ScrapeField vs Apify
Apify is a platform with about six thousand scrapers. We are eighteen endpoints over four surfaces, each with a documented schema and a price you can multiply. Here is the honest comparison, including where they win.
| ScrapeField | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| Billed in | Credits, published per endpoint | Compute units — 1 CU = 1 GB of RAM for 1 hour |
| Can you forecast a bill? | Yes. Multiply the table by your volume | On a pay-per-event actor yes; on a pay-per-usage one it depends on memory and runtime you do not control |
| One price for a given job | One. Published per endpoint | Seven LinkedIn profile actors, $1.50 to $12.00 per 1,000 — the price is whichever listing you clicked |
| Entry price | 2,000 credits free, then $39 once — no subscription | $0 free ($5 usage), then $19/mo |
| Unused credits | Never expire — there is no cycle | Expire at the end of the cycle |
| Schema | One per platform, documented field by field, named the way the platform names it | Each actor’s author decides. Two Maps actors, two shapes |
| Who maintains the scraper | Us. It is our name on the status page | A third-party author. An abandoned actor is your outage |
| Failed calls | Refunded automatically, into your ledger | You pay for the compute either way |
| Cache hits | Charged, like any call | Charged |
| Published success rate per endpoint | Yes | No |
| Sites covered | 4 | ~6,000 actors |
| Time to first result | One GET, no account needed to try | Configure a run, poll it, read the dataset |
Checked 20 September 2026 against each vendor’s own pricing page. Rechecked quarterly — tell us if something here is out of date and we will fix it.
Questions
What is a compute unit, really?
One CU is one gigabyte of RAM running for one hour, charged at $0.20 falling to $0.13 on the largest plan. It is a fair way to bill a platform and a hard way to budget, because the memory footprint and the runtime belong to whoever wrote the actor.
The practical test: try to answer “what will 100,000 Google Maps places cost me?” before you run it. On our side that is 100,000 × 3 credits, which is $196 on Starter and $120 on Scale.
Is Apify more expensive?
Sometimes cheaper, sometimes much more, and you find out afterwards. That is the actual complaint — not the level of the price but that it is not knowable in advance. If your volume is small and steady, their $19 plan may well cost you less than buying credits from us.
Should I move everything?
No. Move the four surfaces if their schemas are costing you code, and keep Apify for the long tail. Plenty of teams should run both, and we would rather tell you that than lose your trust in month three.
Try it before you decide
Every endpoint has a playground that runs against the live API with no key and no account — real routing, real validation, real errors. If the response shape does not fit your code, you will know in about a minute.