Bright Data vs Apify Pricing per 1,000 Pages by Page Type

Bright Data and Apify are the two platforms most teams meet when a scraper starts getting blocked. They look similar on a pricing page, because both now sell an unblocking product at 1.50 USD per 1,000 requests. The difference is everything around that number: what else lands on the invoice, and what the page costs when it is heavy or retried.

Rates below were read from Bright Data's Web Unlocker page and Apify's pricing page on October 31, 2026. Both vendors run promotions and change prices several times a year, so check the live pages before you commit. Each has a full breakdown: Bright Data pricing per 1,000 pages and Apify pricing per 1,000 pages.

The two price lists side by side

Bright Data Web Unlocker has a free tier of 5,000 requests a month, then 1.50 USD per 1,000 requests pay as you go with no commitment and billing on success only. The Scale plan is 499 USD a month for 383,000 requests, with extra requests at 1.30 USD per 1,000. Enterprise adds volume discounts, SSO and an SLA. Bright Data also sells proxies by the gigabyte, a Browser API from 5 USD per GB, and Scraper APIs from 0.75 USD per 1,000 records on prebuilt sites.

Apify bills a prepaid usage budget. The plan fee is also the usage it includes.

What sits around the 1.50 USD

Bright Data's Unlocker is a finished product. You send a URL, it handles proxies, rendering, captcha solving and retries, and you pay for the requests that succeed. The invoice is requests times the rate.

Apify's Unblocker is a proxy feature. It still runs inside an Actor, and the Actor pays for memory time. A compute unit is one gigabyte of memory held for one hour. Apify's own averages are about 300 pages per unit for browser crawlers and 3,000 for Cheerio, which parses raw HTML. On Starter that adds about 0.07 USD per 1,000 pages for Cheerio and 0.67 USD for a browser, on top of the 1.50 USD Unblocker.

That gap is small, but it is not zero, and it grows with retries. A request that fails still used memory time. Bright Data's success only billing keeps failures off the invoice, and Apify's help center says plainly that run cost depends on retries.

Cost per 1,000 pages by page type

Entry level rates, pay as you go on Bright Data and the Starter plan on Apify. Page weights are illustrative, so replace them with what your crawler logs.

The pattern is clear. Apify wins when the site does not fight back. Once a page needs an unblocker or residential traffic, Bright Data's per request price is lower or equal, and it does not move with page weight. Apify's residential line is billed per gigabyte, so a heavy page can cost five times a light one.

Monthly budgets at three volumes

Protected pages through each unblocker, with Apify at Starter compute and Bright Data pay as you go or Scale. The WebScrap column is our flat plan.

Apify figures use its Unblocker rate plus 0.33 compute units per 1,000 pages at the plan's compute price,. Apify becomes the cheaper unblocker once you reach the Scale and Business tiers, and Bright Data's Scale plan is better than its pay as you go rate only past 332,000 requests a month.

Which one earns your budget

Pick Bright Data when you want one request that returns an unblocked page and an invoice that equals requests times a rate, or when you need proxy volume, prebuilt datasets or an enterprise contract. Pick Apify when your team writes many scrapers and wants scheduling, storage and integrations in one place, when a Store Actor already does your job, or when most of your targets are open sites where Cheerio costs cents.

A third path is a flat plan (see the Bright Data alternative page). If your pages are mostly protected and your target mix changes, WebScrap bills 0.98 USD per 1,000 successful pages on Starter and 0.33 on Scale with rendering and rotating proxies included, never billing a blocked page. See the Apify alternative comparison for the page by page math, and our Cloudflare scraping API for the protected page case. If the scraped records feed sales outreach, a cold email outreach platform is the usual next purchase.

Before committing, run 200 real URLs per target through each free tier, read what each run cost, and convert that into your monthly volume. That figure matters more than any plan card.

Questions buyers ask

Which is cheaper, Bright Data or Apify?

For plain HTML on open sites Apify is cheaper, about 0.07 USD per 1,000 pages with Cheerio on datacenter IPs. For protected pages both bill 1.50 USD per 1,000 requests for an unblocker at entry level, but Apify adds Actor compute, so Bright Data Web Unlocker is the lower total at entry level, while Apify Scale and Business undercut it at high volume.

How much does Bright Data Web Unlocker cost?

Web Unlocker is free for 5,000 requests a month, then 1.50 USD per 1,000 requests pay as you go, billed on success only. The Scale plan is 499 USD a month for 383,000 requests, with extra requests at 1.30 USD per 1,000. Enterprise is custom.

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. Compute is 0.20, 0.16 and 0.13 USD per unit, and the Unblocker is 1.50, 1.25 and 1 USD per 1,000 requests.

Is Bright Data or Apify better for scraping?

Bright Data is better when you want a single request that returns a page with blocks handled, or very large proxy volume. Apify is better when you need a platform for scheduling and storing your own scrapers, or a ready Store Actor for a specific site.

Is there a flat price alternative to both?

Yes. WebScrap bills one request per successful page, with rendering and rotating proxies included, at 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter, 0.60 on Growth and 0.33 on Scale. It does not run custom code or sell proxy bandwidth.