Apify Alternative 2026: $9.90/mo Flat-Rate vs Compute Unit Billing

If you’re weighing Apify against MapsScraper for Google Maps lead extraction, you’re comparing two very different things. Apify is a developer platform that runs hundreds of scrapers (“actors”) in the cloud, bills by usage, and exposes a full API. MapsScraper is a single-purpose Chrome extension with a flat monthly price. One is built for engineers wiring scraping into a pipeline; the other is built for someone who just wants a clean lead list this afternoon.

We sell MapsScraper, so treat the bias as declared. To keep this fair, every Apify number below comes from Apify’s public pricing page and the Google Maps actor listing in June 2026, and Apify’s real strengths — the API, the actor ecosystem, the free monthly credit, the developer ergonomics — are stated plainly. If those things matter more to you than predictable cost, Apify is the better pick and this article will help you see why.

This is an Apify alternative comparison for one specific job: pulling business leads off Google Maps. It covers how Apify’s pricing actually works (compute units and per-result billing trip a lot of people up), what each tool costs at realistic volumes, and where the break-even sits.

Quick comparison

Feature	MapsScraper	Apify
Free tier	50 leads/month (renewable)	$5/mo platform usage credit
Cheapest paid plan	$9.90/mo	Starter $29/mo
Pricing model	Flat-rate, unlimited	Subscription + per-result/compute usage
Google Maps cost	Included	From $1.50 / 1,000 places (plus plan fee)
Annual unlimited	$79/yr	Not offered (usage-metered)
Format	Chrome extension (sideloaded)	Cloud platform + REST API
API	❌ No	✅ Full REST API + SDK
Email scraping	✅ Built-in (Premium)	Paid add-on (contact enrichment)
WhatsApp click-to-chat links	✅ Built-in (Premium)	❌ Not generated
Other scrapers (Yelp, IG, TikTok…)	❌ Google Maps only	✅ Thousands of actors
Setup	Sideload, developer mode	Web signup, pick actor, run
UI languages	10 (EN, ES, PT, DE, FR, TR, IT, PL, JA, KO)	English

The shape of the trade-off is the same as most of these comparisons: Apify is the flexible, powerful, developer-grade platform. MapsScraper is the cheap, narrow, predictable tool. The numbers below decide it for your situation.

How Apify pricing actually works

This is where most people get surprised, so it’s worth slowing down. Apify has two layers of cost, and you pay both.

Layer 1 — the platform subscription. You pick a plan: Free ($0, includes $5 of monthly platform usage credit), Starter ($29/mo, or $26/mo billed annually), Scale ($199/mo, $179 annual), or Business ($999/mo, $899 annual). The monthly fee comes with an equal amount of included usage — Starter’s $29 buys $29 of usage, and so on. Source: Apify’s pricing page, June 2026.

Layer 2 — usage, metered two different ways depending on the actor:

Compute Units (CU). A CU is defined as 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. It costs $0.20/CU on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business. Older and custom actors bill this way, which means a long-running or memory-hungry scrape costs more, and you can’t know the exact bill until the run finishes.
Pay-per-result. Apify’s flagship Google Maps actor (compass/crawler-google-places) is priced this way: from $1.50 per 1,000 scraped places, with the rate dropping on higher plans. Source: the Google Maps Scraper actor listing, June 2026.

The per-result model is the friendly one — you pay for rows, not runtime. But two things still bite. First, you need a paid plan once your usage passes the $5 free credit. Second, emails are a separate paid add-on (“Company contacts enrichment”), so the headline $1.50/1,000 is base data only — title, address, phone, website, rating, hours, categories, coordinates, returned as JSON. If you want emails and social profiles, that’s extra on top.

Pricing breakdown

Apify math

Let’s price the same job a lead-gen user actually runs, using the Google Maps actor at the $1.50 / 1,000 places base rate (Starter tier), base data only:

1,000 leads, no emails: ~$1.50 of usage — inside the Free plan’s $5 monthly credit, so effectively $0 if it’s a one-off.
3,000 leads/mo, no emails: ~$4.50 — still inside the $5 free credit most months.
5,000 leads/mo, no emails: ~$7.50 of usage → past the $5 credit, so you need Starter $29/mo (which covers it inside the included usage).
5,000 leads/mo + emails: Starter $29 base plus the contact-enrichment add-on on top of the per-result fee.
60,000 leads/yr (5k/mo) + emails: Starter $29 × 12 = $348/yr before the email add-on.

Apify is genuinely cheap — or free — for occasional, base-only scraping under ~3,000 rows a month. The moment you need it monthly, want emails, or cross the free credit, you’re on a $29/mo floor that climbs with add-ons.

MapsScraper math

MapsScraper has two prices and one rule: pay it, get unlimited.

Free forever: 50 renewable leads/month (no card, all filters, CSV export)
Premium monthly: $9.90/mo — unlimited leads + email scraping + social profiles + WhatsApp link generation + Excel export
Premium yearly: $79/yr ($6.58/mo equivalent)

No per-result fee, no email surcharge, no usage credit to track. The same $9.90 pulls 500 leads or 50,000.

Break-even

Occasional + base data only (under ~3k/mo): Apify’s free $5 credit wins — you pay nothing, MapsScraper’s free tier caps at 50/mo.
Ongoing, any volume, with emails: MapsScraper wins clearly. Apify’s $29/mo Starter floor alone is ~3× MapsScraper’s $9.90, before the email add-on and any overage.
Annual: MapsScraper’s $79/yr unlimited beats Apify’s $348/yr Starter floor by a wide margin for steady lead generation — and the gap widens once emails are in.

The honest rule: if scraping is an occasional, base-data task, Apify’s metering can land at zero. If it’s a recurring lead-gen habit with contact data, flat-rate wins, and it isn’t close. This is the same dynamic we walk through in the Outscraper comparison — per-unit billing is cheap until you use it regularly.

Feature comparison

API access. This is the strongest reason to choose Apify. You get a documented REST API, official JavaScript and Python SDKs, scheduling, webhooks, storage, and proxy rotation. You can trigger a run from your backend, poll for the dataset, and pull JSON straight into Postgres. MapsScraper has none of this — it runs in your browser and exports CSV/Excel. If your workflow ends in code, Apify is the right tool. If it ends in a spreadsheet or a CRM import, the API is weight you won’t use.

The actor ecosystem. Apify isn’t just a Maps scraper — it runs thousands of actors for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Amazon, Booking, and almost any site with a community actor. If your prospecting cross-references Maps with other platforms, you can do it all on one bill. MapsScraper is Google Maps only. That’s a real ceiling if you need breadth.

Email scraping. MapsScraper visits each business website from your browser and parses contact pages and footers for emails — Premium, no surcharge. Apify offers the same outcome through the contact-enrichment add-on, billed on top of the per-result fee. At a few thousand records the add-on can rival the base scrape cost.

WhatsApp click-to-chat links. MapsScraper Premium turns scraped phone numbers into wa.me/<E.164> links, ready to paste into outreach — useful for LATAM, MENA, and Southeast Asia where WhatsApp is the default business channel. Apify doesn’t generate these; you’d format phones yourself.

Output format. Apify returns structured JSON (and CSV/Excel export from the dataset) with a rich field set — reviews, images, amenities, coordinates. MapsScraper returns the lead-focused fields most outreach needs: name, address, phone, website, email, socials, WhatsApp. Apify gives you more raw data; MapsScraper gives you a list you can email today.

Setup complexity. Apify is a few minutes: sign up, open the Google Maps actor, enter a query, click Run, download the dataset. MapsScraper is slower up front because we’re not on the Chrome Web Store — download a ZIP, enable Developer Mode, “Load unpacked,” open the side panel. We document it in the install guide, but the first run is ~10 minutes versus Apify’s ~5.

Setup experience

Apify:

apify.com → sign up
Open the Google Maps Scraper actor
Enter a search query and result limit
Click Start, wait for the run
Download the dataset as JSON/CSV/Excel (or pull it via API)

MapsScraper:

mapsscraper.shop/install → download the ZIP
Unzip somewhere permanent
Open chrome://extensions, toggle Developer Mode
“Load unpacked,” select the folder
Open Google Maps, click the extension, scrape

Apify wins the first impression — no sideload, no Developer Mode warning. MapsScraper’s friction is real but one-time; after the install it’s always loaded, with no dashboard to log into. The trade-off is the same one we describe in the Outscraper piece: cloud convenience up front versus local simplicity after.

Who should use which

Pick Apify if:

You’re a developer wiring scraping into a pipeline (n8n, Make, Airflow, a backend job)
You need a REST API with JSON output, scheduling, and webhooks
You scrape many platforms, not just Google Maps
Your jobs are occasional and base-data-only — the free $5 credit may cover them
You want managed proxies and cloud runtime so nothing runs on your machine
You’re comfortable estimating compute-unit or per-result cost before a run

Pick MapsScraper if:

You’re a solo founder, freelancer, or small agency doing local B2B prospecting
You’re Google Maps-focused and want emails without a metered add-on
You scrape regularly and want a flat, predictable bill
You need WhatsApp click-to-chat links generated automatically
Your team prefers a non-English UI (10 languages built in)
You’d rather not log into a dashboard or watch a usage meter

Both free entries are worth trying before you commit: Apify’s $5 monthly credit covers a small base scrape, and MapsScraper’s 50 leads/month renews so you can check the CSV and email quality first.

When the pipeline beats the tool

Whichever you choose, the scrape is rarely the bottleneck. Targeting (wrong industry, wrong city, wrong company size) and outreach (generic copy, no follow-up) decide whether leads convert. We wrote a Google Maps lead generation playbook that covers the full pipeline — segmentation, enrichment, sequencing — and it applies no matter which scraper feeds it.

If you hit throttling at volume on either platform, our notes on scraping Google Maps without getting blocked cover the rate-limit basics. Apify manages proxies for you; MapsScraper paces requests in your browser. Both respect Google’s limits, and both can still stall if you try to pull tens of thousands of rows in one sitting.

Conclusion

Apify and MapsScraper barely compete in the same category. Apify is a cloud platform that meters usage and gives you an API and thousands of actors. MapsScraper is a browser extension with a flat $9.90 subscription and one job. The decision comes down to two questions: does your workflow end in code or in a spreadsheet, and is scraping occasional or routine?

Developer pipeline, multi-platform, occasional base-data jobs → Apify
Solo/agency lead gen, Google Maps focus, recurring, emails + WhatsApp, predictable cost → MapsScraper

If you’d rather test than commit, the free tier gives you 50 leads/month with no credit card — enough to judge data quality before you weigh it against Apify’s metered runs. For the wider field, see our comparison of 5 Google Maps scrapers with real pricing.

Frequently asked questions

Is Apify free for Google Maps scraping? Partly. Apify’s Free plan includes $5 of monthly platform usage credit, and the Google Maps actor starts at about $1.50 per 1,000 places — so a small, occasional, base-data scrape (roughly under 3,000 rows/month) can stay inside the free credit. Email enrichment is a paid add-on, and recurring use past the credit requires the Starter plan at $29/month.

What is the cheapest Apify alternative for Google Maps leads? For ongoing Google Maps lead generation with emails, a flat-rate tool is usually cheaper than Apify’s $29/month subscription floor. MapsScraper is $9.90/month (or $79/year) for unlimited leads with email scraping and WhatsApp links included, with no per-result fee.

Can I scrape Google Maps without an API? Yes. A browser extension like MapsScraper runs inside Chrome on the Google Maps page and exports CSV/Excel directly — no API keys, no code, no cloud account. An API is only necessary if you’re feeding leads into an automated backend pipeline rather than a spreadsheet or CRM.

How does Apify compute unit pricing work? A Compute Unit (CU) is 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. Apify charges $0.20/CU on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, and $0.13 on Business. Older and custom actors bill by CU, so a longer or heavier run costs more and the final price isn’t known until it finishes. Apify’s flagship Google Maps actor uses simpler pay-per-result pricing (from $1.50/1,000 places) instead.