🦊 Instagram Profile & Post Scraper — Zero Cookies, Zero Login

Scrape Instagram profiles and posts without logging in and without session cookies. Powered by the Ghostfox anti-detect browser engine with protocol-level API interception — the interception is invisible to Instagram's anti-bot scripts.

Why this one?

Almost every Instagram scraper on the market forces you to choose between two painful options:

• 🔑 Feeding it your own session cookies — your account eventually gets flagged and banned.
• 💸 Burning expensive residential-proxy bandwidth — because their scraping gets detected otherwise.

This Actor does neither. It runs a coherent-identity anti-detect engine (patched-Firefox/Gecko with consistent fingerprinting) and extracts data by intercepting Instagram's own API responses at the browser protocol level. Instagram cannot detect the interception, and no login is ever performed.

📦 What you get

Profile data (per username):

• Followers / following / posts counts — exact numbers, e.g. 679,812,464
• Full name, biography, verified badge, profile picture URL

Post data (per post):

• Exact likes & comments counts — live numbers, e.g. 1,493,180 likes
• Full captions, direct CDN media URLs, media type, posted date
• Works with both profile grids (latest posts) and direct post URLs / shortcodes

💰 Pricing

$2.00 per 1,000 results — cheaper than every major Instagram scraper on the Store, with no cookie requirement. You pay only for results written to the dataset.

⚙️ Input

Field	Description
usernames	List of Instagram usernames (no @ needed)
postUrls	List of post URLs or shortcodes
maxPosts	How many latest posts per profile (default 12)
enrichEmbed	Exact like/comment counts per post via embed enrichment (recommended)
tryApi	Attempt the internal web_profile_info API via request interception (gets media URLs + full captions automatically)
proxy	Optional proxy URL — not required for light use. For heavy volume, bring your own residential proxy (any http(s):// or socks5:// URL) and the whole browser session routes through it.

🔬 How it works (the technical edge)

1. Every page loads through the anti-detect engine with a coherent browser fingerprint.
2. Public data (profile counts, bio, grid shortcodes) is read from server-rendered HTML.
3. For richer data, the Actor holds Instagram's own web_profile_info API request, resumes it with a modified User-Agent header, and captures the response body — all at the protocol level, invisible to the page.
4. Media and font requests are aborted at the protocol level during scraping — lower bandwidth, lower memory, lower compute cost for you.

⚠️ Rate limits & fair use

Instagram rate-limits aggressive traffic per IP. For small batches (up to ~5 profiles per run) the default datacenter setup works well. For larger jobs, add a residential proxy in the proxy field.

Blocked or private profiles are returned with error: "profile_blocked_or_private" — you are never charged mystery costs for empty results.

📊 Sample output

{
  "type": "profile",
  "username": "cristiano",
  "followers": 679812464,
  "following": 638,
  "posts_count": 4148,
  "verified": true,
  "profile_pic_url": "https://scontent..."
}
{
  "type": "post",
  "shortcode": "De4ydmnAMes",
  "caption": "71 years of passion. Happy birthday, Al Nassr! 🟡🔵",
  "likes": 1493180,
  "comments": 15468,
  "media_url": "https://scontent..."
}