Is Apify free?

Yes, Apify offers a free tier that lets you develop actors, run scraping jobs, and explore the platform without paying anything. The free plan includes $5 of monthly platform credits, 10 GB of data transfer, and full access to the Apify Store, API, CLI, and all core platform features. Here is what you can realistically do with the free tier. The $5 of monthly credits is enough to develop and test actors locally using the Apify CLI, run small to medium scraping jobs (a few thousand pages per month depending on complexity), experiment with different actor templates and frameworks (Cheerio, Playwright, Puppeteer), publish actors to the Apify Store, and access datasets and key-value stores for data management. You also get access to the full Apify API, which means ApifyForge works perfectly with a free account. There are some limitations to be aware of. The free tier does not include residential proxies, which are essential for scraping websites with strong anti-bot protection like Amazon, LinkedIn, Google, and most social media platforms. If your actors target these sites, you will need a paid plan for proxy access. Data retention on the free tier is 7 days, meaning your datasets and run logs are automatically deleted after a week. Concurrency is also limited, so you cannot run many actors simultaneously. For many developers, the free tier serves as a development and testing environment. You build and debug your actors on the free plan, then upgrade when you are ready to publish and scale. The Personal plan at $49 per month includes $49 of credits, 30-day data retention, residential proxy access, and higher concurrency limits — which is what most independent developers use for production. One important note for actor developers: once you start publishing actors with Pay Per Event pricing, users who run your actors generate PPE revenue for you. This means the platform can become self-funding as your actor portfolio grows. Visit apifyforge.com/glossary/ppe for a detailed explanation of how PPE revenue works. For a full comparison of all pricing tiers, see the related question about how much Apify costs.