Apify pricing: plans, compute units, and Google Trends cost

Apify pricing is a prepaid bucket plus meters. The public grid on apify.com/pricing (accessed 29 August 2026) lists Free at $0 with $5 of included usage, Starter at $29, Scale at $199, and Business at $999. Annual billing knocks 10% off those paid rows ($26, $179, and $899 per month in the annual column). Compute units, proxies, storage, and Store Actor fees draw down the prepaid amount; unused credit expires at cycle end. That model fits teams that scrape many sites. It is a poor fit for a Cursor agent that only needs live Google, TikTok, or Amazon boards. Trends MCP prices that job as requests: Free 100/month, Starter $19 for 1,000, Pro $49 for 5,000, Business $199 for 25,000, with annual billing 20% off.

Which Apify plan matches a scraping budget?

Free is $0, no card, $5 prepaid usage that does not roll over. Paid self-serve tiers on the same 29 August 2026 pricing page: Starter $29 with $29 prepaid and a Bronze Store discount; Scale $199 with $199 prepaid and Silver; Business $999 with $999 prepaid and Gold. Enterprise is a sales quote. Support steps from community to chat, then priority chat, then an account manager.

The sticker is the prepaid pool, not a cap that stops a paid account. Exceed the pool and overage lands on the next invoice, or immediately if overage hits $50 on Starter or $200 on Scale and Business (docs.apify.com/account/billing, accessed 29 August 2026). Free accounts are blocked until the next cycle once the $5 is gone. Cancel keeps the plan through the current cycle; unused prepaid still dies at the boundary.

Plan limits that actually bite live on docs.apify.com/account/limits (accessed 29 August 2026), not in the marketing column of the pricing page:

Students get 30% off Starter and Scale. Startups get 30% off Scale. Nonprofits get a custom discount. Those three lines sit in the pricing-page FAQ, not in the SKU table. Add-ons on the same page: extra concurrent runs at $5 per run, extra Actor RAM at $1 per GB, personal training at $150 per hour.

How compute units and proxies stack on the sticker

One compute unit is 1 GB of RAM running for one hour. Apify's own example: 1,024 MB for 1 hour = 1 CU. A 4,096 MB run that lasts 15 minutes is also 1 CU (4 × 0.25). Memory must be a power of two from 128 MB to 32,768 MB. CPU is 1 core per 4,096 MB. Disk is twice the memory. Browser Actors want at least 1,024 MB; Google Maps-class crawls want 4,096 MB. Those figures are from Actor usage and resources (accessed 29 August 2026).

CU list rates on the pricing page: $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business. A 2 GB Actor that runs 30 minutes burns 1 CU. That is $0.20 on Starter and $0.13 on Business before any proxy or Store fee.

Residential proxy: $8/GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale, $7 on Business. Datacenter IPs: 5 included on Free; 30 included then $1/IP on Starter; 200 then $0.80 on Scale; 500 then $0.60 on Business. SERP proxy: $2.50 per 1,000 on Free and Starter, $2 on Scale, $1.70 on Business. Unblocker: $1.50 per 1,000 requests on Free and Starter, $1.25 on Scale, $1 on Business. Free-plan proxy stays inside the Apify platform; it does not extend to external clients.

Reading a dataset after a run still counts as platform usage. That applies to pay-per-event, pay-per-usage, and rental Actors alike (Actors in Store, accessed 29 August 2026).

What a Google Trends Actor adds after the platform fee

Store Actors use one of three models: pay per event, pay per usage, or rental. Rental is being retired. No new rental Actors after 1 April 2026; remaining rentals migrate to pay-per-usage on 1 October 2026. Until then a rental still means a monthly developer fee on top of CUs.

Two Google Trends listings checked the same day show how far the add-on can swing:

The rental Actor compares up to five keywords per group and writes interestOverTime_timelineData as 0-100 weekly points. Default maxConcurrency is 10. The PPE Actor bills one trends-row per keyword per surface. One year of interest-over-time is one row (54 weekly buckets inside it), not 54 charges. Empty noData rows and failed fetches are not charged. Two interest-over-time keywords cost $0.008 at the published $0.004 rate. A paid Actor still draws the Free plan's $5 allowance.

Pay-per-event prices often include platform usage. Always read the Actor's own pricing tab. Some PPE Actors still bill CUs separately.

Apify is the right buy when the work is "run this Store Actor against a site that has no API." Google Trends is not that job. It is a public interest index with several commercial APIs sitting in front of it, including Trends MCP and the SERP vendors covered in SerpApi pricing.

Can the Apify MCP server stand in for a trends API?

Apify ships a remote MCP at https://mcp.apify.com (streamable HTTP, OAuth on first connect). SSE transport is deprecated and scheduled for removal on 1 April 2026. Default tools: search-actors, fetch-actor-details, apify/rag-web-browser, search-apify-docs, fetch-apify-docs. Running Actors and reading storage always needs an API token. Anonymous access is limited to the four discovery/docs tools. Rate limit: 30 requests per second per user. Local stdio uses npx -y @apify/actors-mcp-server and needs Node.js 18 or higher. Source: Apify MCP docs (accessed 29 August 2026).

Cursor config for the hosted server (OAuth, no token in the file):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "apify": {
      "url": "https://mcp.apify.com"
    }
  }
}

That JSON opens the whole Store. It does not give the agent a get_top_trends tool. The agent has to search Actors, inspect input schemas, and call-actor. Rental Google Trends scrapers never appear in that path. PPE Actors do, if the URL pins them.

Trends MCP is the opposite shape. Three tools, two hosts that are not interchangeable. Cursor JSON from docs.md (29 August 2026):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "trends-mcp": {
      "url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
      "transport": "http",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp takes the Bearer key. The www host /mcp path is OAuth for Claude.ai Connectors only. Windsurf uses serverUrl instead of Cursor's url plus transport. Full Cursor install steps live on the MCP server for Cursor page. get_top_trends default limit is 25, max 200, billed per feed type and per page. get_growth counts as one request per source plus keyword even when percent_growth lists 12M, 3M, and YTD in the same call.

A side-by-side of the two MCP jobs:

Apify still wins for Instagram, Maps, or any target that only exists as HTML. Trends MCP wins when the agent needs ranked boards and 0-100 keyword series without babysitting Actors. The longer product split is on Trends MCP vs Apify.

Request-priced trend data versus prepaid CUs

Trends MCP monthly SKUs from pricing.md (29 August 2026): Free $0 / 100 requests; Starter $19 / 1,000; Pro $49 / 5,000; Business $199 / 25,000. Annual saves 20%. The HTML pricing page the same day showed the yearly toggle as Starter $16/month ($192 billed), Pro $39 ($468), Business $159 ($1,910), copy "2 months free." Paid plans collect a card at checkout and start a 7-day trial; the charge hits on day 8. Failed calls are free. Hitting the quota returns 429 with no overage. Keyword alerts: 50 on Pro, 250 on Business.

HTML marketing that day also printed Free as top 10 trends, 12 months of history, and 24-hour delayed data, plus "35+ data sources" on every plan. The markdown price table does not state those Free caps. Source counts still split across surfaces: docs.md lists 15 keyword sources (no python) and 24 named live feeds including TikTok Trending Hashtags by Category; data-sources.md lists the same 15 keyword sources and 20 live feeds (it drops the four by-Category boards); llms.txt says "plus 21 live feeds"; the MCP get_growth schema still lists python; MCP get_top_trends lists 23 feeds and omits TikTok Trending Hashtags by Category. Cite the split. Do not flatten it to 15, 16, 20, 21, 23, 24, or 35+. HTML also showed 9,438,170 API calls served on this fetch.

Worked comparison for a weekly Google Trends interest pull on 50 keywords (one surface each, 50 successful rows):

• nimait PPE: 50 × $0.004 = $0.20 in Actor events, billed against Apify prepaid usage. Needs an Apify account and the Actor pinned or discovered. No rental fee.
• scraper-engine rental: $19.99 that month plus CUs and any proxy the run burns, and the Actor is invisible to Apify MCP.
• Trends MCP Starter: 50 get_growth or get_trends calls = 50 of 1,000 requests ($19/month). The same 50 calls fit inside Free's 100-request quota, but HTML copy for Free still lags 24 hours and caps the live board at top 10.

Fifty Google-only rows are cheap on PPE. The bill flips when the agent also wants TikTok hashtags, Amazon best sellers, Reddit hot posts, and Wikipedia pageviews without a new Actor per site. That is the request bucket, not the CU bucket.

FAQ

Is Apify free to try?

Yes. The Free plan is $0, no credit card, $5 prepaid usage per cycle. Community support, $0.20 per CU, 25 concurrent runs, 16,384 MB combined memory. Proxy on Free stays inside the platform. When the $5 is gone, runs stop until the next cycle. Paid plans keep going on overage.

Does the $29 Starter plan cover Google Trends scrapers?

It covers $29 of platform usage at $0.20 per CU, plus Bronze Store discounts on Actors that opt in. A PPE Google Trends Actor such as nimait at $4.00 per 1,000 rows will usually fit. A rental Actor such as scraper-engine at $19.99/month plus usage will eat most of the prepaid pool before CUs, and it will not show up in Apify MCP.

How is Trends MCP priced next to Apify?

Trends MCP sells requests, not compute. Free is 100 requests. Starter is $19 for 1,000. Pro is $49 for 5,000. Business is $199 for 25,000. Annual is 20% off (HTML yearly as billed: $192, $468, $1,910). One get_growth call with several windows is still one request. Apify is cheaper for arbitrary HTML. Trends MCP is cheaper for multi-source boards and keyword series inside Cursor or Claude.

Can an AI agent call Apify and Trends MCP together?

Yes. Point Cursor at https://mcp.apify.com for Store Actors and at https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp with a Bearer key for trend tools. Do not put a Trends MCP key on the Apify host, and do not expect rental Actors to appear in Apify MCP search.

When do unused Apify credits expire?

At the end of the billing cycle. They do not roll over. Downgrades are the documented exception: unused platform usage rolls to the new plan. Cancel at any time; the current cycle still finishes, and overage can still invoice.