Apify vs RapidAPI Pricing: Platform vs Marketplace (2026)

Two scraping tools list the same number on their pricing page: $0.0015. One of them is ours.

One meant per business returned. The other meant per request, and each request returns up to two hundred businesses. Same sticker price, orders of magnitude apart on the invoice, and that gap is the whole story of apify vs rapidapi.

It is the one thing every article ranking for this comparison manages not to mention.

Apify is a platform billed per scraped place. FlyByAPIs is a fixed-target API billed per request. Both meter at $0.0015, but one request returns up to 200 businesses, so 200,000 Google Maps listings cost about $300 in Apify actor fees versus $19.99 with us. Apify still wins outright on arbitrary targets.

Now the disclosure, because you should have it before the numbers and not buried at the bottom.

We sell the FlyByAPIs suite on RapidAPI, and we pay the 25% marketplace fee on every subscription plus payment processing on top. We have a horse in this race. So every figure below is one you can verify yourself, and we have flagged where the other side genuinely wins.

We have been running scraping infrastructure on that marketplace for three years. This is what we have learned about which model actually costs less, and when it doesn’t.

What these two things actually are

They are different shapes, which is why the search query is slightly wrong.

Apify is a platform that runs your code. It gives you serverless containers called Actors, an SDK, proxy rotation, storage, scheduling, retries, and webhooks. You either build a scraper or rent one from the 59,000-plus Actors in their Store, and Apify executes it on their infrastructure.

RapidAPI is a marketplace that does not run the scrapers. It is a checkout counter, a gateway, and a key vending machine. Independent vendors host their own finished APIs, list them there, and RapidAPI handles discovery, one API key, unified billing, and rate limiting.

Do you see what that means for cost? Those two meters count very differently, and the gap only shows up on the invoice.

One factual note before the math, since it always comes up. Nokia acquired Rapid’s technology and R&D unit in November 2024 and folded it into its Network as Code platform.

TechCrunch reported the peak was roughly 4 million users across 40,000 APIs. Today the companies will only say active users are in the thousands and listed APIs in the hundreds. That is a brutal decline and you should know it.

But when you subscribe you are buying one vendor’s endpoint, not equity in the marketplace. A smaller catalogue affects discovery far more than it affects the API you already depend on.

Apify vs RapidAPI pricing: the billing unit is the whole story

Here is the comparison nobody has published, using Apify’s own flagship. The Compass Google Maps Scraper is their most-used Actor: 555K total users, 35K monthly active, 4.7 stars.

It charges from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, which works out at $0.0015 per business.

The FlyByAPIs Google Maps scraping API on RapidAPI charges $19.99 for 15,000 requests on Pro, which is $0.00133 per request. Go over the plan and the overage rate is exactly $0.0015. The locate_and_search endpoint returns up to 200 results per request .

Read that fourth column before you get excited about the third. At 10,000 listings Apify is the cheaper option, roughly $15 against our $19.99. Our floor is a whole Pro plan, so under-using it saves you nothing.

Our advantage only appears above roughly 15,000 listings, because our meter stops at the plan ceiling and Apify’s keeps running.

Be careful with this table, and we mean that. It compares listing data only.

Reviews, full place details, and contact enrichment are billed as extra events on Apify and as extra endpoint calls on our side. Neither of us gives those away.

Four assumptions sit under those numbers:

• Apify’s column uses the Compass actor’s $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, actor fees alone
• That actor is pay-per-event, so Apify includes compute units and proxy bandwidth in the per-place price. Only the monthly tier is extra, and that is a genuine simplification on their part
• Our column assumes a full 200 results on every call. Two hundred is the ceiling we ask for, not a guaranteed return: a live test returned 184 for a dense query. Sparse queries come back with far fewer and push our real per-listing cost up
• The $1.50 rate is tier-dependent. Apify discounts per-event pricing on higher plans, so treat it as the reference rate and check your own tier before trusting any of this

Per-result billing punishes one specific workload: bulk listing collection, where each call returns many rows. There is the whole finding. Apify’s price is fine for the job it was built for.

What one request actually buys you

Abstract units are easy to argue about, so here is the concrete version. One call to the Google Maps business listings endpoint on RapidAPI , counted once against your quota:

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import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://google-maps-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com/locate_and_search",
    headers={
        "x-rapidapi-key": os.environ["RAPIDAPI_KEY"],
        "x-rapidapi-host": "google-maps-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com",
    },
    params={"query": "dentists in Austin", "country": "us", "limit": 20},
)

places = resp.json()["data"]
print(len(places))   # up to 200 businesses. One billable request.

Twenty businesses, one tick on the meter. To reach 200,000 listings you run about 10,000 of those calls across many query and location combinations, since no single Maps query returns 200,000 rows.

Ten thousand of the 15,000 requests on Pro, with a third left spare for retries and short responses. Nothing dishonest is happening on either side. The unit is just doing all the work.

The meters you don’t see on the pricing page

The actor fee is one line item. On a platform there are usually three running at once.

The Apify platform tiers go Free ($0, $5 credit), Starter ($29), Scale ($199), and Business ($999). Compute is billed in CUs, where 1 CU is 1 GB of RAM running for one hour, from $0.20 down to $0.13 depending on tier.

Proxies are metered on their own. Residential runs $8 to $7 per GB, datacenter IPs cost $1 to $0.60 each past your included allowance, and SERP queries are $2.50 to $1.70 per thousand.

On a marketplace subscription those collapse into one number you already agreed to, plus a bandwidth fee if you pull more than 10 GB in a month. We go deeper on the compute-unit model in our Apify alternatives breakdown , so we will leave it there.

Where Apify genuinely wins

We would be lying by omission if we stopped at price. There are things a platform does that no marketplace listing can, and one of them is the actual dividing line.

Arbitrary crawls, and this is the big one. If you need to crawl a regional business directory, a competitor’s catalogue, or 400 unrelated small sites end to end, with page discovery, schedules, and storage wired together, nobody sells that as a finished pipeline and nobody ever will. A platform plus a crawler is the only sane answer. Fetching single pages from arbitrary sites is a different job, and we will come back to it.

Crawlee. Their open-source SDK for Node and Python is genuinely excellent. It handles anti-blocking and session rotation properly, which is the part you would otherwise spend months rebuilding badly.

Standardization. This is Apify’s strongest argument and it is fair: every Actor takes structured input and emits a dataset in the same shape. Marketplace listings do not have that discipline, and we will come back to it.

Depth on some fields. The Compass Maps actor returns things we do not: live occupancy on top of the popular-times histogram, menus, hotel booking URLs, and email addresses scraped from each business’s own website.

That last one is a real gap. If you need an email pulled off each business’s own site for lead generation, that actor does it in one pass and our Apify alternative for Google Maps data extraction does not.

Orchestration. Scheduling, dataset storage, webhooks, and retries are built in. With a marketplace API, that plumbing is yours to write.

Where the marketplace model wins

The flip side. When your target is a fixed, high-value platform that thousands of other developers also need, somebody has already solved it and amortized the cost across all of them.

Google Search, Google Maps, Amazon, Crunchbase, jobs boards. These are commodity targets. Paying a platform to execute your own scraper against them means paying to re-solve a solved problem, then owning the maintenance forever.

Three things you stop paying for:

That last one matters more than people admit. A predictable $19.99 you can put in a budget beats a variable $40 you have to explain every month.

There is a quieter benefit too. When a target platform changes its markup, a maintained endpoint absorbs it and your pipeline never notices. We watch every endpoint for that kind of drift and ship fixes within hours, because the alternative is thousands of developers waking up to empty arrays.

So that is the trade. You give up the ability to customize extraction logic, and you get somebody else’s pager duty. For a fixed target like Maps that is a deal worth taking, which is why our Google Maps API with flat per-request pricing exists.

It is also why we run all seven of ours the same way. The Google Maps business data API sits alongside a SERP data API for Google Search and an Amazon product data API covering 22 marketplaces with country-pinned IPs.

Same model for the Crunchbase company data API with its 37 endpoints, the jobs search API , and a multi-format translation API . Flat per-request, every one.

The newest one steps outside the fixed-target list, and this is the single-page job we promised to come back to. Our web scraping API takes any URL and returns raw HTML, LLM-ready Markdown, or structured JSON. Same transparent per-request billing, no platform tier on top, and it charges only for what worked: a blocked page costs zero credits, and the response tells you the real HTTP status, which protection blocked it, and why.

To be precise about scope, it fetches pages. It does not crawl sites or schedule jobs, so the platform case above still stands. Plans run from free at 100 requests a month to $14.99 for 100,000 on Pro.

How to vet an API before you subscribe

Now the part where we hand you a stick to hit us with, because the marketplace model has a real weakness and pretending otherwise would be insulting.

Quality varies enormously by vendor. Some listings are abandoned and the docs drift from the live response. Auth, parameter naming, and response shapes differ between any two APIs you subscribe to, which is exactly the inconsistency Apify’s Actor model was built to solve.

You are not buying from the marketplace. You are buying from a stranger who rents a stall in it, so check the stall.

Run those five on any listing, including our own Google Maps API listing on RapidAPI . A vendor who cannot survive that check does not deserve your production traffic.

What leaving costs you

Nobody puts this on a pricing page, and it is the question we would ask if we were buying rather than selling.

Switching costs are not symmetric between these two models, and the direction of the asymmetry surprises people.

The irony is that the model giving you less built-in tooling is the one that is cheaper to walk away from. You wrote the cron and you own the storage. Nothing to repatriate.

So if you are prototyping and genuinely unsure which target you will settle on, starting with a flat endpoint costs less to be wrong about. Swap the URL, keep everything else.

So which model wins?

Neither, and any article that picks one is selling you something. Including this one, which is why we would rather give you the rule.

Everything above, on one page. On dimension count Apify actually comes out ahead. The two rows we care about are cost and lock-in, and those are the two you should weigh against everything else.

Most teams past a certain size end up running both, and that is the correct answer. They buy the commodity targets as flat endpoints, point an AI scraper at the one-off pages, and keep a platform for the multi-site crawls nobody covers.

The part worth reconsidering is paying per-result prices, at volume, to fetch Google Maps listings that are already sold as a finished Maps data API on RapidAPI for a flat fee.

Below about 15,000 listings, do not bother: Apify is cheaper and the switch is not worth an afternoon. Above 50,000 it pays for itself.

Whichever way you land, run the arithmetic on your own row counts before you commit. Take our numbers, take Apify’s, and multiply by the volume you actually need. That is a ten minute exercise that has saved people we know a few hundred dollars a month.

Oriol.

P.S. If you run those five vetting checks on our Google Maps scraper listing on the RapidAPI marketplace and something fails, tell us. We would genuinely rather hear it from you than watch you quietly churn.