team writes are what Apify is for. We return pages, not a runtime.
Open sites
Undefended HTML at scale
Cheerio on bundled datacenter IPs costs a few cents per 1,000 pages. Blogs, directories and public documents do not need our price model.
Ready made
A Store Actor already fits
If a maintained Actor does exactly your job at a per result price that works, skipping the build has real value.
Other Apify alternatives to compare
Use the linked cost breakdowns to compare billing units before choosing another provider.
| Tool | What to compare | When to evaluate it |
|---|---|---|
| Scrapfly pricing | Credits for browser, proxy and anti-bot features | A credit based API with anti-bot options |
| ZenRows pricing | Credits by rendering and proxy mode | Plain HTML at a low entry price |
| ScrapingBee pricing | Credits by proxy mode and Google rates | Small plans with simple credit math |
| Bright Data pricing | Per GB proxy fees and per record datasets | Very large volumes or ready datasets |
If you are also weighing a markdown focused option, see our Firecrawl alternative page, and for hosted browsers read the Browserless alternative comparison.
Apify alternative questions
What is the best alternative to Apify?
It depends on the job. For reading protected pages at a predictable cost, a scraping API such as WebScrap with one flat price per successful page is cheaper. If you need a platform to schedule and store many custom scrapers, or a ready Store Actor, Apify remains the better fit.
How much does Apify cost?
Apify has a Free plan with 5 USD of usage, then Starter at 19 USD, Scale at 199 USD and Business at 999 USD a month. Each fee is also the usage it includes, billed at 0.20, 0.16 and 0.13 USD per compute unit, with residential proxies at 8, 7.50 and 7 USD per GB.
Why does Apify get expensive for scraping?
Compute is cheap, but residential proxy traffic is billed per gigabyte on top. A rendered page of 1 MB adds about 8 USD per 1,000 pages on Starter, and retries on blocked requests spend compute and bandwidth without returning a page.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Apify?
For plain HTML on datacenter IPs Apify is hard to beat. For protected pages that need residential traffic, WebScrap costs 0.98 USD per 1,000 successful pages on Starter and less on higher plans, whatever the page weighs.
Does WebScrap have ready made scrapers like Apify Actors?
No store of third party scrapers. WebScrap is one API: send a URL and optional field selectors, get the page or structured JSON back. Dedicated endpoints cover Google results, Amazon, LinkedIn, Google Maps and other common targets.
Budget for pages before the crawl starts
Read rendered and protected pages at one rate per successful page. Starter includes 50,000 requests for 49 USD monthly, with browser rendering and rotating proxies included.