Apify Free Plan Limits: What $5 a Month Actually Buys

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Short answer. Apify's free plan gives you $5 of platform usage a month, no credit card, and when the $5 is spent your account is blocked until the next monthly cycle. There is no overage on the free plan and unused credit does not roll over. How far $5 goes depends almost entirely on which Actor you run, because several of the Actors we checked charge free accounts a higher price for some events. On Apify's own Google Maps Scraper, $5 buys about 1,250 places, but only about 47 places with an enriched lead, because the lead event costs $0.10 on the free tier and $0.005 on Starter, a 20x gap. Scrape plain data on the free plan. Pay for Starter only when you need enrichment or AI-answer events at volume.

Every price below was read on Apify's own pricing page, its documentation and its public Actor API on 24 September 2026. Actor prices change often, so treat the per-result numbers as a snapshot and check the Actor's pricing tab before a big run.

What the Apify free plan includes

Apify's pricing reference lists the free plan as:

• $5 of prepaid usage every month, spendable on Store Actors or your own Actors.
• Compute at $0.20 per compute unit (one CU is 1 GB of memory running for one hour), the same rate as Starter.
• 16 GB of memory across everything running at once.
• 5 datacenter proxy IPs, with residential proxy at $8 per GB and SERP proxy at $2.50 per 1,000 searches, both paid from the $5. Apify notes the free plan's proxy works only inside the platform, not from your own scripts.
• No Apify Store discount and community support.
• Rented Actors on a trial only, which matters less from 1 October 2026, when Apify retires the rental model entirely.

One number does not agree with itself. The pricing page says the free plan allows 5 concurrent runs. Apify's limits documentation lists 25 for the same plan. We could not tell which one the platform enforces, so plan on 5 until your own account shows otherwise.

What happens when the $5 runs out

On the free plan, the answer is simple and, for a tester, reassuring. Apify's FAQ says your access "will be blocked until the beginning of the next monthly cycle." A free account cannot run up a bill. Once the $5 is spent, access is blocked until the month resets. Apify's pages do not say exactly what happens to a run that is mid-flight at that moment, so do not start a big job on your last dollar.

Two rules make the $5 smaller than it looks:

• It expires monthly. Unused credit is not rolled over. A quiet month is $5 lost, not banked.
• Reading data later still costs. Apify counts reading from or writing to a dataset after the run finishes as platform usage. Dataset storage is cheap at $1.00 per 1,000 GB-hours, but exports and API reads draw from the same $5.

Paid plans behave differently, and this is the part to know before you upgrade. On Starter the $19 is a floor, not a cap. Usage past $19 continues as overage until it reaches the usage limit set in your billing settings, and Apify's billing docs say overage is invoiced immediately once it reaches $20 on Starter ($200 on higher plans) rather than waiting for the next invoice. Set that limit on the day you upgrade.

The free plan pays the highest price per result

Many Store Actors, including the three most relevant to lead generation below, are priced per event, and the Actor's developer sets a separate price for each plan tier: FREE, BRONZE (Starter), SILVER (Scale) and GOLD (Business). Apify's docs say these discounts are optional and set by each Actor's owner, so the gap varies wildly. From the pricing records in Apify's public Actor API, free tier against Starter:

• Google Maps Scraper, per place: $0.004 against $0.003. 33% more on free.
• Instagram Scraper, per result: $0.0027 against $0.0023. 17% more.
• Google Search Scraper, per results page: $0.0045 against $0.0025. 80% more.
• Google Maps Scraper, per enriched lead: $0.10 against $0.005. 20x.
• Google Maps Scraper, per verified lead email: $0.10 against $0.004. 25x.
• Google Search Scraper, per ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or AI Mode answer: $0.20 against $0.005. 40x.

Not everything is marked up. On the same Maps Scraper, contact details ($0.002) and reviews ($0.0005 each) cost the same on free and Starter, the competitor-analysis event is only 25% dearer, and Perplexity answers on the Search Scraper are 15x rather than 40x. The large gaps sit on lead enrichment, email verification, social profiles and most AI-answer events. A third-party Maps scraper we checked also prices lead enrichment at $0.10 on free. One more trap: the Maps Scraper's "from $1.50 per 1,000 places" headline is the Business (Gold) price. Free pays $4, Starter $3 and Scale $2. So the free plan is a fair way to test raw scraping and a poor way to buy enriched leads.

What $5 buys on five real Actors

Here is the arithmetic, run on the published free-tier prices, not on estimates:

• Google Maps Scraper, places only: $5 divided by $0.004 is about 1,250 places. Add contact details ($0.002 each) and it falls to about 833. Apify's page says this Actor does not charge platform usage on top of its events, so these are the whole cost.
• Google Maps Scraper with one enriched lead per place: $0.004 plus $0.002 plus $0.10 is $0.106 a place, so about 47 places. On Starter the same bundle is $0.010, and $19 covers about 1,900.
• Google Search Scraper: about 1,110 results pages in one run ($0.001 start fee plus $0.0045 a page), or at most about 25 ChatGPT answers at $0.20 each (fewer if a results-page event is charged alongside). Starter's $19 covers about 3,800 of those answers.
• Instagram Scraper: about 1,850 results, against about 8,260 for Starter's $19.
• A pay-per-usage Actor such as Website Content Crawler: $5 is 25 compute units, for example a 4 GB run for about six hours, plus any proxy traffic. Page yield depends on the site, so test on a small crawl first.

The cheapest leads on the free plan came from a third-party lead database Actor (Leads Finder) that charges $0.002 per lead on both the free and Starter tiers, plus $0.02 per run: about 2,490 leads for $5. Not every developer marks the free tier up, which is why checking the Actor's pricing tab beats trusting any single "cost per 1,000" headline, including ours on the Google Maps scrapers roundup.

Open a free Apify account (no card needed) and run the exact Actor you plan to use on 50 to 100 records. The Console shows what the run cost, which is the only number that matters.

How long the free plan keeps your data

Apify's storage docs say the free plan keeps your 10 most recent runs for 4 months. Default storages are unnamed, and unnamed storages beyond those 10 runs are deleted when the retention period expires. Named storages are kept indefinitely on every plan. If you run a scheduled scrape on the free plan, name the dataset or export it after each run, or older results will disappear without warning.

When the free plan is enough

• Testing. $5 a month is enough to run any Actor on a real sample and read the actual cost.
• Small, plain-data jobs. Up to about 1,250 Maps places or 1,850 Instagram results a month, the free plan's per-result markup is 17 to 33%, and you pay nothing.
• Actors with no free-tier markup. Some developers charge the same on free and Starter. Check the pricing tab.

Be honest with yourself about the ceiling, though. For places alone, Starter's discount is $1 per 1,000, so the reason to upgrade is volume, not price.

When Starter pays for itself

Starter is $19 a month, or $17 a month billed annually, and the whole $19 is usage you can spend. It earns its fee in three cases:

• You need enrichment. The free plan tops out at 50 lead events a month on Apify's Maps Scraper (about 47 once each place is paid for), and each one costs 20x the Starter price.
• You scrape AI answers. Tracking how ChatGPT or Gemini answers a query costs $0.20 per answer on free and $0.005 on Starter.
• Your data is part of a workflow. A blocked account mid-month breaks anything downstream. Paid overage keeps it running, within the limit you set.

The costs that do not go away: credit still expires monthly, overage is billed at the $20 mark, and the step after Starter is $199 for Scale. For the full plan-by-plan picture, see our Apify review, and for what failed requests and retries do to a scraping bill, see what a lead scraper really costs.

If the list is for outreach to local businesses, say HVAC or plumbing firms pulled from Maps, the list is the cheap part. What converts it is the follow-up, which is why we pair Maps lists with AI calling for home services or a managed lead generation build.

Verdict

The Apify free plan is a real free plan: $5 a month, no card, no surprise bill, and a hard stop when the money runs out. It is generous for plain scraping and expensive for enrichment, because on the Actors we checked, developers price several premium events for free accounts at 12.5 to 40 times the Starter rate. Start free, measure one run, and move to Starter only when your monthly volume or your need for enriched leads passes the free ceiling. Start with the free plan on Apify and let the usage chart make the decision.