Apify without actor rental: how much does parsing cost now

Today, September 30, 2026, is the last day of the rental model for Apify. Starting October 1, actors with a fixed monthly subscription will disappear from the Store as a class: everything that developers have managed to convert will operate on a pay-per-event basis (payment per event — launch, result, file), while everything that has not been converted will automatically become pay-per-usage. For those collecting data through ready-made actors, this changes the entire economy: it alters what you pay for, who pays for proxies, and where you now face real overcharges.

Let's break down what exactly has changed, how to recalculate your scraping budget, and in which cases your own proxies significantly reduce costs, and in which cases they provide no benefit at all.

What Happened: Timeline of the Transition from Rental

Apify announced its shift to unified pricing on April 14, 2026. At that time, the company’s blog reported that around 2000 actors had already transitioned to pay-per-event, with the remaining rental actors expected to make the switch within six months. Key dates include:

April 1, 2026 — New rental actors cannot be published, and existing prices cannot be changed;
August 25, 2026 — Apify published a migration guide for developers with a strict deadline;
September 30, 2026 — Last day to convert an actor to the new model;
October 1, 2026 — Rental is completely phased out; any unconverted actor becomes pay-per-usage, and its author will no longer earn a cent from it.

There are two official reasons. The first is a survey: according to Apify, 73% of customers preferred payment per event over fixed rental. The second is AI agents. In Apify's April post, it explicitly states that an agent cannot reasonably manage a dozen subscriptions at $50 a month and needs a "pay-as-you-go" model. The same logic drives the entire market: on September 22, Firecrawl, which sells web data specifically to agents, closed a Series B round at $75 million led by Smash Ventures.

Three Payment Models and Who Pays for Proxies

The main thing users of actors need to understand is that the platform costs — compute units, storage, and proxies — are distributed differently in each model. This affects whether it makes sense to connect your own proxies.

Rental (was until October 1)

A fixed monthly fee for the author plus all platform costs at your expense: computing and proxies were paid separately from the tariff credits. This is why having your own proxy network in rental actors provided direct savings.

Pay-per-event (main model from October 1)

You pay for events defined by the developer: actor start, each result in the dataset, uploaded file. According to Apify's documentation, in most of these actors, platform costs are already included in the event price: the developer receives 80% of the revenue and pays for the infrastructure themselves. There are two "synthetic" events that are included by default:

apify-actor-start — fee for starting, scales with allocated memory (default $0.00005 per event);
apify-default-dataset-item — fee for each entry in the dataset by default.

Important: some PPE actors still pass platform costs onto the user. This is visible on the actor card, so check it before launching, not just by the bill at the end of the month.

Pay-per-usage (applies to all unconverted actors)

There is no markup from the author; you only pay the platform: compute units, storage operations, and resident proxies. It sounds like a gift: a former paid actor has become "free." But there is a catch, which will be discussed below.

Where Overcharges Now Occur: Calculating with Numbers

The current pricing of the Apify platform (according to the page apify.com/pricing):

tariffs: Free — $0, Starter — $19, Scale — $199, Business — $999 per month;
compute unit: $0.20 (Free and Starter), $0.16 (Scale), $0.13 (Business). One CU equals 1 GB of memory for 1 hour of operation;
Apify resident proxies: $8/GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale, $7 on Business;
SERP proxies: from $2.50 to $1.70 per 1000 search result pages;
datacenter IPs: from 5 on Free to 500 on Business, additional ones range from $1 to $0.60 per IP.

Let’s take a typical task: an actor on Playwright collects product cards from a protected website and processes 30 GB of resident traffic in a month. On the Starter plan, just the proxies through Apify will cost 30 × $8 = $240. The same volume from a third-party provider is significantly cheaper: for example, resident proxies from ProxyCove cost $2.70 per GB, which totals about $81. The difference of $159 per month — and this is without accounting for computing costs, which remain unchanged.

However, this arithmetic does not apply to all models:

Pay-per-usage — your proxies provide direct savings: you pay for Apify traffic, so switching to your own reduces the bill by the entire difference in GB price.
Pay-per-event with included platform costs — there are no savings: the developer pays for proxies, and you pay a fixed price for the result. If you connect your own proxies (if the actor allows it), you simply give the author their margin.
Pay-per-event with external platform costs — behaves like pay-per-usage: your proxies save again.

How to Restructure Scraping Under New Rules: Step by Step

Export the list of used actors and check the current payment model for each in the Store. Everything that was rental is now either PPE or PPU.
For PPE actors, compare the price per 1000 results with what you paid before (rental + computing + proxies). Apify recommends developers offer discounts for Silver and Gold plans (approximately 10% and 20% lower than Bronze prices), so the final cost depends on your plan.
Set a cap on launch costs. Users can set a maximum run cost in the Apify Console or via the API; within the actor, it is available as the variable ACTOR_MAX_TOTAL_CHARGE_USD. With payment for each result, this is the only protection against costly runs if the site unexpectedly returns a million empty rows.
For PPU actors, connect your own proxies. If there is a block in the input parameters labeled "Proxy and browser configuration," you can enter your own proxy URLs in the format http://login:password@host:port. In your SDK code, this is done through ProxyConfiguration with a list of proxyUrls (the method newUrl(sessionId) provides the address linked to the session).
Check the viability of former rental actors. This is the main hidden risk: an author who has not managed to migrate will earn nothing from their actor starting October 1. There is no longer any motivation to fix it after another update from the source website. Check the last build date and the Issues tab; if the actor is critical for your business — prepare a replacement.
For ongoing large volumes, consider your own actor. Crawlee is an open-source scraping engine from Apify itself. If the task is stable, your own code with your own proxies often ends up cheaper than any third-party model, and it also does not depend on someone else's monetization decisions. For more details on integrating such frameworks with proxies — see our guide on proxies for Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, and Crawlee.

Pitfalls of the New Model

Payment for results penalizes junk runs

In a migration webinar, Apify presented telling statistics for one of the actors: 72% of runs produced only 15% of results, while 6% of runs generated 47% of the total volume. The takeaway for users is simple: when paying for both the launch and the record, it is crucial not to run the actor on known empty input data and to clean the dataset of duplicates on your side before re-runs.

Cheap traffic does not replace the right type of proxy

When switching to your own proxies, do not try to save where the site will not forgive you. Open directories, APIs, and poorly protected pages can easily go through datacenter proxies — this is the cheapest traffic. Websites behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or Akamai, marketplaces, and social networks require residential proxies with rotation or sticky sessions: any savings on GB will otherwise be spent on retries, CAPTCHAs, and bans.

Traffic can often be reduced significantly even before choosing proxies

If the actor renders the entire page in the browser, most of the gigabytes are consumed by images, fonts, and scripts. Sometimes the same data is provided by the site through an internal JSON endpoint, allowing the parser to switch to lightweight HTTP requests. We discussed how to find such endpoints in our article about hidden JSON APIs of websites.

PPE prices may change

According to Apify's rules regarding price increases for PPE actors, developers are required to notify users 14 days in advance. Keep an eye on the email associated with your account: this is your chance to recalculate your budget ahead of time, rather than after the fact.

Conclusion

Apify's abandonment of rental is not just a private news item for one platform, but a marker for the entire web data market: tools are transitioning to pay-as-you-go because the main buyer is increasingly becoming an AI agent, rather than a person with a subscription. For users, this is both a benefit (you only pay for what you receive) and a new set of risks: opaque platform cost shares, abandoned former rental actors, and runs without cost caps.

The practical takeaway as of October 1: analyze your actors by models, set limits on runs, and where you pay for proxies, switch traffic to your own network. On resident traffic, this difference is between $8 and $2.70 for each gigabyte.