We are introducing a new feature: tenancy for Standby Actors.

Standby mode Actors are a convenient way to host and monetize server-shaped tools on the Apify platform. A Standby mode Actor gets a URL to answer HTTP requests. It autoscales to meet demand instead of running as a job.

Until now, a request to the Standby URL started a run in the caller's account, on the caller's memory. That meant a cold start on the first request, no real control over scaling for you, and pricing that was hard to make profitable.

Multi-tenant Standby changes who runs the Actor. It's hosting a cloud service: you pay for the compute, you control the concurrency, and callers hit your instances. Each caller is charged per event, and the platform handles the routing, the caller's identity, and the metering.

Platform usage of paying-pool runs is deducted from your Actor’s payout. Apify covers platform usage of free-pool runs. When you call your own Actor directly, platform usage is charged to your account, while event charges only update statistics.

This covers run-attributed compute, data transfer, proxy usage, and storage operations. Storage retention remains charged to the storage owner’s account.

Tenancy is a per-Actor setting applicable to Standby Actors and has two possible values:

• Single-tenant: Every caller gets their own run in their own account and pays for it as platform usage. Right for anything that a user would want to use by themselves: per-organization web apps, a self-hosted LLM API, a browser pool API, etc.
• Multi-tenant: The new feature. Your Actor is behaving like a microservice running in your account, scaling to meet demand based on the scaling settings and responding to (and charging for) requests from many distinct callers.

Enabling multi-tenant Standby

Tenancy is a beta per-Actor setting. It’s this simple to make a multi-tenant Standby Actor. Two prerequisites before you switch:

1. Your Actor should have pay-per-event (PPE) monetization set up
2. Your Actor should have Standby enabled

To switch**:**

1. In Apify Console, open your Actor and go to Settings → Actor Standby.
2. Set Standby mode tenancy to Multi-tenant and confirm

What happens when you confirm? The change takes effect, within 2 minutes, for everyone already calling your Actor. Their next request is served from a pool of runs in your account instead of from a run in theirs. Nothing is queued or staged, so switch when you are ready to carry the traffic. You can switch back to single-tenant the same way, and that is immediate too.

How it works

Every request to a multi-tenant Standby URL is served by a pool of runs in your account. To control the cost and concurrency of the service running in your account, requests are routed to one of three pools based on who the caller is: