Discover related Instagram profiles via Instagram's Suggested for You algorithm. Expand from 1–5 seed handles to find similar creators, qualify leads, and map a niche. 25+ filters (followers, engagement rate, language, contacts, Reels views) + full per-profile enrichment.
The free-plan cap notice no longer blames your filters for profiles that were actually lost to private or unavailable accounts. The «your filters kept N of the 5» wording now appears only when filters really rejected candidates; otherwise the notice states the plain delivered count.
[0.0.41] - 2026-07-02
Changed
README «Example tasks» now links two new ready-to-run tasks — «Find travel influencers on Instagram» and «Find food bloggers on Instagram» (six one-click examples total). No code changes.
[0.0.40] - 2026-07-02
Added
Zero-result runs now explain themselves on the completed screen. A free run that ends with nothing saved shows the likely cause and the fastest fix — «your filters rejected all N discovered profiles» (with a pointer to free offline re-filtering) or «Instagram returned no related profiles for your seeds» (with a proven starter seed) — instead of a generic completion screen with an upgrade button.
Filter coaching where it actually helps. When filters zero out a free run, the run report now explains that the free plan discovers 5 profiles before filters and that re-filtering cached results is free (Enable Offline Mode). The input form's filtering section teaches the same before the run, and a new «Tips & best practices» README section collects the field-tested guidance.
Six new FAQ entries — no login/cookies needed, scheduling on the free plan, getting more than 5 profiles per run, the exact API field names (and the common wrong guesses), and free offline re-filtering.
The run summary now reports how many profiles were discovered before filters and whether the free discovery cap held back results.
Changed
The free-plan heads-up message now tells the whole story when filters trimmed a capped harvest — «discovery stopped at the free-plan limit of 5, and your filters kept 3 of the 5» — instead of only naming the cap.
The completed screen's free-plan box now states the real limit for this actor (5 discovered profiles per run); it previously showed a 50-profile figure that belongs to a different mode family.
Fixed
The FREE_LIMITS_APPLIED storage record now lists the discovery cap only when the cap actually held back delivered results. Previously it appeared on nearly every free run — including runs where nothing was held back — which made the record useless for understanding what limited your run.
[0.0.39] - 2026-07-01
Added
A clear heads-up when free runs hit the discovery limit. On the free plan, network discovery stops after 5 related profiles. Previously it just stopped silently. Now the run shows a short message: how many related profiles this run delivered, that your seeds had more to discover beyond the limit, and a one-click way to lift the cap by re-running the same input on a paid plan. No change to billing, run behaviour, or input schema.
[0.0.38] - 2026-06-22
Added
New "Example tasks" section in the README linking ready-to-run example tasks — one-click, pre-configured use cases (find related accounts, discover niche creators, find competitors, expand your niche) you can run with no setup.
[0.0.37] - 2026-06-10
Fixed
The narrow-filters heads-up introduced in 0.0.36 now names this actor's real cost-control field in the message itself. The on-screen suggestion said to validate with a small maxCount, but this actor's field is maxCountExpansion (as the 0.0.36 notes already stated) — following the on-screen advice as written had no capping effect.
On free plans the heads-up no longer counts filter options that the free plan does not apply (engagement, recency, views and view/follower-ratio filters) — predictions match what the run will actually do.
With Filter Combination = OR, combining Keywords with a Business Category no longer over-states the expected filtering — under OR the two widen the match instead of narrowing it.
Changed
The heads-up now also accounts for the engagement, posting-recency, views and follower-range filters when estimating how much of a fetched list will be kept. Runs using only those filters previously produced no prediction at all.
[0.0.36] - 2026-06-10
Added
Heads-up before launching a run with very narrow filters. Some filter combinations (for example Contact Info combined with Profile Language, or Keywords combined with Location Keywords) save only a small fraction of fetched profiles — billing is per fetched profile, not per saved profile, so a big run with such filters can be much pricier per saved result than expected. The actor now shows a pre-run warning estimating the expected save-rate, suggests validating yield with a small maxCountExpansion first, and writes the prediction to a new FILTER_BURN_PREDICTION record in the run's Storage tab. No change to billing, run behaviour, or input schema.
[0.0.35] - 2026-06-05
Fixed
More patient when Instagram briefly returns a server error on the first account lookup. The account-resolution step now uses the same long retry window the related-profile chain reads already use — short upstream hiccups no longer abort the run with "Temporary Unavailable" / zero results. No change to behavior on successful runs; no change to billing.
[0.0.34] - 2026-06-03
Fixed
Profile-category filters (Filter for Influencers Only and Filter by Specific Business Category) now match category names regardless of capitalisation. Previously, a profile whose category came back as "Digital creator" was treated as different from "Digital Creator" — the same string with one letter cased differently — and was incorrectly excluded. On creator-heavy queries this was rejecting up to ~45% of analysed profiles. No input change needed; existing filter settings are strictly more inclusive after the fix.
[0.0.33] - 2026-05-29
Added
A short callout near the top of the README announcing the new Instagram Follower Tracker — a sibling Actor (same author) that reports who started following and who unfollowed any public account over time. Links to its Store page for anyone who wants change-over-time monitoring rather than a one-time scrape.
[0.0.32] - 2026-05-28
Fixed
Runs started via API, MCP, or a schedule now finish as soon as the results are ready, instead of holding a 20-second "completed" screen at the end. That hold only ever helped the in-browser live view; for synchronous API and agent/MCP integrations it was dead time that could push a long run past the caller's own timeout — so the caller could receive nothing even though the run finished and was billed. Runs you start from the web console keep the completed screen unchanged.
[0.0.31] - 2026-05-26
Fixed
Runs that end with every input seed skipped now always say why. The previously silent case — some seeds 404'd, some are private, some filter-rejected, and some hit a temporary read error in the same run — now ends with a clear "Nothing was scraped this run" note that lists each category. A separate case — every seed reachable but every read hit a temporary rate-limit — now says "Couldn't finish reading, please re-run" instead of finishing blank.
Paid-plan welcome / check-in messages no longer overshadow real run results. The onboarding banner only surfaces when there's nothing more specific to report.
[0.0.30] - 2026-05-25
Fixed
Large follower / following lists now finish reliably even if a single page briefly hiccups partway through. Before, one temporary blip while reading a long list could stop the read early and return a truncated list; the read now waits and retries that page before moving on, so big accounts come back complete.
[0.0.29] - 2026-05-22
Changed
Maintenance build — no user-facing changes.
[0.0.28] - 2026-05-22
Changed
Added the Instagram Profile MCP Server (connect Claude / Cursor / ChatGPT to live Instagram data via MCP tools) to the Related Actors section. No change to input, output, behaviour, or pricing.
[0.0.27] - 2026-05-22
Changed
Added the new Instagram Follower Tracker (track who follows / unfollows a public account over time) to the Related Actors section. No change to input, output, behaviour, or pricing.
[0.0.26] - 2026-05-12
Fixed
Dataset was not found warning storm on clearSavedData: true runs — every fresh-data run was silently logging hundreds of [finalize] checkpointDataset.pushData failed: Dataset was not found and matching detailedCacheDataset warnings during the account-processing loop. Cause: the drop-then-reopen sequence wrapped the reopen in a 3-second timeout and silently kept the stale dataset reference when the timeout fired, so every subsequent pushData targeted a just-dropped backend store. Replaced the racey block with a retry-until-writable helper (6 attempts, 1.5–10 s backoff) that aborts the run loudly if it can't recreate the checkpoint and detailed-cache datasets — propagated 1:1 from parent instagram-profile-scraper 0.1.50. Same input, output, and pricing.
[0.0.25] - 2026-05-11
Changed
README — Dropped the Offline mode section. Production-analytics data shows zero of 160 runs since 2026-03-11 used enableOfflineMode: true. The feature stays in the input schema's Advanced Run & Storage section for the few users who need it. Same input, output, and pricing.
[0.0.24] - 2026-05-08
Changed
Maintenance build — no user-facing changes.
[0.0.23] - 2026-05-07
Changed
README — refreshed structure for clarity (restored prior section layout). Same input, output, dataset shape, and pricing.
[0.0.22] - 2026-05-07
Changed
README — aligned to Apify quality template. Hero rewritten with value-first prose and a "beyond what Instagram's official Graph API offers" comparison (Graph API doesn't expose the recommendation graph at all); numbered 3-step Quick start; new 💡 Tips & Best Practices section (4 sub-sections × 3 bullets); new 🛟 Support & feedback section pointing to Apify Store reviews / bookmark / Issues tab; promoted disclaimer to dedicated ⚖️ Is it legal to scrape Instagram? H2 with link to Apify's web-scraping legality blog; FAQ expanded to 12 Q&As (including legality, ban risk, data freshness); offline-mode section consolidated with Resume; MCP wrapper added to Related actors. No functional changes — same input, output, dataset shape, and pricing.
[0.0.21] - 2026-05-06
Fixed
Test runs that used the default demo seed now also write a USER_MESSAGE storage record (in addition to the existing console banner). API-origin runs that never open the run console will now see — wherever they read run output — that the run used the example seed (openai), the output was capped at 10 profiles for cheap testing, and the canonical input field for their own seeds is startUsernames. Previously the only signal was the console banner, so customers who started the actor programmatically with the example seed could end up with 10 unrelated test profiles and assume that's what the actor returned for their input.
Runs that returned 0 profiles because Instagram had no «Suggested for You» suggestions for the seed now show a distinct Stop Reason: "No related profiles found for seed account(s)" instead of completing identically to a successful run, and write a USER_MESSAGE storage record explaining what happened with three concrete next steps (try a more popular seed in the same niche, try the sibling Instagram Profile Scraper's keywordDiscovery mode, or add multiple seeds). Each affected seed is also recorded in SKIPPED_ACCOUNTS under a new category no_related_profiles. This is the most common failure mode for small / niche / non-English / very new seed accounts.
Unknown input field names now surface a warning in the run log and a USER_MESSAGE storage record instead of being silently dropped. Common typos and field names imported from sibling actors — e.g. profileUrls, seedAccounts, usernames, accounts, maxItems, maxResults, maxProfiles — are detected and mapped back to their canonical names (startUsernames, maxCountExpansion). Previously a run configured with the wrong field name would still execute but ignore the customer's intended values without any indication.
[0.0.20] - 2026-05-06
Changed
The "Estimated run time" log line is now closer to typical real-world durations. After the 0.0.19 retry-pacing + concurrency speedup, an 80-account run on this actor now typically finishes in about a minute on a clean upstream — the previous estimate of "~2m 30s" was over-predicting by 2× because it still carried the old retry-overhead buffer. The estimate now reflects the post-fix baseline. (On a slower upstream day the run can still take longer than the estimate — live progress is in the "Status:" heartbeat printed every 60s.)
[0.0.19] - 2026-05-06
Changed
Faster recovery from transient upstream errors. The retry-pacing wait between attempts on 5xx was reduced from 5s/10s/15s to 2s/4s/6s, so brief upstream wobbles no longer add minutes to a run. Successful retry rate is unchanged — observed runs already recovered within the first two attempts.
Higher concurrency ceiling (8 → 16 parallel requests). Until now, runs on plans with high upstream rate were capped at 8 concurrent requests by the actor itself; the new ceiling lets larger upstream rate plans translate into faster runs immediately.
The "Estimated run time" buffer was tightened from 1.5× to 1.25× to reflect the lower pacing overhead.
[0.0.18] - 2026-05-06
Changed
Phone-number extraction is now off by default. Most lead-gen workflows rely on email and website; phone-number availability on Instagram profiles is low. Toggle "Extract Phone Number" on in the input form if you need phones. Users who already had it enabled keep getting phone numbers as before.
The "Estimated run time" log line now factors in a 1.5× buffer for upstream retries, so the printed ETA matches real-world durations more closely on long runs.
[0.0.17] - 2026-05-06
Changed
The "All target accounts unreachable" diagnostic now spells out all common causes for a 404 — the account may be private, deleted, banned, or the username is misspelled — instead of only "deleted or username changed", so users have a clearer first-pass checklist when a target fails.
[0.0.16] - 2026-05-05
Fixed
"No profiles matched filters" is no longer reported on small runs that fetched zero expansion candidates upstream — it now fires only when at least one candidate was actually evaluated against your filters. Previously, a run with maxCountExpansion=1 could trip this diagnostic incorrectly when the fetch returned no candidates at all (a different root cause that should surface as "Completed successfully" with 0 saved, not as filter rejection).
[0.0.15] - 2026-05-05
Fixed
Dataset rows again land normally when a profile is missing follower / engagement metrics. Previously the dataset schema declared Followers Count, Following Count, Reels Count, Avg Likes, Avg Comments, Posts in Last 30 Days, Posts per Month, Total Posts, and Last Post Within (Days) as strict integers/numbers, but the actor emits the string "N/A" for these fields when the underlying value is unavailable — causing the platform to reject every push with "Schema validation failed" and the run to complete with 0 saved profiles. The 9 affected fields now accept either a number or the "N/A" sentinel.
[0.0.14] - 2026-05-05
Changed
Improved diagnostics when every expansion candidate is rejected by the configured filters. Runs now show Stop Reason: No profiles matched filters (instead of completing silently with 0 saved profiles or showing the misleading "User profile limit reached") and write a USER_MESSAGE storage record listing the top 3 filter rejections so it's easier to see which filter to relax.
[0.0.13] - 2026-05-05
Changed
Improved diagnostics when every seed account in a run is deleted, renamed, or private. Runs now show Stop Reason: All target accounts unreachable (instead of "Completed successfully") and write a USER_MESSAGE storage record explaining what happened, so paid runs against accounts that no longer exist surface a clear message rather than completing silently with 0 profiles.
Unreachable seed accounts (404 / private) are now recorded in the SKIPPED_ACCOUNTS storage record with category not_found / private / error. Previously seed-fetch failures were logged to console but absent from the storage record.
[0.0.12] - 2026-05-04
Maintenance build — no user-facing changes.
[0.0.11] - 2026-05-04
Fixed
Dataset rows again land normally. The 0.0.10 dataset-schema rollout introduced strict per-field validation (required-fields list + enum-locked Source / Email Source / Quality columns) that rejected real rows in some configurations and re-queued them indefinitely. Schema retained as documentation; the strict validators are removed.
[0.0.10] - 2026-05-04
Changed
README expanded with a full output sample, pricing math examples, three filter recipes (nano-influencer / B2B partnership / local market), an FAQ section, and a comparison table vs the other Instagram actors in this family.
Every output column now has a per-field description, type, and example available in the Apify Console's dataset view and to clients that read the actor schema programmatically.
Input field help text rewritten throughout — each field now leads with what it does and any prerequisites (e.g. "requires extractPosts=true"), so it's clearer what to set before running.
SEO title / description tightened on the Apify Store page (no functional change).
[0.0.9] - 2026-05-03
Fixed
"Last Post Within (Days)" now reflects the actual most-recent post date. Profiles with pinned posts (Instagram pins up to 3 to the top of the grid regardless of age) were reporting the pinned post's age instead of the latest activity, sometimes by hundreds of days. Affects both the column value and the lastPostDays filter.
"Median Views" and "Views/Followers Ratio" populate correctly for accounts that post Reels. Previously, these came back as 0 / 0.00% on most profiles because the calculation was reading from the feed-posts list (photos / carousels — no view counts) instead of the Reels list. Fixes the false-zero on the column and the corresponding viewFollowerRatioMin/viewFollowerRatioMax filter.
Accounts with no Reels at all now show "Median Views: N/A" instead of "0" — the prior 0 was misleading and made these profiles look like dead Reels accounts when really there were no Reels to measure.
Added
New SKIPPED_ACCOUNTS Storage record listing every username skipped during the run, with reason and category (filter, not_found, private, error). Open the Storage tab → SKIPPED_ACCOUNTS to see exactly which usernames hit which filter, and which ones errored (re-run those — most errors are transient). The Log also prints up to 3 examples per category at the end of the run.
[0.0.8] - 2026-05-01
Fixed
First-paid-run welcome banner referenced features that don't exist in this actor (Modes 1/2/3/4) and an incorrect free-plan cap (50 — actual is 5). Message rewritten to reflect what paid plan actually unlocks here: uncapped profiles per run, Search Depth 2, Reels-analytics filters, and Reels view metrics in the output. Message ID bumped to paid_first_run_v2.
[0.0.7] - 2026-05-01
Changed
Documentation: added a "Other Instagram Tools" section to the README, with one-line descriptions of the sibling Instagram actors.
[0.0.6] - 2026-04-30
Fixed
TEST RUN banner showed an incorrect "50, free-plan limit" cap that did not actually exist.
Changed
Demo-input runs (when start usernames are left at the example value) are now capped at 10 discovered profiles on any plan. This keeps the cost of trying the actor under ~$0.10. Custom seed inputs are unaffected — default "Max profiles" stays 0 (unlimited).
[0.0.5] - 2026-04-30
Fixed
Init slowdown under restricted permissions: switched named storage to actor-scoped names so brand-new runs no longer stall on cross-actor resource lookups.
Removed defensive 5-second timeout on dataset opens — calls now complete in under 200 ms under normal conditions.
[0.0.1] - 2026-04-30
Added
Initial release of Instagram Related Profiles Scraper.
Discover similar profiles via Instagram's Suggested for You algorithm starting from 1–5 seed accounts.
Configurable per-profile filters: minimum/maximum followers, language, business category, contact info type, verification status, website availability, account type.
Free plan limit: up to 5 discovered profiles per run.
Live status page (HTML) and run summary KVS record.
Resume from checkpoint for interrupted runs.
Pay-per-event pricing: $0.01 per profile analyzed (one event per discovered profile that was successfully retrieved and analyzed, regardless of whether it passed your filters).
