Pricing and costs
Learn how to set Actor pricing and calculate your costs, including platform usage rates, discount tiers, and profit formulas for PPE and PPR monetization models.
Computing your costs for PPE and PPR Actors
For both PPE and PPR Actors, profit is computed using the formula (0.8 * revenue) - costs. In this section, we'll explain how the costs component is calculated.
When paying users run your Actor, it generates platform usage in the form of compute units, data traffic, API operations etc. This usage determines the costs in the profit formula above.
Platform usage by FREE tier users is covered by Apify and does not contribute to your costs.
To calculate your costs for a specific run by paying user, multiply the unit cost of each service by the quantity consumed. For example, if a BRONZE tier user run uses 10 compute units (CUs) at $0.3/CU, your cost would be $3.
As highlighted in the How to attract larger customers of PPE and PPR Actors section, if your Actor uses tiered pricing, the user's discount tier determines the unit costs applied to their runs. Your costs are lower for higher tiers, enabling you to offer more competitive pricing to these customers, while sustaining healthy profit margins.
The following table summarizes the platform unit costs used for your cost computation across different discount tiers.
| Service (unit) | FREE | BRONZE | SILVER | GOLD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Compute unit (per CU) | $0.3 | $0.3 | $0.25 | $0.2 |
| Residential proxies (per GB) | $8 | $8 | $7.5 | $7 |
| SERPs proxy (per 1,000 SERPs) | $2.5 | $2.5 | $2 | $1.7 |
| Data transfer - external (per GB) | $0.2 | $0.2 | $0.19 | $0.18 |
| Data transfer - internal (per GB) | $0.05 | $0.05 | $0.045 | $0.04 |
| Dataset - reads (per 1,000 reads) | $0.0004 | $0.0004 | $0.00036 | $0.00032 |
| Dataset - writes (per 1,000 writes) | $0.005 | $0.005 | $0.0045 | $0.004 |
| Key-value store - reads (per 1,000) | $0.005 | $0.005 | $0.0045 | $0.004 |
| Key-value store - writes (per 1,000) | $0.05 | $0.05 | $0.045 | $0.04 |
| Key-value store - lists (per 1,000) | $0.05 | $0.05 | $0.045 | $0.04 |
| Request queue - reads (per 1,000) | $0.004 | $0.004 | $0.0036 | $0.0032 |
| Request queue - writes (per 1,000) | $0.02 | $0.02 | $0.018 | $0.016 |
If you decide not to offer tiered discounts on your Actor, the unit prices for FREE tier apply. To offer enterprise level services and unlock even cheaper unit prices for enterprise customers, please reach out to us.
When you monetize your Actor in Standby mode using pay per event mode only, you are not responsible for covering platform usage costs of your users' runs.
Discount tiers and pricing strategy
Each user running your PPE or PPR Actor belongs to a discount tier:
- FREE
- BRONZE
- SILVER
- GOLD
You can define different prices for different tiers. While optional, we recommend offering progressively lower prices for higher discount tiers. This approach can significantly improve attractiveness of your Actor to large enterprise customers who may spend thousands or tens of thousands of dollars on it.
Your platform costs are also lower for these higher tier, which helps maintain healthy profit margins. This is further detailed in the Computing your costs for PPE and PPR Actors section.
Implementing discount tiers
By default, we advise against setting excessively high prices for FREE tier users, as this can limit the ability to evaluate your Actor thoroughly. However, in certain situations, such as protecting your Actor from fraudulent activity or excessive use of your internal APIs, a higher price for FREE tier users might be justified.
During an Actor run, you can identify the user's discount tier through Actor run environment variables or by querying user data via the Apify API. This capability allows you to offer premium features or differentiated service levels to users in higher discount tiers.
Additional benefits and enterprise tiers
Actors that implement tiered pricing also receive additional benefits like enhanced visibility in the Apify Store, making your Actor more discoverable to potential users.
In addition to the standard tiers, Apify provides further tiers specifically for enterprise customers, including PLATINUM and DIAMOND tiers. If you are interested in offering enterprise-level services and attracting major clients, please contact us.