Dan Stephenson, ThoughtPivot

Apify retired rental pricing for Actors on October 1, 2026. Rental Actors that were not moved to pay-per-event became free to use and stopped earning their developers anything. Some developers moved to pay-per-event and are doing well. Others had heavy, recurring renters that a flat monthly price suited better.

Bytewells by ThoughtPivot is a second store for those Actors. It is in private beta now, and the public store opens on Monday, November 2. This post covers the question I get most from Actor developers: do I have to maintain a second codebase?

Short answer: no. Here is how it works, and what it does not do yet.

Your Apify listing stays live

There is no exclusivity. You keep your Apify listing and your Apify pricing. Bytewells is an extra channel for the same Actor. Renters run the built image and never receive your source.

The code doesn't change

Bytewells exposes an Apify-compatible API. Actors written with the Apify SDK and Crawlee, and clients using apify-client, work unchanged; a client points at a different base URL instead of being rewritten.

Inside the Actor, Actor.init(), Actor.getInput(), Actor.pushData() and Actor.exit() behave the way they do on Apify. One codebase ships to both stores.

Import instead of re-listing

Import brings over your Actor's source, README, input schema and pricing, then builds the listing. There are two ways in:

• Console: sign in with Apify, pick your Actors, and they come in as draft listings you can review before publishing.
• CLI (for tokens and CI): the package is @thoughtpivot/bytewells on npm.

npm install -g @thoughtpivot/bytewells
bw signup --username you
bw import apify you/your-actor --publish

Waitlist developers get hands-on help with the import during the private beta.

How renters pay

• Monthly rental, with a free trial you set.
• Optional passes for bursty work: Flash (1 hour), Burst (24 hours) and Sprint (7 days). Pay-per-use charges inside a window are capped at the next tier's price, like a transit fare cap.
• Compute is billed separately from the renter's prepaid credit at $0.15 per compute unit, against $0.20 on Apify Starter and $0.13 on Apify Business. That is a per-unit rate. What a run costs overall depends on how much compute it uses and on the Actor's own price.

Commission is 10% (20% on Apify), and 0% on renters you bring yourself. Payouts go out monthly through Stripe once your balance reaches $50; check the developer page for the countries Stripe payouts currently cover.

Who this fits

Our September analysis of 291 former rental Actors put the median break-even at 7,411 results a month. Renters pulling more than that paid less with rental plus compute than with pay-per-event at Apify list prices; below it, pay-per-event was cheaper. If your heaviest renters run pipelines, schedules or agents every day, a monthly price may suit them. Full method: https://bytewells.com/apify-rental-alternative

What it doesn't do yet

• No paying renters yet. We are building supply and demand at the same time and would rather say so.
• Pay-per-usage pricing on Bytewells comes after launch. We started with rentals because that is the model that lost its home on October 1.
• Agent pass purchase via MCP is coming. An MCP server that lets agents find Actors, run them and buy passes is on the roadmap. Today, rentals and passes are bought by people.

Get in early

If you have Actors on Apify and want them live when the store opens, join the developer waitlist: https://bytewells.com/developer-waitlist

If rentals were part of your income before October 1, I would like to hear what changed for you, in the comments or by reply.

thoughtpivot