Instagram Comments Scraper — no login, no cookies

Pull every top-level comment from public Instagram posts and reels, without an account, without cookies and without a browser. Paste post links, get one clean row per comment.

What it does that the others don't

• No account at risk. It reads comments the way Instagram's own logged-out page does. There is no session to buy, rotate or get banned.
• A blocked post is never an empty post. Instagram sometimes throttles a reader, and sometimes ends a comment list early while looking finished. This actor resumes a throttled post from where it stopped, re-reads a list that ended suspiciously short, and if a post still yields nothing it comes back as an error row, unbilled, rather than as zero comments.
• Coverage you can check. For every post the run records the comment count Instagram shows, how many comments were collected, and why collection stopped (COVERAGE in the run's key-value store).
• Failed posts cost nothing. Deleted, private, age-gated or region-blocked posts and non-post links come back as free error rows.

What it does not do

• Replies are not included. Instagram serves replies only to logged-in viewers, and this actor never logs in. You get every top-level comment. The count Instagram displays on a post includes replies, so expect the collected number to sit somewhat below it — on our test posts top-level comments were 77–95% of the displayed count.
• Commenter display names are not included — Instagram does not send them to logged-out viewers. You get the username, user id and verified flag.
• It reads posts you give it. It does not search, crawl profiles or discover posts.

Input

Field	What it does
startUrls	Post or reel links (/p/…, /reel/…, /tv/…, with or without the account name), or bare shortcodes
maxCommentsPerPost	0 for every top-level comment, or a cap to control spend on viral posts (newest first)

{
  "startUrls": ["https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ28eTxo4s/", "https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeAYvsnn4la/"],
  "maxCommentsPerPost": 0
}

Output

One row per comment:

{
  "post_url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ28eTxo4s/",
  "shortcode": "DeJ28eTxo4s",
  "comment_id": "18000000000000000",
  "comment_url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJ28eTxo4s/c/18000000000000000/",
  "text": "Incredible shot!",
  "author_username": "example_user",
  "author_url": "https://www.instagram.com/example_user/",
  "author_id": "1234567890",
  "author_is_verified": false,
  "is_post_owner": false,
  "created_at": "2026-10-20T14:03:11.000Z",
  "likes": 12,
  "has_gif": false,
  "post_comment_count": 2140
}

• is_post_owner — the comment was written by the account that published the post.
• post_comment_count — the count Instagram displays on the post (replies included).
• has_gif — a GIF-only comment has empty text and has_gif: true.

Error rows (free) look like {"type": "error", "post_url": "…", "error": "post_not_found_404"}.

Pricing

You pay per comment collected. Error rows and posts with no comments cost nothing.

Tips

• Comments arrive newest first. To sample a viral post cheaply, set maxCommentsPerPost.
• Links copied from the app with tracking parameters (?igsh=…) work as they are.
• Large posts take longer: Instagram serves 10–15 comments per page, so a post with 5,000 comments needs a few hundred page reads. Several posts in one run are read in parallel.