Apify pricing in 2026: plans, compute units and Reddit and X costs

Apify pricing has two layers. You start by picking a platform plan: Free ($0, with $5 of monthly usage), Starter ($19 a month), Scale ($199) or Business ($999). Whatever the plan costs comes back to you as prepaid usage. On top of that, each Actor you run charges per result or event, per compute unit, or both. Everything below comes from Apify's pricing page and the Actor pages, checked on October 17, 2026.

The second half of this post uses two popular Actors to work out what Reddit and X data costs on Apify, then sets those numbers beside ChatterAPI's credit prices. All the workings are shown, so you can rerun the math with your own volumes.

Apify pricing plans at a glance

Source: apify.com/pricing, checked October 17, 2026. Annual billing takes 10% off the paid plans. Google SERP proxies cost $2.50 per 1,000 SERPs on Free and Starter and drop to $1.70 on Business.

Three rules on that page matter more than the table:

• The plan fee is prepaid usage. Apify describes it as usage "to spend in Apify Store or on platform usage", so a $19 Starter plan gives you $19 to spend on Actors, compute and proxies.
• Usage you don't spend is gone. Apify says that if you don't use it all, "it disappears at the end of the billing cycle".
• What happens when you run out depends on the plan. Paid plans keep running and charge overage up to the limit you set. On the Free plan, "you'll be blocked until the next billing cycle."

How Apify charges for Actors

Actors are the scrapers and automations in the Apify Store. Community developers publish most of them and set their own prices. The pricing page lists the models:

A compute unit is 1 GB of RAM for one hour. On pay-per-usage Actors the bill depends on memory, run time and proxy traffic, so the same job can cost different amounts on different days. Apify's own FAQ says a pay-per-event run "costs more when it returns more results or triggers more events", which is what you'd want from a per-item price.

The Store discount column matters for pay-per-event Actors. Many developers set lower prices for Bronze, Silver and Gold, so the list prices in this post (the "from" prices on each Actor page) can drop on paid plans.

What Reddit scraping costs on Apify

One of the most used Reddit Actors is Reddit Scraper Lite, built by a community developer, Trudax. Its Store page, checked October 17, 2026, listed:

• Pricing: pay per event, "from $3.40 / 1,000 result storeds", platform usage included
• Users: 48,382 total, 8,105 monthly
• Rating: 4.57 out of 5, with a 98.6% run success rate

A "result" can be a post, a comment, a community or a user. If you also collect comments, 1,000 results won't mean 1,000 posts. The README mentions getting "1,000 results for less than $4" and recommends a "$49/month Starter plan". That plan price is out of date, since the pricing page lists Starter at $19. Trust the pricing page.

At the listed "from" price:

Free plan:    $5 of usage  ÷ $3.40 per 1,000 results ≈ 1,470 results a month
Starter plan: $19 of usage ÷ $3.40 per 1,000 results ≈ 5,588 results a month

On Starter, the Bronze discount would raise that second number. The Actor page only shows the discounted price after you sign in.

What X (Twitter) scraping costs on Apify

For X, a widely used Actor is Tweet Scraper V2 by API Dojo. Its Store page, checked October 17, 2026, listed:

• Pricing: pay per event, "from $0.40 / 1,000 tweets", with platform usage not charged separately
• Minimum: "Each query must return at least 50 tweets"
• Free plan limits: up to 5 runs a month, each capped at 10 items, demo mode only, and no API access
• Users: 107,115 total and 9,407 monthly, with a rating of 3.86 out of 5

You can't call the Actor from code on the Free plan, so it's good for a demo and nothing you'd build on. On Starter:

Starter plan: $19 of usage ÷ $0.40 per 1,000 tweets = 47,500 tweets a month

If you run many narrow searches, watch the 50-tweet minimum per query. A query that would return 5 tweets still gets billed as 50.

X's own API is now pay-per-use too. X's pricing page, checked October 17, 2026, lists post reads at $0.005 each, or $5.00 per 1,000 posts.

Apify pricing next to a per-call API

ChatterAPI prices differently. Each call costs a fixed number of credits and returns a page of results:

• Reddit search costs 2 credits for a page of up to 25 posts.
• X tweet search costs 3 credits for a page of about 20 tweets.
• Plans are Starter at $19 a month for 25,000 credits, Growth at $49 for 70,000, and Scale at $149 for 240,000 (pricing, checked October 17, 2026).

The arithmetic for 1,000 items, assuming full pages:

Reddit, 1,000 posts:  1,000 ÷ 25 = 40 pages × 2 credits = 80 credits
  at Starter ($19 / 25,000 = $0.00076 per credit):  80 × $0.00076  ≈ $0.061
  at Scale   ($149 / 240,000 ≈ $0.00062 per credit): 80 × $0.00062  ≈ $0.050

X, 1,000 tweets:      1,000 ÷ 20 = 50 pages × 3 credits = 150 credits
  at Starter: 150 × $0.00076 ≈ $0.114
  at Scale:   150 × $0.00062 ≈ $0.093

The table comes with caveats, and for some jobs they change the answer:

• Pages are not always full. A narrow search can return 3 posts and still cost 2 credits, so per-item cost goes up when your queries are specific.
• The fields differ between an Apify result and a ChatterAPI search row. Comments, for example, come from a separate ChatterAPI call: a thread export is 3 credits per page of about 100 comments.
• Both have a monthly floor. ChatterAPI's plans start at $19 and unused monthly credits expire at renewal, the same as Apify's prepaid usage. If you need 2,000 tweets once, Apify's Free plan or ChatterAPI's 100 signup credits may be enough.
• Apify covers far more sites. If Reddit and X are two of twenty sources, one Apify account may be simpler than a separate API per site.

A real Reddit search call for comparison

Here is a ChatterAPI Reddit search for comparing the outputs. The response is a recorded sample from a test key (captured October 7, 2026), trimmed to one of its 25 posts:

curl "https://api.chatterapi.com/v1/reddit/search?q=best+crm+for+small+business&time=year" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHATTERAPI_KEY"

{
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "1wdihhj",
      "title": "What CRM should a small business use?",
      "author": "NotedWhisky",
      "subreddit": "CRM",
      "score": 51,
      "numComments": 186,
      "createdAt": "2026-09-11T14:52:16.000Z",
      "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/CRM/comments/1wdihhj/what_crm_should_a_small_business_use/"
    }
  ],
  "page": { "nextCursor": "AX-vad045wfn…", "hasMore": true }
}

The call returns right away, with no run to start and no dataset to fetch afterwards. On a live key it costs 2 credits, and the credits block in the response shows the charge. On Apify, the same search means starting an Actor run, waiting for it to finish, then reading the results from the run's dataset. That suits scheduled batch jobs and is a worse fit for request-response code.

When Apify's pricing is the better fit

Apify still makes sense for some Reddit and X work. One marketer on r/InstagramMarketing put it plainly in 2024: "With apify you can scrape anything (not the cheapest method for sure), but they take care of all the scraper accounts for you, so you do not need to buy proxies and scrapers" (u/bouc).

The pricing page says the same thing. You pay for breadth and convenience: thousands of Actors, scheduling, datasets in many formats, and no infrastructure to run. If you scrape many sites, need CSV or Excel exports on a schedule, or want to write and host your own Actors, the plan fee covers a lot.

The per-item gap starts to hurt when Reddit or X is the core of your product and your code calls it often, a few items at a time. Our Apify alternative page compares the two feature by feature, and there are separate pages for Apify's Reddit scrapers and Apify's Twitter scrapers.

Price your own workload

Take your real monthly volume, divide it by results per call, and multiply by each side's price. Then run real calls before you commit to a plan. Sign up with Google and you get 100 free ChatterAPI credits with no card, which covers 50 Reddit search pages. Every response shows what it cost.