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Actor platform vs pay-per-lookup APIApify Alternative: One API Instead of a Fleet of Actors
Apify is a genuinely good scraping platform: thousands of community Actors, scheduling, storage and webhooks. It is also a platform you have to assemble. If the job is answering questions about profiles, posts, videos and advertisers, one normalized API with one price per lookup is less to build and less to babysit.
Apify sells a scraping platform: you subscribe to a monthly plan, then run individually priced scraper Actors whose fees draw from prepaid usage that expires each billing cycle. 1Lookup sells social answers directly: profile checks, post metrics, video transcripts, social search, ad library and audience lookups as flat-priced synchronous calls on universal credits shared with phone, email and IP validation, one response shape across platforms.
The Actor jobs, priced per lookup
Each product below replaces a separately priced Actor integration with a single synchronous call, and the search and audience products extend past what most Actors return.
Instagram & TikTok profile Actors
Social Profile Check API
One endpoint and one response shape for 10 platforms, instead of one Actor per network with its own schema and per-result price.
10 credits per matched profile
Post & video scraper Actors
Social Post Lookup API
A post URL in; likes, comments, shares, views, caption and author out. Deleted posts bill nothing.
5 credits per matched post
Transcript & subtitle Actors
Video Transcript API
The full transcript of any public social video as text, only billed when one exists.
5 credits per found transcript
Ad library scraper Actors
Ad Library Lookup API
Live ads from the Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn and Google ad libraries behind one endpoint, one shape.
10 credits per lookup
1Lookup vs Apify: the same criteria, side by side
Both products measured on identical criteria, with Apify’s numbers taken from its own published pricing.
| Criteria | 1Lookup | Apify |
|---|---|---|
| Contact-data coverage | EmailPhoneIP | EmailPhoneIP |
| Pricing model | Monthly plans with universal credits; core phone, email and IP lookups cost 1 credit, enrichment and intelligence products cost more | Platform subscription with prepaid usage: Free ($0, $5 usage included), Starter ($29/mo, $29 usage), Scale ($199/mo, $199 usage), Business ($999/mo, $999 usage), 10% off billed annually. Individual scrapers ("Actors") then charge against that prepaid usage, either pay-per-event/pay-per-result prices set per Actor (e.g. Instagram results at $2.30 per 1,000 on Starter) or raw compute at $0.13-$0.20 per compute unit (1 GB of RAM running for 1 hour), plus optional proxy fees (residential $7-$8/GB). |
| Starting price | $99/mo for 20,000 credits ($4.95 per 1,000, down to $2.00 on Enterprise) | $29/mo Starter ($26/mo billed annually) includes $29 of prepaid platform usage - enough for ~12,600 Instagram results/mo at the official Instagram Scraper's $2.30 per 1,000-result Starter rate |
| Free option | Free single lookups via the online tools at 1lookup.io/tools, no account required | Free plan: $5 of platform usage credit every month (~1,850 Instagram Scraper results at its $2.70 per 1,000 Free-plan rate), 25 concurrent runs, community support |
| Free trial | 7-day free trial on every plan: $5 of credits on Starter, $20 on Growth, Professional, and Enterprise (card required, nothing charged up front) | No separate time-limited trial advertised on the pricing page; the Free plan's recurring $5/mo usage credit functions as the ongoing trial. Students get 30% off Starter and Scale, startups 30% off Scale. |
| Do credits expire? | Unused monthly credits roll over for 3 months; separately purchased credits last 1 year | Yes - the pricing page states "Unused usage credits are not rolled over to the next billing cycle, and they expire at the end of the billing cycle" (applies to each plan's prepaid usage, including the Free plan's $5) |
1Lookup
Apify
Cost per 1,000: Apify and 1Lookup
Published rates only, drawn on one shared scale that starts at $0.
- 1Lookup rate card
- Apify published tiers
Apify, per published tier
1,000 Instagram results (posts/reels/profiles/comments)
$2.30As published: $2.30 (plus the $29/mo subscription)
~12,600 Instagram results/mo
$2.30~104,700 Instagram results/mo
$1.90
1Lookup, reference band (a range, not a bar from $0)
All 4 plans, 20,000 lookups/mo to 1,000,000 lookups/mo
Cost per 1,000
| Product | Volume tier | Price | Cost per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | 1,000 Instagram results (posts/reels/profiles/comments) | $2.30 on the $29/mo Starter plan via the official Instagram Scraper's pay-per-event pricing ($2.70 on Free) | $2.30 (plus the $29/mo subscription) |
| Apify | ~12,600 Instagram results/mo | $29/mo Starter, spending the full $29 prepaid usage on Instagram Scraper at $2.30/1,000 | $2.30 |
| Apify | ~104,700 Instagram results/mo | $199/mo Scale, spending the full $199 prepaid usage at the Scale-tier $1.90/1,000 rate | $1.90 |
| 1Lookup | 20,000 lookups/mo | $99/mo (Starter) | $4.95 |
| 1Lookup | 85,000 lookups/mo | $299/mo (Growth) | $3.52 |
| 1Lookup | 250,000 lookups/mo | $799/mo (Professional) | $3.20 |
| 1Lookup | 1,000,000 lookups/mo | $1,999/mo (Enterprise) | $2.00 |
What Apify costs at volume
| Volume | Apify price | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000 Instagram results (posts/reels/profiles/comments) | $2.30 on the $29/mo Starter plan via the official Instagram Scraper's pay-per-event pricing ($2.70 on Free) | $2.30 (plus the $29/mo subscription) |
| ~12,600 Instagram results/mo | $29/mo Starter, spending the full $29 prepaid usage on Instagram Scraper at $2.30/1,000 | $2.30 |
| ~104,700 Instagram results/mo | $199/mo Scale, spending the full $199 prepaid usage at the Scale-tier $1.90/1,000 rate | $1.90 |
| 1,000 TikTok videos/profiles | from $1.70 per 1,000 results (clockworks/tiktok-scraper pay-per-event pricing) plus the platform subscription | from $1.70 |
Apify pricing stacks a platform subscription ($29-$999/mo) with per-Actor fees drawn from expiring prepaid usage; 1Lookup is a flat 3 to 40 credits per social lookup with no subscription floor beyond the credit plan you pick. Model your real monthly lookup count on both before choosing.
Where Apify wins
- Very low per-result cost for raw social scraping: Instagram data from $1.50 per 1,000 results (Business tier) and TikTok from $1.70 per 1,000 - far below typical per-lookup API pricing for bulk raw records
- Mature, heavily used social Actors: the official Instagram Scraper reports 355,000+ users, a 99.8% run success rate and a 4.76/5 rating; the TikTok Scraper reports 233,000+ users and 4.75/5
- Genuine recurring free tier: $5 of platform usage credit every month on the Free plan (~1,850 Instagram results), plus 30% student and startup discounts on paid plans
- Full automation platform, not just an endpoint: scheduling, dataset storage, webhooks, custom-code Actors and built-in proxies (residential $7-$8/GB), with pay-per-event Actors bundling platform compute into the per-result price
Where 1Lookup wins
- One integration, one response shape across platforms, instead of one Actor schema per network
- Flat per-lookup prices with success-billing: misses, dead profiles and empty searches cost 0 credits
- Credits roll over for up to 3 months and spend on all 40 products, validation included
- Synchronous answers in seconds, no run orchestration, dataset fetching or compute-unit math
Apify pricing and product facts verified against apify.com as of August 2026. Prices change; always confirm on the vendor’s site. 1Lookup numbers come from the live rate card.
Who this is for
A quick, honest read on which tool fits your use case.
Choose 1Lookup if: you want one synchronous API and one price per lookup for profiles, posts, transcripts, ads, and audience data, next to contact validation, instead of wiring separately priced scrapers into your app.
Consider Apify instead if: you want a scraping automation platform where you schedule Actor runs, store datasets, and can write custom scraping code of your own.
Frequently asked questions
How is 1Lookup different from running Apify Actors?
Two ways. Shape: 1Lookup lookups are synchronous API calls returning normalized JSON in seconds, where Actor runs are asynchronous jobs that write datasets you then fetch, and each Actor has its own input and output schema. Billing: 1Lookup is one flat credit price per lookup from a shared balance, where Actor fees are set per Actor and per plan tier and draw from prepaid platform usage.
Is Apify cheaper per result?
For raw bulk records, usually yes: the official Instagram Scraper runs $2.30 per 1,000 results on the $29/mo Starter plan, verified August 2026, which is well below per-lookup API pricing for the same row count. The trade is the subscription floor, per-Actor integration work, and prepaid usage that expires at the end of each billing cycle with no rollover.
Do 1Lookup credits expire like Apify usage credits?
Apify's pricing page states unused prepaid usage does not roll over and expires at the end of the billing cycle, including the Free plan's monthly $5. 1Lookup monthly credits roll over for up to 3 months, and every credit works on all 40 products, social or not.
When is Apify clearly the better choice?
When you want a scraping platform rather than answers: scheduled crawls of arbitrary sites, custom scraping code you write and host as your own Actor, dataset storage and webhooks, or community scrapers for long-tail targets no lookup API covers. Apify is built for exactly that, with a genuine recurring free tier.
Can 1Lookup replace several Actors at once?
That is the point of the suite. One credit balance and one response convention cover profile checks on 10 platforms, post metrics on 10, transcripts on 7, keyword search on 6, four ad libraries, TikTok audience countries and link-in-bio pages. Chaining is one call into another: Social Profile Check returns the bio's external link, and Link-in-Bio Lookup expands it.
Is Apify worth it in 2026?
As a scraping platform, yes: it is mature, widely used, and its per-result Actor pricing is competitive at volume. The honest split is build vs buy: pick Apify when you want to operate scraping as part of your stack, pick a per-lookup API when you want social answers to arrive as one HTTP response with no platform to run.