Pick Apify if you need a scraping platform — scheduled runs, dataset storage, and actors for far more than Google Search. Pick serp.cheap if you only need Google organic results from a plain HTTP endpoint at a flat $0.0006 per fresh request. The deciding factor is the billing model: Apify’s Google Search Scraper is metered in compute units, so the effective cost per search depends on how each run executes; serp.cheap meters requests, so the same query volume always produces the same bill.
serp.cheap vs Apify at a glance
| serp.cheap | Apify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price / 1,000 | $0.30 cached / $0.60 fresh | ~$0.80–$3.50 (compute) |
| Billing model | Pay as you go | Usage-based (compute units) |
| Credits expire | After 12 months | Platform credits |
| Free tier | 100 searches, no card | $5 free/mo |
| Search engines | ||
| Real google.com | ✅ Live google.com | ✅ Live google.com |
| Knowledge Graph | ✅ | Some |
| Countries | 12 | Many |
| Min. spend | None | Platform plan |
| Response | ✅ Synchronous (<3s avg) | ◑ Actor runs |
Prices last reviewed June 2026 — always check the provider’s pricing page.
Where serp.cheap wins
- The bill is arithmetic, not a guess. Requests × rate. $0.0006 fresh, $0.0003 cached. Compute-unit billing means the same 1,000 queries can cost different amounts depending on how the actor run goes; per-request billing can’t.
- No actor lifecycle for a single search. With Apify’s scraper you start a run, wait for it to finish, then pull items from a dataset. serp.cheap is one synchronous POST — JSON back in under 3 seconds on average, milliseconds on a cache hit.
- No platform plan in the way. Pay-as-you-go from $0.75/1k, dropping to $0.60–0.70/1k at volume. Credits valid for 12 months, no monthly minimum, no contract.
- Cheaper than its own Apify listing. The serp.cheap actor on Apify runs ~$1.50/1k; the direct API is $0.75/1k or less. If you don’t need the Apify wrapper, skip it and pocket the difference.
Where Apify wins
- It’s a complete scraping platform. Scheduling, dataset storage, webhooks, and proxy management come built in — with serp.cheap you bring your own cron and storage.
- Actors for everything, not just Google Search. Maps, Shopping, Images, social networks — serp.cheap covers none of those; it returns organic results and Knowledge Graph only.
- Broader geo coverage. serp.cheap serves 12 countries (US, BR, GB, DE, FR, ES, IT, MX, CA, AU, JP, NL); Apify covers many more.
- Recurring free platform credit. $5 in Apify platform credit every month, paid by card. serp.cheap’s direct top-ups take card (Stripe) or crypto, no KYC — or buy through the marketplaces.
What switching looks like
With Apify you configure the Google Search Scraper actor, trigger a run, and read organic results out of the run’s dataset. With serp.cheap the whole exchange is one request:
curl https://api.serp.cheap/v1/search \
-H 'X-API-Key: KEY' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"q":"coffee grinder","gl":"us"}'The response carries organic[] — each item has position, title, link, snippet, plus date and sitelinks when present — and a knowledgeGraph object when Google shows a Knowledge Graph panel. Mapping from Apify’s scraper output is mechanical: its organic items expose a title, a URL, and a description; those become title, link, and snippet. Country selection moves from the actor’s country input to the gl body parameter, language to hl, and pagination to a 1-indexed page. What doesn’t carry over: scheduling (the actor’s cron becomes your own), result persistence (Apify keeps datasets; serp.cheap returns JSON and forgets it), and any non-organic data the actor was scraping.
The cost math on a real workload
Say you track 500 keywords once a day for 30 days — 15,000 fresh searches a month.
- serp.cheap, pay-as-you-go: 15,000 × $0.00075 = $11.25/mo (drops to $9.00 at the $0.60/1k volume rate)
- Apify Google Search Scraper, compute-based: at the ~$0.80–$3.50/1k effective range above, 15 × $0.80 to 15 × $3.50 = $12.00–$52.50/mo, and where you land in that range isn’t knowable until the runs execute
- serp.cheap actor on Apify: 15 × $1.50 = $22.50/mo — the card-friendly middle ground
Best case the platforms roughly tie; worst case Apify costs ~4.7× more for identical organic results. The spread itself is the argument for per-request billing.
When Apify is the right choice
- You’re scraping more than Google Search — Maps, Shopping, e-commerce sites, social — and want one platform and one bill for all of it.
- You want scheduling, storage, and retries handled for you instead of wiring up your own infrastructure around an API.
- You need countries outside serp.cheap’s 12.
- You need card billing on a platform you already use (though the serp.cheap actor on Apify covers that too).
Verdict
This isn’t really an either/or between two SERP APIs — it’s infrastructure scope versus unit cost. If Google organic results are one feed among many scrapers you run, stay on Apify and consider the serp.cheap actor for the search portion. If Google Search is the whole job, the direct API at a flat $0.60–0.75/1k is the cheaper and simpler tool.
For the full market picture, see our Google Search API pricing comparison and the price-ranked cheapest SERP API 2026.
Try serp.cheap
Skip the actor lifecycle and get Google organic results from a single synchronous endpoint. 100 free searches on signup — no card required; pay-as-you-go from $0.75/1k after that, and credits stay valid for 12 months.
- Get your free API key →
- Prefer paying by card? serp.cheap is also on RapidAPI (
$0.90/1k) and Apify ($1.50/1k).