Best Apify alternative for scraping many APIs

I reached for an Apify Actor once to pull a list that should have taken ten minutes. Instead I spent the afternoon reading its input fields, staring at the run log, and working out why my compute units drained faster than the per-result price suggested.

The data came back fine. Everything around getting it felt like a second job.

Apify is a good platform if you actually want to run scrapers. But if you opened an Actor just to grab a list of followers, a product's reviews, or a video transcript, you didn't want a platform to run. You want the data, then back to building. That's where the plan fees and the compute math start to wear on you.

The split is simple. Apify is the better tool when you want to run and control the crawl. When you just want the data out, calling an API wins. Here's the long version of both.

Where Apify is strong

Apify earns it when scraping is part of what you're building, not a one-off you want to be done with.

• The Store has a ready-made scraper for almost anything. The Apify Store has thousands of maintained Actors covering a long tail of sites. If you need some obscure source pulled and someone has already built an Actor that keeps working, that breadth is hard to match.
• You can run it on a schedule and keep the results. Scheduled runs, datasets, queues, webhooks, monitoring. If scraping is a standing job you run every day, those are things you'd otherwise have to build yourself.
• You can change how the scraper works. If an Actor is close but not quite right, you can fork it or write your own with Crawlee and a headless browser. When the crawl is genuinely custom, that control is worth a lot.

If that's you, stay on Apify. The rest of this is for the case this post is about: you just want the data back.

Where AnyAPI wins

If you're not running a scraping operation, all of that is setup and upkeep you don't need. Here's what changes when you just call an API.

No monthly floor

Apify's pricing adds up a few things that each move on their own: a monthly plan, usage measured in compute units ($0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business), per-result fees on some Actors, and residential proxies billed by the gigabyte. None of them is unreasonable alone. Together they're hard to predict, because how much compute a run eats depends on the site, the Actor's code, and how many times it retries.

And there's a floor under all of it. The plan is prepaid and resets every month, so a slow month doesn't cost you less. Starter is $29/mo, Scale $199/mo, Business $999/mo, and the credit you don't use just expires.

Paying per request works the other way. No plan, so a quiet month is $0, and a busy one is just the calls you made at a price you knew up front. The pricing page has the exact per-call rates, but the short version is you pay for the calls that worked and nothing else.

One integration across every source

The cost that never shows up on the bill is wiring it all together. Every Apify Actor has its own inputs and its own output shape, set by whoever built it. Pull from six different Actors and that's six integrations you wrote and six parsers you own when any of them changes.

Call AnyAPI and it's one integration: one key, one request pattern, one billing model, and a response that's normalized across the providers behind each source. If the provider serving a source goes down, AnyAPI can fall back to another one for the same data without changing your code. With Actors, a broken Actor is yours to debug or replace.

You only pay when it works

When you call an API like this, you're charged for the calls that succeed. A blocked or failed request costs you nothing, and the automatic switch above usually means you get the data instead of an error to retry. On Apify, a run that burns compute and comes back empty still ate into your usage.

One call, any source

Here's what it looks like. You POST to one URL with the source you want and your key. The data comes back in the standard shape, at a price you already knew.

curl https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123"}'

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['ANYAPI_KEY']}"},
    json={"url": "https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123"},
)
print(r.json())

const r = await fetch("https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/tiktok.video_transcript", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ANYAPI_KEY}` },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://www.tiktok.com/@user/video/123" }),
});
console.log(await r.json());

The same call works for anything in the catalog. To switch sources you change the source and the input, and that's it: same auth, same parsing, same billing. Nothing to rent first.

Apify vs paying per request, at a glance

Who should switch

Just want the data? Call an API and pay per request. You're tired of paying for a plan in months you barely scrape, the compute-unit bill is hard to call ahead of time, or you're maintaining a different parser for every source. You want one key, one bill in dollars, and a call that returns data without renting anything first.

Building or running the scrapers yourself? Stay on Apify. You need a niche Store Actor, a custom crawl, scheduled jobs, or your own code. Plenty of people run both: Apify for the custom crawls, an API for the common sources they just want pulled.

If you're wiring this up for an AI agent, paying per call is also what lets an agent buy data with no account. If it's a marketplace of per-API subscriptions you're weighing instead of a platform, I ran the same comparison for the best RapidAPI alternative. And if you're really choosing between two proxy APIs rather than Apify, I put those head to head in ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI.

Want one key, US dollar pricing, and no monthly plan to keep funded across hundreds of data APIs? Browse the catalog or see how pricing works.