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Apify alternative

Apify is a platform of ready-made scrapers called actors, built by Apify and a community, run on a cloud with compute-based pricing (apify.com). QuanticData covers the same job with a different deal: every call billed only on success, every price public, $2 of credit a month without a card, and proxies plus data APIs on one key.

By , founder of QuanticData · Published · Updated

100 URLs, 33 blocked: per-request billing charges all 100, per-success billing charges the 67 usable results at $0.0005 per delivered row.
The same hundred URLs, billed two ways — and a plain note on when Apify is the better fit.

Why people look for a Apify alternative

The searches around “apify alternative” are consistent: a free or cheaper option, something that works with Claude, Cursor or n8n, an MCP server, and a bill that does not surprise. Those are the four things this page is about. We do not rank vendors or quote their prices; Apify publishes its own, and it is a capable product with a marketplace of thousands of community actors, compute-unit pricing per run and an SDK to publish your own actors.

What QuanticData does differently

  • Pay per success, no subscription. A blocked page, a timeout or a retry is never billed. There is no monthly plan to size: pay-as-you-go at list price, or a paid account for a discount and a higher rate limit.
  • Public unit prices. 100 ready-made collectors take a semantic input (keyword and location, place id, product id, domain) and return typed rows, billed per delivered row from $0.0005: Google Maps places and reviews, jobs, news, shopping, hotels, Amazon, eBay, Zillow, Indeed, LinkedIn, local business leads with emails and phones.
  • $2 free every month, no card. Every permanent email address renews with $2 of credit: roughly 10,000 scraped pages or 4,000 searches. Residential proxies add a free 100 MB trial.
  • Proxies and APIs on one account. The residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP and IPv6 networks are the same infrastructure the APIs run on, and you can use them directly with country targeting included.
  • Built for agents. Markdown output, a JSON envelope on every call, twin .md pages, llms.txt, and an MCP server that exposes every endpoint as a tool.
  • Collectors instead of URLs. For the common targets, you send a keyword, a place or a product id and get typed rows, billed per delivered row.

Same job, one request

curl -X POST "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer qd_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "format": "markdown"}'

Add "render": true for JavaScript pages, "extract" with CSS selectors or a JSON schema for structured output, or switch the endpoint to /v1/serp, /v1/crawl, /v1/batch. Every endpoint with a working example: Python, Node, curl, PHP.

When Apify is the better fit

You need an actor that exists only there, or you want to publish and monetise your own scrapers on a marketplace. Switching tools has a cost, and a bill that is already predictable is not a reason to switch. Try the free tier on the pages that matter to you and compare the results, not the marketing.

How to compare fairly

  1. Take 100 URLs from your real targets, including the protected ones.
  2. Fetch them through both services with the same options (rendering on or off) and count usable results, not HTTP 200s.
  3. Divide what you paid by the usable results. Per-success billing makes that number the price; credit billing makes it a calculation.
  4. Check what the output needs before your parser can use it. Markdown that is already clean saves a step per page.
Moving over in an afternoon: pick 100 failing URLs, get a free key, run one batch job, then divide cost by delivered rows — 100 × $0.0005 is $0.05.
Four steps on your own URLs, at our published price — and a plain note on when Apify is the better fit.

Sources and standards

Primary sources for this comparison: the vendor’s own documentation, and the standards both sides implement.

Questions about switching from Apify

Is QuanticData a Apify alternative?

For the job Apify does in most stacks, yes: pages as Markdown or JSON, search results as JSON, whole-site crawl, and proxies underneath. The differences are the billing model (per successful result, no subscription), public unit prices, $2 of free credit a month, and 100 collectors that take a keyword or id instead of a URL. Stay with Apify if you need an actor that exists only there, or you want to publish and monetise your own scrapers on a marketplace.

Is there a free Apify alternative?

QuanticData is free to start: every account gets $2 of API credit every month with no card, which is about 10,000 scraped pages or 4,000 searches at list prices, plus a 100 MB residential proxy trial. It stays pay-as-you-go afterwards, with no minimum.

How do I migrate from Apify?

Point your client at POST https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scrape with {"url": …, "format": "markdown"} (or /v1/serp with a query) and read payload. The Python, Node, curl and PHP quickstarts cover every endpoint; the curl converter turns a working request into code.

Does QuanticData work with Claude, Cursor and n8n like Apify?

Yes. The MCP server exposes search, scrape, map, crawl, batch, seo_audit and the collectors as tools to Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Cline; n8n and any HTTP node call the REST API directly.

Where are QuanticData's prices?

All of them are on the pricing page: scraping from $0.0002 per page, SERP from $0.0005 per search, crawl $0.0003 per page, residential proxies from $0.80/GB. We do not publish other vendors' prices; check Apify's own site for theirs.

Compare on your own URLs

A free key, $2 of credit every month, and the same 100 pages you would test anywhere else.

Get my free API key

Free key, $2 of usage credit every month, no credit card.