September 18, 2026. If you sell a web scraper on Apify Store under the rental model, you have thirteen days. On 1 October 2026 rental Actors are retired, and Apify's own documentation says every Actor that has not been migrated by its developer is moved to pay per usage. That is the cheapest possible outcome for your users and, read against Apify's own definition of the model, the worst one for you.
What Apify published
The notice sits at the top of Apify's rental pricing model documentation, headed RENTAL MODEL SUNSET, with two dates for 2026.
- 1 April, already passed. You can no longer publish new rental Actors or change pricing on existing ones. Anything still on rental has been frozen at its current price for almost six months.
- 1 October. "Rental Actors are fully retired. All remaining Actors are migrated to pay-per-usage pricing."
Apify points developers to a migration guide, a #project-rentals Discord channel, and a rental to pay per event calculator published as an Actor.
The default migration is the trap
Apify's monetisation page defines the two surviving models in one line each. Pay per event means "Users pay for specific events that are programmatically triggered from the Actor's source code". Pay per usage means "Users can run the Actor without any additional charges beyond the platform usage costs generated by the Actor".
Read the second one again. Beyond platform usage costs, which Apify bills, there is no charge, and no developer markup is defined for that model. On pay per event, Apify's pricing page states the split plainly: "You receive 80% of this revenue", with platform costs deducted and free plan users excluded.
So the automatic path on 1 October is not a neutral conversion. It turns a paid product into a free one and leaves your users paying Apify directly for compute.
Pay per event is also the agent gate
There is a second consequence that the sunset notice does not mention, and it is the reason this deadline matters more than a billing change normally would.
Apify now supports agentic payments, where an AI agent can "discover, run, and pay for your Actor without an Apify account", using protocols such as x402 and Skyfire. The eligibility rules are on the same monetisation page, and the first one is blunt: "Use the pay-per-event pricing model. Rental and pay-per-usage Actors are not supported."
Two of the other conditions are easy to fail by accident. The Actor must charge only for events, so the combined pay per event plus usage option disqualifies it, and it must run with limited rather than full permissions. It must also avoid Standby mode, and the developer must have completed identity verification. Apify exposes eligible Actors to agentic buyers automatically, with no separate opt in.
Put the two facts together. Doing nothing by 1 October moves you to the one surviving model that is explicitly excluded from the buyer segment growing fastest on that marketplace.
What it means for operators
If you publish scrapers or automations on Apify, this is a calendar item, not a reading item. Export the last ninety days of usage for each rental Actor, run it through the calculator, and price your events slightly above break even rather than trying to reproduce the old monthly rent exactly. Rental revenue was predictable and event revenue is not, so the first month after migration is a measurement exercise.
If you buy Actors rather than build them, watch for the opposite effect. A tool you rent monthly today may become free at platform cost on 1 October, or reappear at a per event price that is higher or lower than your current bill depending on how heavily you use it.
The wider lesson goes beyond Apify. Marketplace billing is being rewritten around machine buyers, and the rewrite keeps arriving as a deprecation notice rather than a launch. Anyone selling through a storefront they do not own, including agencies running apps in the Shopify App Store, should read the pricing docs on a schedule. Our AI automation builds now treat the billing model as part of the architecture, because it decides who is allowed to buy the thing.
Frequently Asked Questions
1 October 2026. Apify's documentation states that on that date rental Actors are fully retired and all remaining Actors are migrated to pay per usage pricing. A first milestone already passed on 1 April 2026, after which no new rental Actors could be published and existing rental prices could not be changed.
Your Actor is moved to pay per usage. Apify defines that model as users running the Actor with no charge beyond the platform usage costs the run generates, and no developer markup is defined for it. The migration guidance and independent write ups both treat an unmigrated Actor as producing no revenue for its author.
Apify's pricing and costs page gives the formula as profit equals 0.8 times revenue minus platform costs, and states that you receive 80% of revenue charged through the pay per event API. Revenue and cost generated by users on the free plan are excluded from the calculation.
Apify's agentic payments let an AI agent discover, run and pay for an Actor without an Apify account, using protocols such as x402 and Skyfire. Eligibility requires the pay per event model, and Apify states that rental and pay per usage Actors are not supported. The Actor must also charge only for events, run with limited permissions, avoid Standby mode, and belong to a developer who has completed identity verification.