CA
unwilling-turquoise
Pay per result vs. monthly vs. "free" confusion
My example use case: I want to track 1000 TikTok profiles over time. So, let's say, once, a week, i want to scrape 1000 profiles page and their each most recent video. I set up Apify, and it seems to work well. But i have three different options and I'm not certain how the cost works out for each. For my example, I took 100 random profiles and gave it to each of these actors. Each returns 89 results, asking for one video per profile. (the other 11 I assume were broken / private / bad links, that's fine)
(1) TikTok Scraper Actor: https://console.apify.com/actors/GdWCkxBtKWOsKjdch/information/latest/readme - for $49/mo. Scraping 100 example profiles with 89 results cost me $0.439, ~ 0.50 cent per result, above the $49/month(?) as well. So crawling 4000 profiles a month would cost me $49 + $20 = $69 a month.
(2) TikTok Profile Scraper Actor: https://console.apify.com/actors/0FXVyOXXEmdGcV88a/information/latest/readme - for $5 / 1000 videos (0.50 cent per video). This does end up charging me 0.50c/result. This would cost me $20 a month.
(3) Free TikTok Scraper Actor: https://console.apify.com/actors/OtzYfK1ndEGdwWFKQ/information/latest/readme - for (free?), cost me $0.379. , 0.43 cent per result. this would cost me $17.20 a month.
My question is, why would i use (1) , when it'll cost me $49/mo + 0.50 cents per result, when I can use (2) or (3)? And also, what makes (3) "free"? I'm still being charged a fee per result. What am i missing?
5 Replies
unwilling-turquoiseOP•2y ago
Also, the $49/mo Actor has this on their docs page:
>And don't forget that choosing a higher plan will save you money in the long run.
What does that mean? Which higher plan are they referring to? I only see the $49/mo actor.
flat-fuchsia•2y ago
(1) - you pay a rental fee for the actor. You also pay for the runtime
(2) - you are paying per result
(3) - you are not paying anything for rental of the actor or per result, so yeah, it's free. 0.43 you are mentioning is the runtime costs, which are related to the platfrom, not the actor.
To answer your question about why would you not just use (3) -
This free version of TikTok Scraper will get you up to 20 videos and 5 comments per run
Higher plans have cheaper platform feesunwilling-turquoiseOP•2y ago
Ok. For (2) am I also paying platform fees as well as result fees? I’m only seeing the cost number that goes up as the run happens, and it’s always 0.005$ per result.
flat-fuchsia•2y ago
For (2) no - you don't pay the runtime cost (I should have mentioned it) - it's covered by pay per result fee. Also from the page -
This Actor is paid per result. You are not charged for the Apify platform usage, but only a fixed price for each dataset of 1,000 items in the Actor outputsunwilling-turquoiseOP•2y ago
Ok. Thanks for your help, I think I understand now !