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

Apify is a platform for running scrapers. Its Store has a ready-made scraper (Apify calls them Actors) for almost any website, you can run them on a schedule and keep the results, and you can write your own when nothing fits. It's a good product. About a hundred of the data sources behind AnyAPI run on Apify Actors, so this comparison comes from paying Apify's bill every month, not from reading its pricing page once.

The thing is, Apify is built for people who run scrapers, and a lot of the people who end up there don't want to run anything. They want a list of TikTok videos or a YouTube transcript back as JSON so they can get on with their actual project. For that job, the plan, the usage fees, and the per-scraper setup are all overhead.

Here's where Apify is the right call, where paying per request wins, and what the bill looks like either way.

Where Apify is strong

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

• There's a scraper for almost anything. The Apify Store lists over 68,000 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 genuinely custom, that control matters.
• It keeps improving. Apify now takes x402 payments, so an AI agent can run an Actor 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 post is for the other case: you just want the data.

Where AnyAPI wins

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.

No monthly plan, and no credit that expires

Apify's pricing has three parts: a monthly plan, usage fees for the computing time and proxies a scraper burns through, and the scraper's own fee, usually a price per 1,000 results.

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 own pricing page says unused credit doesn't roll over.

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

The advertised price is the top-plan price

Every Actor in the Store shows a "from $X per 1,000 results" price. That "from" is the rate on Apify's most expensive plan. On the free and Starter plans, the same Actor costs more, and the difference isn't small. One popular Instagram profile scraper was $2.60 per 1,000 on the free plan and $1.60 on the top plan.

For the most common jobs, paying per request comes out well ahead. A YouTube transcript is $1.25 per 1,000 on AnyAPI. The two most-used transcript Actors on the Store charge $5 and $7 per 1,000 results, and the usage fees come on top of that.

That gap shows up across most list-shaped data: TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, X, and Google News all come out several times cheaper per item than the big Actors. It isn't universal. A TikTok profile lookup costs about the same either way, and a page of Google results is cheaper on Apify. It depends on what you're pulling.

You only pay when it works

On Apify, you pay for the computing time a scraper uses whether or not it comes back with data. A run that gets blocked, times out, or hits its spending limit still counts against your usage. Across a hundred Actors that's a steady trickle of charges for runs that returned nothing, and it's the part of the bill that's hardest to predict.

With a pay-per-request API you're charged only for calls that return data. A blocked or failed call is $0. And if the first provider behind an endpoint fails, AnyAPI tries another one for the same data before it gives up, without you changing anything.

One integration across every source

The cost that never shows up 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 fails twice in 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 it's one key, one request format, one bill in dollars, and the same response shape for every source. When a provider behind an endpoint has a bad day, another one picks up.

One call, any source

Here's the call, and what it cost: 61 timed transcript segments for $0.00125, on September 5, 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()["data"]["segments"]))
# 0.00125 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, data } = await r.json();
console.log(costUsd, data.segments.length); // 0.00125 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 tradeoffs

Just want the data? Pay per request. You're tired of paying for a plan in months you barely use it, the usage bill is hard to predict, or you're maintaining a different parser for every Actor. 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, and AnyAPI is one of them: the Store is still the first place to look when a new source comes up.

Two limits on AnyAPI's side. It covers 363 endpoints, not 68,000, so if your source is obscure the Actor may be the only option. And list endpoints are priced per page, so for a source where you want one item at a time, Apify's per-result price can come out close.

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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