Instagram Profile & Posts Scraper — No API Key, No Login

Extract complete Instagram profile data and recent posts from any public account — in bulk. No Facebook Developer account, no Graph API review, no login required. 1,000+ successful runs in the last 30 days with a 0% failure rate; the users who run it most run it 100+ times a month inside automated pipelines.

⭐ Free to try — if this actor saves you time, leave a quick review. It takes 30 seconds and helps other researchers find it.

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What It Extracts

Pass one or more Instagram usernames. Get back structured JSON in seconds:

Profile data

• Username, full name, biography, website URL
• Follower count, following count, total posts count
• Verified badge status, business account flag, category
• HD profile picture URL
• Profile URL, internal user ID

Recent posts (up to 50 per profile)

• Caption text with embedded hashtags and mentions
• Like count, comment count, video view count
• Post type (image, video, carousel)
• Media URL, post URL, timestamp

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⚠️ Session Cookie for Accurate Counts

Without a session cookie, Instagram caps what unauthenticated requests return — follower counts and post counts may come back as 0 or 1. Add your sessionid cookie value in the sessionCookie field to get accurate numbers.

The rest of the data (bio, name, verification, posts) is available without it.

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Input Parameters

{
  "username": "natgeo, nike, tesla",
  "action": "profile",
  "maxPosts": 24,
  "sessionCookie": ""
}

Field	Type	Default	Description
username	string	required	Instagram handle(s), comma-separated. Accepts @handle, full URL, or plain username.
action	string	"profile"	"profile" returns profile + recent posts. "posts" returns posts only.
maxPosts	integer	24	Max recent posts per profile. Range: 1–50.
sessionCookie	string	""	Your Instagram sessionid cookie value. Optional but recommended for full data.

Accepted username formats:

• natgeo
• @nike
• https://www.instagram.com/tesla/
• natgeo, nike, tesla (comma-separated list)

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Example Output

{
  "username": "natgeo",
  "fullName": "National Geographic",
  "biography": "Experience the world through the eyes of National Geographic photographers.",
  "followerCount": 281500000,
  "followingCount": 132,
  "postCount": 29847,
  "isVerified": true,
  "isPrivate": false,
  "category": "Media",
  "externalUrl": "https://natgeo.com",
  "profilePicUrl": "https://instagram.fcdn.net/v/t51.2885-19/...jpg",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/",
  "userId": "787132",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-04-23T09:15:42.000Z",
  "recentPosts": [
    {
      "postId": "3398271049123456789",
      "shortcode": "C6xYzAbC1234",
      "type": "GraphImage",
      "caption": "A lion surveys the plains at dawn in Kenya's Masai Mara. #wildlife #kenya #africa",
      "likeCount": 284932,
      "commentCount": 1842,
      "videoViewCount": 0,
      "isVideo": false,
      "imageUrl": "https://instagram.fcdn.net/v/t51.2885-15/...jpg",
      "postUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/p/C6xYzAbC1234/",
      "timestamp": "2026-04-12T08:30:00.000Z"
    },
    {
      "postId": "3398271049123456790",
      "shortcode": "C6xYzAbC5678",
      "type": "GraphVideo",
      "caption": "Deep inside the Amazon — a species no camera has captured before. #nature #discovery",
      "likeCount": 193041,
      "commentCount": 2310,
      "videoViewCount": 4812000,
      "isVideo": true,
      "imageUrl": "https://instagram.fcdn.net/v/t51.2885-15/...jpg",
      "postUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/p/C6xYzAbC5678/",
      "timestamp": "2026-04-09T14:22:10.000Z"
    }
  ]
}

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Use Case: Creator Vetting Before You Sign

Paste a shortlist of 30 handles, run once, and get a spreadsheet of follower counts, post frequency, verification status, and per-post engagement. Divide average likes by followers for a real engagement rate — the number that exposes bought audiences before a contract is signed.

{ "username": "creator1, creator2, creator3", "action": "profile", "maxPosts": 24 }

Use Case: Influencer List Building at Scale

Feed the actor from a Google Sheet of candidate handles (Apify's Google Sheets integration works both directions), schedule it weekly, and maintain a living database of creators in your niche — follower growth, content cadence, and category — without opening a single profile by hand. At $0.005/profile, a 1,000-creator database refresh costs $5.

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Who Uses This

Influencer marketing teams — vet creators before signing contracts. Compare follower counts, post frequency, and engagement rates across dozens of accounts in one run instead of opening each profile manually.

Brand managers — monitor competitor accounts weekly. Catch changes to bios, track follower milestones, watch which content formats drive the most likes.

Marketing agencies — build client reports with real Instagram metrics. Pull profiles for entire client rosters automatically instead of copying numbers by hand.

Market researchers & academics — analyze posting patterns, engagement benchmarks, and content trends across accounts in a niche. Export to CSV for analysis in Python or R.

Lead generation — build lists of active creators filtered by follower thresholds, post frequency, and category.

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Why Not Use the Official Instagram Graph API?

Instagram's Graph API requires a Facebook Developer account, app review, business verification, and only returns data for accounts you manage or that have explicitly granted permissions. For third-party research on public profiles, it is effectively unusable.

This actor works on any public profile instantly — no approvals, no waiting, no account dependencies.

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Integrations & Export

Results export to JSON, CSV, or Excel directly from the Apify console. Connect to:

• Google Sheets — sync actor output automatically
• Webhooks — push results to your own backend on run completion
• Zapier / Make — trigger downstream workflows
• Apify API — call from your own code using the Apify Python or Node.js client

Schedule runs hourly, daily, or weekly to track accounts over time.

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Limits

• Public profiles only — private accounts are skipped
• Maximum 50 posts per profile per run
• Default run timeout is 60 seconds; for long comma-separated username lists, raise it in the run options
• Add a session cookie for accurate follower/post counts

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💰 Pricing

This actor uses Pay-Per-Event (PPE) pricing — $0.005 per result row delivered. You only pay for rows you actually receive, never for platform compute time, and never for a failed lookup.

• action: "profile" → one row per username (the profile object, with recent posts nested inside it). 1,000 profiles = $5.00.
• action: "posts" → one row per post, because each post is a separate result row. 1 username with maxPosts: 24 = 24 rows = $0.12. Set maxPosts to control the spend.
• Failed lookups are free. If a profile cannot be fetched (blocked, private, or non-existent), nothing is pushed and nothing is charged.
• Incomplete profiles are free too. Instagram sometimes serves only its logged-out page, which carries a follower count but no bio, no user ID, no category and no posts. That is not a profile, so it is neither delivered nor charged — the username is reported in the run status instead. You are only billed for complete records.
• maxTotalChargeUsd is respected exactly. If you cap a run, it stops delivering when the cap is reached and tells you so in the run status — you will never be billed past your cap, and you will never receive rows you were not billed for.

No extra proxy cost. This Actor runs on Apify datacenter proxy, which is included in your plan. There is no residential proxy option: measured over 66 runs, Instagram's mobile API answers datacenter IPs and returns 401 to residential ones, so residential produced fewer complete profiles at 5.4x the cost.

Free tier users can run the actor to test before committing to a paid plan.

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