Apify YouTube Scraper Alternative

It is also the most expensive per result of the major social Actors, and it is built around videos rather than creators. Both facts matter depending on what you are building.

What it returns

Per the Actor page: titles, view counts, likes, subscriber counts, channel name, upload date, comment count, duration, thumbnails, subtitles and transcripts, plus channel location and monetization status. Exports to JSON, CSV, XLSX and HTML.

Transcripts and monetization status are genuinely useful and not things a creator database carries. If your product analyses video content, or you need to know whether a channel is monetized, this Actor earns its price and you should use it.

The unit mismatch

The pricing unit is per 1,000 videos, not per channel. That is the right unit for the Actor's design and the wrong one for creator work, and the gap is larger than it looks.

To evaluate 1,000 YouTube creators you do not want 1,000 videos. You want recent video performance per channel, which means pulling perhaps 10 to 30 videos each to compute a meaningful engagement baseline. At 20 videos per channel, evaluating 1,000 creators is 20,000 video results, or roughly $48 at the $2.40 per 1,000 floor, before compute, proxy and storage. Evaluating 10,000 creators is 200,000 results and around $480 in Actor fees alone.

That cost scales with how rigorous you want your engagement math to be, which is a strange incentive to build a creator selection product on.

And the $2.40 floor is a Business plan ($999/mo) price. Lower plans pay more per result. Apify's own Instagram scraper page shows the spread plainly: $2.70 per 1,000 on Free against $1.50 on Business.

No channel discovery

The Actor's inputs are URLs, search terms and channel identifiers. There is no filtering by subscriber range, engagement rate, niche, upload cadence, country or contact availability.

You can scrape search results and filter afterwards in your own code. That works, and it means paying per video result for a candidate pool you mostly discard, then implementing channel level aggregation, engagement computation, deduplication and ranking yourself.

There is also no first party Apify Actor for creator discovery or contact on any platform. For that layer the Store offers only community Actors, the two main ones showing 9 lifetime users and 61 lifetime users as of 1 October 2026, with no first party ownership or SLA, and one of them doubling its Instagram lead price on 7 October 2026.

The engagement math problem, specifically

Creator selection on YouTube needs a defensible engagement number, and YouTube makes that harder than Instagram or TikTok because the denominator is ambiguous. Do you divide engagement by subscribers or by views? Subscribers understates reach for a channel whose Shorts travel well beyond its subscriber base. Views overstates consistency for a channel with one viral outlier and a flat median.

So you pick a method. Then you discover the method drives the cost:

• Subscriber based needs one channel record, which is cheap, and gives you a number that is misleading for Shorts heavy channels.
• View based on recent uploads needs enough recent videos per channel to establish a median rather than a mean, because a single outlier wrecks an average. That is realistically 10 to 30 videos.
• Separating Shorts from long form, which matters because they behave completely differently, needs more videos still, since you need a usable sample of each format.

At 20 videos per channel across 5,000 candidate channels, that is 100,000 billable video results, roughly $240 in Actor fees at the $2.40 per 1,000 floor, before compute units, proxy bandwidth and storage operations. The more defensible your methodology, the larger the bill, and you still have to write and maintain the aggregation.

This is the structural reason per video billing is awkward for creator selection. It is not a criticism of the Actor, which is billing fairly for what it does. It is a mismatch between the unit the tool sells and the unit the decision needs.

What you still have to build

Assume the scraping works perfectly. On top of it you own:

• Channel level aggregation. Rolling many video rows up into one creator record, keyed on something stable.
• Engagement computation, with whichever methodology you settled on, applied consistently as you add channels over months.
• Niche classification. The Actor returns titles and descriptions, not a category. You infer the niche, usually with keyword rules that misfire or a model call per channel.
• Contact discovery. Not returned at all. YouTube about pages gate email behind a captcha, so this is typically a separate vendor or a manual step.
• Deduplication across the same creator appearing under multiple channels or cross posting to other platforms.
• Refresh scheduling, because follower counts and engagement move, so every record has a staleness policy and a re scrape cost.

None of that is hard individually. Together it is a service with an owner, a backlog and a pager, and it is the real cost of the approach rather than the $2.40 per 1,000.

Run model and latency

Apify runs are asynchronous: POST a run, receive an immediate run object, poll for completion, then fetch dataset items. The synchronous endpoint waits up to 300 seconds and then times out with an error.

Apify has genuinely improved startup, cutting median container start from 7 seconds to 1.2 seconds, but that precedes actor boot, browser launch, navigation and polling. Scraping 20 videos per channel across hundreds of channels is a batch job measured in minutes, not a response you serve to a waiting user.

Cost beyond the Actor fee

Apify meters compute units, data transfer, proxy and storage operations separately from Actor fees. A compute unit is memory times duration, so identical output costs different amounts depending on how hard the target resists. Residential proxy runs $7 to $8 per GB on the pricing page. Prepaid plan usage expires monthly without rolling over.

Worth noting for anyone whose bill moved recently: Apify's docs state that rental Actors were fully retired on 1 October 2026 and migrated to pay per usage, following a freeze on new rental Actors from 1 April 2026.

What a creator first approach changes

A creator data API bills per creator record and precomputes the engagement math, so evaluating creators does not get more expensive the more carefully you do it:

curl "https://api.ugcroster.com/v1/creators/search" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer rsk_your_key_here" \
  -G \
  -d niche=tech \
  -d follower_min=50000 \
  -d engagement_min=0.03 \
  -d has_email=true \
  -d sort=engagement \
  -d limit=100

Ten credits for 100 filtered records, each with engagement_rate already computed and extracted_email as a field. One round trip, server side filtering.

One honest scope note so this is not oversold: the Roster creator graph covers Instagram and TikTok, more than 1,000,000 creators across the two. If YouTube channel data specifically is your requirement, streamers/youtube-scraper or a dedicated YouTube API is the right tool and this is not a substitute for it. Many teams run both: YouTube scraping for channel and video analysis, a creator API for Instagram and TikTok discovery plus the campaign workflow after it.

Keep the Apify YouTube Actor when

• You need transcripts or subtitles at scale
• You need video level metrics, durations or thumbnails
• You need channel monetization status or location
• You are analysing content rather than selecting creators
• You need arbitrary non YouTube targets, where Apify's 78,000+ Actors and custom Actor support are unmatched
• You want to write your own scraper, or build on Crawlee and self host for nothing

Move the creator vertical when discovery is the feature, you need normalized Instagram and TikTok records without writing the mapping, contact needs to be filterable, a user is waiting, or you need to brief, contract and pay the creators afterwards. The UGC Roster API exposes creator search, briefs, campaigns and payouts behind one key at UGCRoster.

See also the full Apify alternative breakdown, the TikTok and Instagram Actor comparisons, Apify pricing decoded and how creator data APIs compare.

Docs at api.ugcroster.com/docs, reference at api.ugcroster.com/reference, plans at api.ugcroster.com/pricing, keys at api.ugcroster.com/keys.

FAQ

How much does the Apify YouTube scraper cost?

streamers/youtube-scraper is listed from $2.40 per 1,000 videos as of 1 October 2026, which is the highest per result price among the major social Actors. That figure is the Business plan ($999/mo) rate and lower plans pay more. Compute units, data transfer, proxy at $7 to $8 per GB residential, and storage operations are all metered separately.

Does the Apify YouTube scraper return subscriber counts?

Yes, along with titles, views, likes, upload date, comment count, duration, thumbnails, subtitles and transcripts, plus channel location and monetization status. The unit of billing is videos rather than channels, so pulling enough videos per channel to compute a reliable engagement baseline multiplies the cost.

Can I find YouTube creators by subscriber count or niche?

Not with this Actor. Inputs are URLs, search terms and channel identifiers, with no filters for subscriber range, engagement rate, niche, country or contact availability. You can scrape search results and filter in your own code, but you pay per video result for the whole candidate pool and implement channel aggregation and ranking yourself.

Why does evaluating creators on Apify cost more than it looks?

Because the billing unit is videos and creator evaluation needs several videos per channel. At 20 videos per channel, assessing 1,000 creators is 20,000 billable results, roughly $48 in Actor fees at the $2.40 floor, plus compute, proxy and storage. The more rigorous your engagement math, the more it costs, which is an awkward incentive for a selection product.

Does Apify have a YouTube creator contact or email Actor?

Not a first party one. The Store's influencer email and discovery Actors are community maintained, with 9 and 61 lifetime users respectively as of 1 October 2026, no SLA and no first party ownership. One of them raises its Instagram lead price from $0.002 to $0.004 per lead on 7 October 2026.

What is the best alternative for YouTube creator data?

Separate the two jobs. For YouTube channel and video data including transcripts, streamers/youtube-scraper at 4.80 stars is a strong option and a creator database will not replace it. For creator discovery with filters, normalized records, queryable contact and the hiring workflow afterwards, a creator data API is the better fit, and on Instagram and TikTok it replaces the scraping path entirely.