What you actually pay to fetch a page
Here's the short version: on FourA a page costs 1 credit, and on Apify it costs however long the Actor ran. The key difference is that one is a number you know before the call; whilst the other you learn from the bill. If you're choosing between them for a scraping workload, that's the decision in a sentence. Both pricing pages were read on October 19, 2026.
What FourA charges per page
FourA bills per request. A plain HTTP fetch through Single is 1 credit. A JavaScript render through Browser is 5. You pay only for successful requests, so a fetch your own validate rule rejects is retried and not billed. Every call's cost comes back in an X-FourA-Credits header, so you read the price off the response instead of reconstructing it later.
Residential traffic, when you need it, counts against a per-plan GB allowance at $2 to $5 per GB depending on plan (FourA list prices in USD, as of October 19, 2026, on the pricing page). Standard traffic isn't metered by volume. The unit is the request, and the request has a fixed price.
What Apify charges for the same job
Apify bills platform usage. An Actor run is metered in compute units, one unit being 1 GB of RAM for one hour, at $0.13 to $0.20 per unit depending on plan, plus storage reads and writes, plus data transfer, plus proxy. Residential proxy is $8 per GB. Prepaid usage in each plan doesn't roll over; it expires at the end of the billing cycle.
So a single page's cost depends on how much memory the Actor uses and how long it runs. Apify says as much: the way to learn an Actor's cost is to "perform a test run" and check your billing afterward. The meter is compute time, not the page.
| One page | FourA | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Billed by | the request | compute time |
| Known upfront | yes, 1 credit | after a test run |
| Failed fetch | free | compute counts |
| Residential /GB | $2 to $5 | $8 |
Why FourA comes out ahead here
A per-request price is one you can budget. A thousand fetches is a thousand credits, whatever each page does on the way. Apify's compute meter moves with the Actor: a heavier page, a slower site, a longer run, and the same fetch costs more, with the number landing after the work. For a steady scraping job where you want the invoice to track the request count, the request is the better unit, and residential at $2 to $5 per GB beats $8.
Apify isn't trying to win that fight, though. The marketplace is its point: more than 90,000 ready-made Actors, so for a common target you run someone else's code and never write a parser. That's real added value and we frankly love their business model; and FourA doesn't offer it at the moment. But once you're running your own scraper at volume, a compute meter is a cost you model, while a per-request credit is one you already know.
Run the same job on FourA
Send a batch of your own URLs through Single and add up the credits: one per successful fetch, shown in the X-FourA-Credits header on each response. Then run the same batch anywhere that bills compute time and set the two statements side by side. For more on the costs a scraping bill hides behind its sticker price, see Web Scraping API Pricing: What the Sticker Hides.
Frequently asked
How does FourA price a single request? 1 credit for a plain fetch through Single, 5 for a JavaScript render through Browser, and nothing for a request that fails your validate rules.
Does Apify charge even when a run gets nothing? A run still consumes compute units for the memory and time it used, and compute is what Apify bills, so the usage counts whether or not the page came back.
What does FourA charge for bandwidth? Standard traffic isn't metered by volume on the public plans. Only traffic through a premium (residential) exit counts, against your plan's GB allowance, at $2 to $5 per GB.
Create a free account at https://auth.foura.ai/signup and push a batch of your own URLs through Single. The free plan includes 3,000 credits and needs no card, so you can watch the per-request price add up on your own traffic before you choose.