Comparison

Grabber vs Apify

Apify's Website Content Crawler crawls whole sites into Markdown for RAG, billed by compute time on Apify's platform. Grabber fetches one page per request, at a flat price.

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At a glance

	Grabber	Apify
How you pay	Prepaid credit, from $5. No plans	Platform plans: Free with $5 of usage a month, Starter $19 a month
Pay without a subscription	Yes: it is the only way to pay	Only as overage on a paid plan
A static page	$0.001	About $0.0002 with the raw HTTP crawler, by Apify's estimate
A JavaScript page	$0.005 with js_render=true	$0.0005 to $0.005 with a headless browser, by Apify's estimate
Failed requests	Never charged. A page that loads with a 404 or 500 status is charged	Not stated. Usage is billed by compute time, including retries
Unused credit	Valid for 365 days	Monthly usage does not roll over
Free tier	$1 at signup, about 1,000 pages, no card	$5 of usage a month, no card
Formats	Markdown, HTML, text, links, raw body, page metadata	Markdown, text, HTML, metadata, files, screenshots
MCP server	Yes, remote	Yes, through Apify's MCP server
Rate limit	60 requests a minute per key	5 concurrent runs on the free plan

Checked on October 27, 2026 against Apify's own pricing page and docs. Prices change, so check the sources below before you decide.

What it costs

Example	Grabber	Apify
1,000 static pages	$1	About $0.20, inside the free $5
100,000 static pages	$100	About $20
1,000 rendered pages	$5	$0.50 to $5

Apify's figures are the estimates on its Actor page, which assume $0.25 per compute unit; its pricing page lists $0.20 or less. The real cost depends on the site.

When Apify is the better choice

You want to crawl whole sites: depth and page limits, URL patterns, sitemaps, llms.txt and incremental crawls.
You want a platform around the crawler: schedules, webhooks, storage, and integrations with LangChain, LlamaIndex and vector databases.
On static sites at volume, Apify's estimated cost per page is lower.
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When Grabber is the better choice

You fetch single pages: one GET request returns the page, instead of a crawler run. Apify itself suggests another tool for single URLs.
You want to know the price before the request: $0.001 a page, not compute time that depends on the site.
Your agent fetches pages as it works: Grabber's fetch_page tool returns the content in the tool result.
Credit that lasts a year, with no monthly plan.

Switching from Apify

Website Content Crawler runs as an Actor and writes to a dataset. Grabber answers each GET request with the page.

Apify	Grabber
Run the Actor with `startUrls`	`GET /fetch?url=…`, one page per request
`crawlerType: "cheerio"`	The default
`crawlerType: "playwright:firefox"`	`js_render=true`
Markdown in the dataset	`formats=markdown`
`maxCrawlDepth` and URL globs	No equivalent: follow `formats=links` yourself

Questions

Something else? The docs cover every parameter and error, and you can reach us from the dashboard.

Is Grabber cheaper than Apify?

For static pages at volume, Apify's own estimate of about $0.20 per 1,000 pages is lower than Grabber's $1. For single pages on demand, Grabber is simpler: $0.001 a page, with no plan and no compute time.

Can Grabber crawl a whole site?

No. Grabber fetches one page per request. Ask for formats=links to see where to go next.

Does Apify have an MCP server?

Yes, at mcp.apify.com, and it can run Website Content Crawler. Grabber's MCP server returns the page in the tool result.