Apify pricing explained: what an Instagram hashtag job costs

Apify pricing has two layers, and most confusion comes from mixing them up. The first is your plan: a monthly subscription that is really prepaid credit — $0 with $5 of credit, $19, $199 or $999 a month, each with that same amount to spend. The second is the actor's own price: every actor in Apify Store is either pay-per-event (a fixed price per result or per run, set by its developer) or pay-per-usage (you pay for the compute it burns). What you actually pay for a job is the actor's price, drawn out of your plan's credit. The plan mostly decides how much credit you pre-buy and what discount you get on some actors.

The rest of this article walks through both layers with the numbers Apify publishes, then prices one concrete job — keeping an eye on a single Instagram hashtag for a month — across three actors, because that is where the difference between pricing models stops being abstract.

All prices below were read from apify.com and from the actors' own Apify Store pricing as of September 2026. Prices on the platform change; check the pricing section of an actor's page before a large run.

The Apify plans, as of September 2026

Paid plans are about 10% cheaper when billed annually. A few details on the pricing page matter more than the headline numbers:

• The subscription is credit, not a fee on top. The $19 Starter plan comes with $19 to spend in Apify Store or on your own actors. Anything you use past that is added to your next invoice.
• Unused credit does not roll over. Apify says plainly that unused usage credits expire at the end of the billing cycle. Buying Scale "to be safe" when you use $40 a month throws away the rest.
• The Free plan stops rather than bills. If you use up the $5 on the Free plan, your access is blocked until the next monthly cycle. No card is required, so there is no surprise invoice — but a scheduled job will simply stop.
• The store discount is a tier, not a percentage. Bronze, Silver and Gold unlock lower prices only on actors whose developer set tiered prices. Many actors charge the same on every plan.

What a compute unit is

A compute unit (CU) is Apify's measure of platform usage: 1 CU = 1 GB of memory running for 1 hour. A run with 1 GB of memory that takes 30 minutes uses 0.5 CU, which is $0.10 on Free or Starter, $0.08 on Scale and $0.065 on Business.

Compute units only show up on your bill directly when the actor you run is priced by usage, or when you run actors of your own. For pay-per-event actors, it depends on the actor — which is the next point.

Pay-per-event vs pay-per-usage actors

Apify's pricing page says every actor in Apify Store uses one of two models, and the actor's page states which:

• Pay per event. The developer defines events — a result written to your dataset, a search processed, an actor start — and puts a fixed price on each. Apify notes that most pay-per-event actors include the platform usage in the event price, but some charge for it separately, so read the actor's pricing section.
• Pay per usage. The developer charges nothing extra. You pay for the compute units, data transfer, storage operations and proxies the run consumes.

Pay-per-usage is cheap when an actor is efficient and expensive when it is not, and you only find out which by running it. Pay-per-event is predictable, but only as honest as its events: a per-result price tells you nothing about what happens to results you did not want — duplicates, posts older than you needed, rows past a limit — unless the actor says so.

For a monitoring job, three details in an actor's event list decide your bill far more than the plan you are on:

1. Is there a fixed charge per run or per query? If you poll on a schedule, that charge is paid every time, including the runs that find nothing new.
2. Can you stop at a date? Without a date filter, "give me what is new since yesterday" means paying for everything the actor reads before it gets to yesterday's posts, or re-buying the same recent posts each run.
3. Is the result limit exact? A limit that is only checked between pages can overshoot, and every extra row is a billed row.

Apify pricing for an Instagram hashtag job

Here is the job: you are tracking one Instagram hashtag for a campaign or a brand, and you pull its recent posts on a schedule. Three actors in Apify Store do this, and they are priced in three different ways.

Apidojo's listing describes the included batch as the first 40 results in one place and 60 in another, so the examples below give its cost as a range.

Scenario 1: one daily pull of 200 posts, for 30 days

That is 6,000 posts a month.

On a large daily pull, apidojo's actor is the cheapest of the three: the fixed $0.016 is spread over hundreds of posts and its per-item price is lower than ours. It also needs no login. If that is your job, it is a good choice, and we would say so.

Scenario 2: hourly polling for new posts, for 30 days

Now you want to know within the hour when something is posted, on a hashtag that gets a few dozen posts a day. That is 720 runs a month, most of them returning a handful of posts or none.

• apidojo: 720 keyword queries × $0.016 = $11.52 in query charges before a single additional item is billed.
• Apify's Instagram Hashtag Scraper: no per-run fee, but with no date filter in its input, each run returns posts up to your limit whether or not you already have them — so an hourly poll re-buys the same recent posts at $0.0019 to $0.0026 each and you remove the duplicates afterwards.
• This site's actor: set onlyPostsNewerThan to the time of your last run. The run stops as soon as the feed reaches that time, and a run that finds nothing new delivers nothing and costs $0.00. If the hashtag gets 40 new posts a day, a month costs 1,200 × $0.0005 = $0.60.

Polling is where fixed per-run charges and missing date filters compound, and where per-delivered-post pricing with a hard stop at a date is the cheapest shape.

What $5 of Free plan credit buys

• About 1,900 posts from Apify's Instagram Hashtag Scraper at its Free-tier price.
• 10,000 posts from this site's actor.
• With apidojo, roughly 300 small queries, or around 12,000 posts if you pull them in large batches.

Who should use which

Stay with Apify's own Instagram Hashtag Scraper if you need several hashtags in one run, keyword search, or reels, and you already work in its output format. On the Business plan its price drops, and it is maintained by Apify itself.

Choose apidojo's Instagram Hashtag Scraper if you cannot or do not want to supply an Instagram session, or you pull large batches (hundreds of posts per query) rather than polling often. Its per-item price is the lowest of the three.

Choose this site's Instagram Hashtag Scraper if you watch one hashtag at a time and poll it often, want a result limit that is exact and a date filter that stops the run, and want to be charged only for posts that actually reach your dataset — duplicates, posts outside your date window, rows past your limit and empty runs are all free, and platform usage is included in the price. The trade-off is real: it needs a session cookie from an Instagram account you control, it reads one hashtag per run, and it does not do reels, comments or profiles. The limits page lists everything it does not do.

How to switch an existing hashtag job

1. Start with a small run. Set resultsLimit to 10. That costs $0.005 and shows you the output fields next to what your current actor returns.
2. Add your session cookie. Getting started shows where to find the two cookie values in your browser. It needs an account you control and are willing to have rate limited.
3. Replace "fetch everything, dedupe later" with a date bound. Put the timestamp of your previous run in onlyPostsNewerThan, or a relative window like 1 day for a daily schedule.
4. Keep your schedule and integrations. Apify schedules, webhooks and the API work the same for any actor, so only the actor id and the input change.
5. Compare a week of bills in your Apify billing settings before switching everything over.

If you are not sure a hashtag has enough recent posts to be worth watching, the free hashtag checker gives you a reading of it without starting a run. When you are ready, the overview has the full list of what is and is not charged.