Pricing

What will my scraping job cost?

Both Actors use Apify's pay-per-event pricing: you pay for each result saved. YouTube is the same price on every Apify plan; Instagram results get cheaper on the Scale and Business plans. Put in your job and see the cost next to the most common alternative at your plan's price.

• YouTube $2.00 / 1,000 videos
• Instagram $1.90 / 1,000 results (Free)
• Transcripts $0.004 / started minute
• Instagram $1.10 / 1,000 on Business

YouTube job

Instagram job

What counts as a result

YouTube: one video row, at $0.002. Top comments and dislike estimates (from Return YouTube Dislike) live inside the row and add nothing. Each run also has a start fee of $0.00005 per GB of memory, which is a rounding error. Inputs that return nothing (an empty or over-filtered search, an unknown channel or playlist, an unavailable, private or deleted video) are listed in the run's ERRORS record and not charged; errorRowsInDataset saves them as billed dataset rows instead, as older versions did.

Instagram: any saved row at $0.0019 on the Free and Starter plans, $0.0015 on Scale and $0.0011 on Business: a post or reel, a comment (in comments mode), or a profile, place or keyword row. The latest comments on each post, Instagram's AI summaries and view counts are included. Transcripts are $0.004 per started minute; reels with no detectable speech are usually skipped for transcription. Not billed: queries that find nothing, login-only sources and rows your filters remove. Free Apify plans are capped at 100 results per Instagram run.

You pay the listed event prices through your Apify account. There is no monthly fee to us.

Worked examples

Where others cost less

We'd rather you hear it here than find out later:

• apidojo/youtube-scraper charges $0.50 per 1,000 videos for basic metadata, with a 10-video minimum per query.
• apidojo's Instagram scraper is also around $0.50 per 1,000 rows.
• streamers/youtube-channel-scraper lists channel videos for $1.30 per 1,000 on Free when you only need what the channel page shows.

Our prices are set for bundled rows: comments and dislikes inside YouTube rows, AI summaries, comments and transcripts alongside Instagram rows, one Actor for every source.

Keeping a lid on spend

• maxItems (both Actors) and maxItemsPerQuery (Instagram) cap how many rows a run can produce.
• until on Instagram skips older posts, and profile scraping stops as soon as it reaches them.
• Set a maximum cost per run: maxTotalChargeUsd in the API or the run options in Apify Console.

From code, pass the cap with the run. This stops the run once it would cost more than $1:

const run = await client.actor('yugenox/youtube-scraper').call(
  { channels: ['Fireship'], maxItems: 500, maxComments: 20 },
  { maxTotalChargeUsd: 1 },
);

Run it from code

// Save as run.mjs, then: npm i apify-client && APIFY_TOKEN=... node run.mjs
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });

const run = await client.actor('yugenox/instagram-scraper').call({
  startUrls: [
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"
  ],
  maxItems: 100,
  commentsPerPost: 5
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const item of items) console.log(item.url, item.likeCount, item.commentCount);

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient  # pip install apify-client

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])

run = client.actor("yugenox/instagram-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"],
    "maxItems": 100,
    "commentsPerPost": 5,
})
if run is None:
    raise RuntimeError("Run did not finish")

for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("url"), item.get("likeCount"), item.get("commentCount"))

# Small jobs: runs the Actor and returns the rows in one call (up to 5 minutes).
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/yugenox~instagram-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls":["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"],"maxItems":100,"commentsPerPost":5}'

Last updated 2026-10-06.