Apify alternative
datamint vs Apify
A platform and marketplace of prebuilt scrapers, where you rent hosted actors rather than call a single extraction API. Here is how the two compare, priced from published information rather than from a benchmark we ran.
Why teams switch
Why teams look for a Apify alternative.
Usually one of three things: the bill is hard to predict, a target stopped returning content, or the shape of the response is wrong for the pipeline downstream.
- 1
You want one endpoint with a schema you control rather than choosing and configuring an actor per target.
- 2
You do not want to reason about compute units, memory allocation, and run time to predict a bill.
- 3
Your workload is API calls inside an existing pipeline, not jobs running on someone else's platform.
Head to head
datamint and Apify, side by side.
Every Apify figure below comes from their published pricing, read on 16 September 2026. Where they do not publish a number, this table says so instead of estimating one.
$19 / month, or $17 billed annually
$49 / month
Compute units, plus proxies, storage, and transfer
Credits per page, by transport tier
Not directly; included usage is published in dollars, not compute units
Yes: 1, 5, or 15 credits per page, published
$5 of usage / month
1,000 credits / month
Thousands of actors in the store
No: you supply a URL and a schema
$7–$8 per GB depending on plan
Included in the 15-credit stealth armor tier
No: unused usage credits do not roll over
Credits reset monthly
Their pricing
What Apify publishes.
Prepaid platform usage in dollars, consumed at a per-compute-unit rate. 1 CU is 1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour. Proxies, storage, and data transfer draw on the same balance.
$5 of usage / month
5 concurrent runs, 16 GB max RAM
$19 of usage / month
$17 billed annually; $0.20/CU; 32 concurrent runs
$199 of usage / month
$179 billed annually; $0.16/CU; 128 concurrent runs
$999 of usage / month
$899 billed annually; $0.13/CU; 256 concurrent runs
Not published
Free tier: $5 of platform usage per month, no card required. Source: https://apify.com/pricing, read 16 September 2026.
In their favour
Where Apify is the stronger choice.
Teams pick them for these reasons, and switching does not solve any of them.
Thousands of prebuilt actors, so common targets work without writing a scraper at all.
A hosting platform: actors run on their infrastructure, which suits teams that do not want to run crawlers themselves.
An unusual and generous free tier: $5 of platform usage per month, no card.
Store revenue share and a public actor ecosystem, which keeps the catalogue growing.
Where datamint differs
What changes if you switch.
How the two bill, and what they hand back, compared without a verdict on quality.
Apify bills in compute units (1 CU is 1 GB of RAM running for an hour), plus proxy and storage consumption. datamint bills per page, by transport tier.
Apify publishes included monthly usage as dollar amounts ($19, $199, $999) and does not state how many compute units that converts to. datamint publishes credits per tier and credits per page.
datamint is a single API with a fixed request shape. Apify's value is the actor catalogue, so the interface differs per actor.
datamint's credit model
$1 = 1,000 credits. A request is routed across transport tiers automatically and billed at the tier that succeeded.
- Static fast HTTP fetch
- 1 credit / page
- Dynamic headless render
- 5 credits / page
- Stealth armor bypass
- 15 credits / page
- Structured schema extraction
- +2 credits / page
Questions
Before you switch.
When is Apify the better choice?
When a prebuilt actor already does what you need. If someone has published an actor for your target, running it is less work than writing a schema and calling an API. datamint has no actor catalogue and no hosted job platform, so there is nothing to rent.
Why is Apify's pricing harder to compare?
Because it is metered on compute rather than on pages. A run costs 1 CU per GB of RAM per hour, so the cost of a result depends on how much memory the actor requests and how long it runs, not on how many pages come back. datamint's cost is a fixed credit cost per page by transport tier, which is a narrower and more predictable unit but covers less.
Is the free tier comparable?
Not directly. Apify gives $5 of platform usage per month, which converts to an unknown number of pages because the compute-unit conversion is not published. datamint gives 1,000 credits, which is 1,000 static fetches or 66 stealth armor renders.
Comparing more than one? See all comparisons.
Stop maintaining scrapers. Start shipping.
Point datamint at the targets your team keeps losing. Get typed data back, and stop rebuilding parsers every sprint.
1,000 credits free every month · No card required · Blocked requests cost nothing