Best Apify alternative for multi-source API scraping (2026)

You needed a list of TikTok videos or a YouTube transcript as JSON, and somehow you're now comparing Apify plans and wondering which per-result price is yours. Every site you add means another scraper to set up, with its own inputs and its own output.

I read every Apify plan's per-result prices for seven common jobs on October 1, 2026, ran three paid TikTok list calls to see what a page of videos really costs per request, and timed 30 more calls across six of the jobs.

Apify calls each ready-made scraper an Actor: one takes a TikTok username and returns the profile, another takes a YouTube link and returns the transcript. If you build and run Actors yourself, Apify is good at that. If you just want the data back, the plan, the per-plan pricing, and a separate integration for each Actor are overhead you can skip.

Where is Apify strong?

If scraping is part of what you're building, not a chore you want done with, Apify earns its place.

• There's a scraper for almost anything. The Apify Store lists 78,664 Actors. If you need an obscure site pulled and someone has already built a working scraper for it, nothing else comes close.
• You can run it on a schedule and keep the results. Scheduled runs, stored datasets, webhooks, monitoring. If scraping is a job you run every day, those are things you'd otherwise have to build.
• You can change how the scraper works. If an Actor is close but not quite right, you fork it or write your own with Crawlee and a headless browser. When the crawl is custom, that control matters.
• Agents can pay for it. Apify takes x402 payments on more than 20,000 Actors, so an AI agent can run one and pay per run, and its MCP server plugs the Store into Claude and ChatGPT.

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

Where does paying per request win?

If you're not running a scraping operation, most of that platform is setup and upkeep you don't need. Here's what changes when you call one API instead.

What do you pay in a month you scrape nothing?

Your Apify bill has two parts on its pricing page: a monthly plan, and each Actor's own price, usually per 1,000 results. A few Actors, including Apify's own general crawlers, bill the computing time and proxies they use instead.

Apify's entry price: a free plan with $5 of usage a month (at the highest per-result rate); paid plans start at $19 a month (prepaid, and it expires).

The plan is the part that stings in a quiet month. Starter is $19, Scale is $199, Business is $999, and the plan price is also your prepaid usage.

Don't use it and you've lost it. Apify's pricing page says unused credit expires at the end of the billing cycle.

Paying per request has no plan. A month with no calls is $0, and a busy month is the calls you made at the price shown on each endpoint page. Each response tells you what that call cost.

Which Apify plan does the Store price assume?

You'll see a "from $X per 1,000 results" price on every Actor in the Store. On an Actor whose price depends on your plan, that "from" is the rate on Apify's Business plan, the $999 one.

On Free, Starter, and Scale, you pay more for the same Actor.

Here's what seven common jobs cost on each Apify plan, next to AnyAPI's price for the same data. The Apify side is a read of each Actor's published prices on October 1, 2026, not a run. It covers only the plans you can sign up for yourself on Apify's pricing page:

On every plan in the table, paying per request is cheaper on all seven.

The two searches are priced per search, because one AnyAPI request returns the whole page of results while the Actors charge for each post or place.

On top of its per-post price, Reddit Scraper Lite charges $0.04 each time a run starts at its default memory.

Lists are a different story, because one AnyAPI request returns a whole page. Three tiktok.profile_videos calls on October 1, 2026 returned 21, 20, and 19 videos, and each was charged $0.0007, so 60 videos cost $0.0021. The TikTok Scraper charges per video, $1.70 per 1,000 on Business, its cheapest plan you can sign up for.

If transcripts are your job, the gap is wide too. A YouTube transcript is $0.90 per 1,000 on AnyAPI.

The most-used transcript Actor in the Store moved to a flat $10 per 1,000 on October 1, 2026, and the second most-used charges $5 on every plan.

How fast do these jobs come back?

A price only matters if the call returns something. I ran five calls of six of these jobs on AnyAPI on October 1, 2026, one after another, on popular public inputs: big TikTok and Instagram accounts, five Amazon listings, five well-known YouTube videos, five everyday Reddit searches, and five Google Maps searches in five US cities.

All 30 calls cost $0.0264 together. Profiles came back in about two seconds at the median, and searches and products in three to four.

Transcripts are the slow job: the 19.8-second call was a 14-minute talk, so if you're pulling long videos, don't set a short timeout. The Amazon miss was one of the five product IDs coming back "not found", and it cost nothing.

What happens when a scrape fails?

If you're on a per-result Actor, which is most of the Store now, a run that comes back empty costs you little or nothing. The author pays the computing time.

Actors billed by usage are different. A run that gets blocked, times out, or hits its spending limit still uses computing time, and you pay for it.

With AnyAPI, if the first source for an endpoint fails, AnyAPI tries another one for the same data before it gives up, without you changing anything. A call that fails costs nothing, except on a few endpoints where the source charges for certain failures; there you pay that charge at cost.

An answer is billed at the listed price of the source that gave it, and a "not found" can be billed too. If the first source says "not found" and a second one is asked, you can be billed for both, but never more in total than the top price on the endpoint's page.

How many integrations do you maintain?

The cost you never see on the bill is wiring it all together. Every Actor is built by someone different, so each one has its own inputs and its own output format.

Use six Actors and you've written six integrations, and you own all six the day any author changes something.

There's upkeep on top of that. Apify tests every Store Actor daily, and one that doesn't pass at least twice in the last three days gets marked "under maintenance". When that happens to the one you depend on, you're the one finding a replacement and rewriting your parser.

With AnyAPI you get one key, one request format, one bill in dollars, and the same response shape for every source. When one source for an endpoint has a bad day, another one picks up.

What does one call look like?

Here's the call, and what it cost: 61 timed transcript segments for $0.0009, on September 27, 2026.

curl https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/youtube.video_transcript \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"}'

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/youtube.video_transcript",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['ANYAPI_KEY']}"},
    json={"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ"},
)
print(r.json()["costUsd"], len(r.json()["output"]["data"]["segments"]))
# 0.0009 61

const r = await fetch("https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/youtube.video_transcript", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ANYAPI_KEY}` },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ" }),
});
const { costUsd, output } = await r.json();
console.log(costUsd, output.data.segments.length); // 0.0009 61

The same call works for anything in the catalog. To switch sources, you change the endpoint name and the input. Same key, same parsing, same wallet, nothing to rent first.

Apify vs paying per request, at a glance

Limitations and what you give up

Just want the data? Pay per request. If you're paying for a plan in months you barely use it, can't tell which per-result price applies to you, or keep a different parser for every Actor, that's the switch. You get 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. If you need a niche Store Actor, a custom crawl, scheduled jobs, or your own code, Apify is built for that and AnyAPI isn't. Plenty of people run both.

And if your usage fits inside Apify's free plan and its $5 a month, you don't need to switch at all.

One limit on AnyAPI's side: 409 endpoints, not 78,664, so if your source is obscure, the Actor may be your only option.

If you're wiring this up for an AI agent, paying per call is what lets an agent buy data with no account. If it's a marketplace of per-API subscriptions you're weighing, see the best RapidAPI alternative, and for enterprise proxy infrastructure there's the best Bright Data alternative. For the whole field priced on one job, see 7 Apify alternatives on real per-request cost.

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