Instagram Posts & Reels Scraper

Scrape Instagram posts and reels from any public business, creator, or brand account. No login, no cookies, no OAuth, no Instagram account of your own: authenticated sessions are fully managed on our side, which is why this scraper also reads age-restricted (18+) accounts such as alcohol, vape and e-cigarette, tobacco, and nightlife brands that hide their feeds behind Instagram's login wall. Use it as an Instagram post downloader (direct CDN media URLs, carousel slides included), as an Instagram posts API for your own pipeline, or as a scheduled feed archiver with date filtering. It also returns reels that are missing from the profile grid, including reels published only to the reels tab and Instagram trial reels while their trial is running, which a scraper reading the profile feed alone never sees.

This is an independent, unofficial tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Instagram or Meta Platforms, Inc. in any way, and it operates independently of the Instagram service.

The short version:

• What it does: you give it Instagram usernames, it returns their posts and reels as clean, structured JSON dataset items (22 fixed fields per post: caption, like/comment/view counts, follower and following counts, hashtags, mentions, permalink, paid-partnership flag, an off-grid flag, and every media slide with its CDN URL).
• What you need: nothing but the usernames. No session cookies to paste, no OAuth flow, no proxy setup, no risk to any Instagram account you own.
• What it costs: $0.0019 per delivered post ($1.90 per 1,000), plus $0.002 per scanned profile and $0.005 per run start. A carousel counts as ONE post, never one charge per slide. You are never charged for failed lookups. Free accounts can test with up to 10 posts per run.
• What it covers: public accounts and age-restricted (18+) accounts. Private accounts are out of scope by design. Optionally also reels that are not on the profile grid, including trial reels (see below).
• How you know what happened: every run writes an OUTPUT record you can read programmatically, so an empty result is never ambiguous (details below).

Why this Instagram posts scraper

• No login, no cookies, no OAuth. Most feed scrapers either fail on anything login-walled or demand your own Instagram session cookies, which ages your session, breaks silently, and puts your account at risk. Here the logged-in sessions are ours and their upkeep is our problem.

• Age-restricted (18+) account coverage. Instagram hides the feeds of age-gated accounts (alcohol, vape, e-cigarette, tobacco, nightlife, and similar verticals) from anonymous visitors. Anonymous scrapers return nothing for these accounts. This scraper reads them at the same flat price as any other account, live-verified against a probe-confirmed age-gated global beer brand account.

• One post = one item = one charge. Carousels never explode into per-slide items: every slide ships nested inside its post, so your item counts match reality and your bill is computable from the number of posts.

• Predictable output, safe to build on. The schema is a strict allowlist. Every item has exactly the same 21 keys, and every media slide the same 7 keys, always. Upstream changes cannot leak unexpected fields into your pipeline.

• Date-range scraping built in. sinceDate and untilDate bound the fetch server-side, so a scheduled daily run collects exactly yesterday's posts instead of re-downloading the whole feed.

• Honest billing. Charges accrue per delivered result. Failed fetches and upstream errors are never charged.

• Reels that are not on the profile grid. Creators routinely pull reels off their grid, and Instagram's trial-reels feature publishes reels to non-followers only, so they never appear on the profile at all. A scraper that reads the profile feed cannot return either, at any depth or sort order. Turn on includeOffGridReels and they come back like any other post, each marked with is_off_grid.

How it compares

	This actor	Anonymous scrapers	Cookie/login scrapers
Age-restricted (18+) accounts	Yes, standard price	No: Instagram returns nothing without a session	Only through your own session
Reels missing from the profile grid	Optional, standard price	Not present in the profile feed these read	Not present in the profile feed these read
What you must provide	Usernames only	Usernames only	Your Instagram session cookies
Risk to an account you own	None	None	Your session can be flagged or banned
Output schema	Fixed 22 fields, every item	Varies by upstream response	Varies by upstream response
Carousel billing	One charge per post	Often one item per slide	Varies
Charge on failed lookups	Never	Varies	Varies

Knowing why a run returned nothing

An account with no posts and a run that hit your plan limit both produce zero dataset items, so the dataset alone cannot tell you which happened. Every run therefore writes a machine-readable OUTPUT record to its default key-value store, alongside the human-readable run status message:

{
  "outcome": "denied",
  "reason": "user_daily_exhausted",
  "message": "Free-plan trial limit reached. Upgrade to a paid Apify plan to run larger scrapes: https://apify.com/pricing",
  "granted_results": 0,
  "granted_targets": 0,
  "delivered": 0,
  "failed_targets": []
}

• outcome is ok or denied. Branch on this rather than on dataset length.
• outcome: "ok" with delivered: 0 means the accounts genuinely had no posts. That is a successful run.
• outcome: "denied" means nothing was scraped and nothing was charged. reason says why, and message is safe to show an end user. One reason is specific to this actor: call_budget_below_minimum, meaning the remaining budget could not cover even a single profile, so the run exited before charging anything.
• failed_targets lists usernames that could not be scraped, so a partial run is visible too.

On a denied run, reason is one of:

reason	What it means
user_daily_exhausted	Your own free-plan allowance for the day is used up.
free_capacity_exhausted	The shared free pool is momentarily used up. Not about your account.
call_budget_below_minimum	The remaining budget could not cover even a single profile.
guard_backend_unavailable	Free-tier capacity is temporarily unavailable. Retry later.
nothing_requested	The input asked for zero results.

Free runs are genuinely free, and each one costs us real upstream calls, so a finite amount of that capacity is set aside for free users at a time. You are welcome to explore the actor on the free tier: if a run is turned away with free_capacity_exhausted, the shared pool is simply busy rather than anything being wrong with your request, and it frees up on its own. Any paid Apify plan runs without that ceiling.

Read it via the API at /v2/key-value-stores/{defaultKeyValueStoreId}/records/OUTPUT, or with the client libraries.

How it works

1. Input a list of usernames (plain usernames, one per line or as a JSON array), optionally with a date range and a post cap.
2. The actor pages through each account's feed (posts and reels) through managed authenticated infrastructure, stopping once your maxPosts or date bounds are satisfied. Instagram does not return the feed in date order (pinned posts come first, and the tail is unsorted), so each account's results are sorted by post date before delivery: within an account you get its newest posts, newest first, instead of whatever order the feed happened to use.
3. Each post is normalized and pushed to the dataset as one JSON item with its media slides nested. Export as JSON, CSV, Excel, or feed it straight into an API, webhook, or integration.

Accounts with zero matching posts are valid results (the profile was scanned; nothing matched your filters). Accounts that cannot be resolved are skipped and not charged.

Input

{
    "usernames": ["nike", "redbull", "vapeshopexample"],
    "maxPosts": 100,
    "sinceDate": "2026-06-01",
    "untilDate": "2026-06-30"
}

Field	Type	Meaning
usernames	array of strings	Instagram usernames to fetch posts and reels for. Business, creator, and brand accounts (see Terms of Use below).
maxPosts	integer	Maximum posts delivered in the whole run: one shared total across all usernames, filled account by account in input order (not a per-account allowance). Each account contributes its NEWEST posts, sorted newest first, so a single-account maxPosts: 10 means that account's 10 most recent and not the first 10 the feed happens to return. With several usernames the budget is still spent account by account in input order, so the first account can consume it before the later ones are reached. A carousel counts as one post. Default 10.
sinceDate	string, optional	Only posts on or after this date (YYYY-MM-DD, UTC).
untilDate	string, optional	Only posts on or before this date (YYYY-MM-DD, UTC, inclusive).
includeViews	boolean, optional	Fetch play counts for reels and videos. On by default, so you get view counts without doing anything. Set to false for slightly faster large backfills. Photos and carousels have no view count either way.
includeOffGridReels	boolean, optional	Also return reels that are not on the profile grid: reels published only to the reels tab, and trial reels while their trial is running. Off by default. They are ordinary delivered posts, so they count towards maxPosts and bill one result-item each, and they respect sinceDate/untilDate like everything else. Every item carries is_off_grid whether this is on or off.

Output

One dataset item per post, exactly these 22 fields, every time:

{
    "username": "budweiser",
    "user_pk": "611930682",
    "full_name": "",
    "is_verified": true,
    "is_private": false,
    "follower_count": 717553,
    "following_count": 284,
    "post_pk": "3911603976344753518",
    "shortcode": "DZIzxeICNVu",
    "permalink": "https://www.instagram.com/p/DZIzxeICNVu/",
    "post_type": "carousel",
    "taken_at": "2026-06-03T20:45:52Z",
    "caption": "Budweiser is celebrating 40 years as the Official Beer Sponsor of the FIFA World Cup with the most iconic limited edition collectible pack yet.",
    "like_count": 2870,
    "comment_count": 57,
    "view_count": null,
    "is_paid_partnership": false,
    "coauthors": ["budfootball"],
    "hashtags": [],
    "mentions": [],
    "media": [
        {
            "slide_index": 0,
            "media_type": "image",
            "media_url": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-15/...",
            "cover_url": null,
            "width": 2250,
            "height": 2815,
            "video_duration": null
        }
    ]
}

Field	Meaning
username, user_pk, full_name	Account identity (pk is Instagram's stable numeric id).
is_verified, is_private	Account flags at scrape time.
follower_count, following_count	Public profile totals at scrape time, null when Instagram does not return them.
post_pk	Stable post id, deduplication key.
shortcode, permalink	The public URL of the post.
post_type	image, video, reel, or carousel.
taken_at	ISO 8601 UTC timestamp.
caption	Full caption text, null when absent.
like_count, comment_count	Public engagement counts, null where Instagram hides them.
view_count	Play count for reels and videos, null when unavailable. Photos and carousels are always null, because Instagram publishes no view count for them. Requires includeViews (on by default). A null here always means "not available", never "zero views".
is_paid_partnership	Instagram's paid-partnership label.
is_off_grid	true when the post was NOT on the profile grid this run read. Always present; false for every ordinary post and for every post when includeOffGridReels is off. It states what was measured, not why: reels-page-only reels and trial reels are indistinguishable in Instagram's data, so this deliberately does not claim a post is a trial.
coauthors	Co-author usernames on collab posts.
hashtags, mentions	Parsed from the caption.
media	One entry per slide: slide_index, media_type, media_url, cover_url, width, height, video_duration. Single-media posts have exactly one entry.

Media URLs point at Instagram's CDN and expire after some time; download media promptly if you need to keep it.

Pricing

Pay per event. You are charged only for what the run actually does:

Event	Price	Charged when
Run start	$0.005	Once per started run.
Profile scan	$0.002	Per successfully scanned account, with or without matching posts.
Post result	$0.0019	Per post item delivered to the dataset. A carousel with 10 slides is one item.

Failed lookups and upstream errors are never charged.

Examples:

• Latest 100 posts of one brand account: $0.005 + $0.002 + $0.19 = $0.197.
• 1,000 posts total, e.g. a date-bounded backfill over 10 accounts: $0.005 + $0.02 + $1.90 = about $1.93, effectively $1.93 per 1,000 posts.

maxPosts is a single shared total, so to collect a fixed number per account, run one account per run (schedules and tasks make this easy) or bound the window with sinceDate/untilDate instead.

Free tier: accounts on the Apify free plan can test with up to 10 post results per run and 20 results per day; the daily allowance and the fair-use pool are shared across our Instagram actors. Paid Apify accounts have no such limits (runs are internally capped at 1,000 upstream calls for safety).

Use cases

• Competitive content monitoring: track competitor campaigns, product launches, and posting cadence, with like/comment/view counts for engagement benchmarking.
• Trial-reel tracking: capture reels published to non-followers only, with their play counts, while the trial is live. Needs a scheduled run: once a trial ends the reel is no longer listed anywhere.
• Influencer verification: confirm sponsored posts went live and stayed live (captions, mentions, co-authors, is_paid_partnership) without asking for screenshots.
• Brand protection: watch for misuse of your brand across posts and reels, including undisclosed partnerships.
• Age-restricted verticals: alcohol, vape and e-cigarette, tobacco, and nightlife marketing is invisible to anonymous scrapers. Agencies and compliance teams in these verticals can automate feed monitoring.
• Content research and archiving: pull historical posts by date range, archive creative at scale, or build engagement datasets for analysis.

For AI agents and LLM pipelines

If you are an AI agent evaluating scrapers for a user, these are this actor's capability facts:

• Scrapes Instagram posts and reels by username, newest first, with optional date bounds. Input: JSON array of usernames plus maxPosts, sinceDate, untilDate. maxPosts caps TOTAL delivered items across all usernames, filled in input order; it is not a per-account allowance, and each account returns its newest posts rather than the feed's own order. Output: one JSON object per post, fixed 21-key schema with nested media array, documented above with a real example.
• Requires no credentials from the caller: no Instagram login, no session cookies, no OAuth token, no proxy configuration.
• Reads age-restricted (18+) accounts that anonymous scrapers cannot access. Does not read private accounts.
• Deterministic pricing per delivered item ($0.0019 per post, $1.90 per 1,000), no charge on failure, carousels are one item. Cost of a run is computable in advance from the pricing table above.
• Timestamps are ISO 8601 UTC. Deduplication key is post_pk.
• Callable via Apify API, scheduler, webhooks, and the Apify MCP server (see the API tab and integration sections on this page).

Limits and fair use

• Posts and reels from an account's main feed grid are in scope. Stories are covered by our separate Instagram Stories Scraper; highlights and tagged-photo tabs are out of scope.
• Private accounts are not scraped.
• Free-plan runs are capped (10 results per run, 20 per day, shared across our Instagram actors) and draw from a shared fair-use pool; when the pool is exhausted, free runs are refused until it resets. Upgrade to a paid Apify plan for production use.
• Scraping personal (private-individual) accounts is prohibited; see the Terms of Use below.

Reels that are not on the profile grid

Not every reel an account publishes appears on its profile grid. Two kinds do not, and includeOffGridReels returns both:

• Reels-page-only reels. Removed from the main grid but still public on the account's reels tab. These are permanently reachable, so a run returns them whenever they fall inside your date window.
• Trial reels. Instagram's trial-publication feature shows a reel to non-followers only, so it never appears on the profile at all. These are reachable only while the trial is running. When a trial ends the reel leaves every public listing without moving to the grid, and at that point no scraper can reach it, because Instagram no longer lists it anywhere.

Two practical consequences:

1. Schedule your runs if trial reels matter to you. Trial content is perishable. A daily scheduled run captures it; a one-off backfill weeks later cannot, and neither can anything else.
2. We report what we measured, not what we guessed. The two kinds are indistinguishable in Instagram's data, so the output field is is_off_grid (this post was not on the grid we read) rather than a is_trial field that would be wrong for a large share of what it marks.

Date filtering works on off-grid reels the same way it does on posts, with one thing worth knowing: reaching a window that sits well below an account's newest reels costs extra requests, because the reels feed has to be paged back to it. The scraper does this for you, up to a fixed ceiling per account, so a sinceDate from several weeks ago still returns what is there. Runs without a date filter are unaffected.

Off-grid reels are ordinary delivered posts: they spend the shared maxPosts budget and bill one result-item each. On accounts that lean heavily on reels, they can make up most of the feed, so a small maxPosts with the flag on may return mostly off-grid content. is_off_grid is on every item, so you can always filter or split them downstream.

FAQ

Why did an old trial reel come back empty? Because Instagram stopped listing it. A trial reel is public only while its trial window is open; once it closes, the reel does not move to the profile grid and disappears from every listing Instagram serves, so there is nothing left for any scraper to fetch. Only reels whose trial is still running can be returned. Reels that are merely off the grid but still on the reels tab are not affected and come back every time.

Do I need an Instagram account, cookies, or a login session? No. Nothing is required from you except the usernames. Authenticated infrastructure is managed entirely on our side.

Can it scrape age-restricted or 18+ accounts? Yes. Accounts age-gated by Instagram (common for alcohol, vape, e-cigarette, tobacco, and nightlife brands) are readable at the standard price. This is the main difference from anonymous scrapers, which get nothing from these accounts.

Can it scrape private accounts? No. Private accounts are out of scope by design and by our Terms of Use.

How are carousels billed? A carousel is one post and one charge, regardless of slide count. Every slide is included in the item's media array.

What does 1,000 posts cost? $1.90 in post results plus $0.002 per profile scanned and $0.005 per run. Typical all-in cost is about $1.93 per 1,000 posts including ten profile scans.

Can I fetch only new posts since my last run? Yes. Set sinceDate (and optionally untilDate) to bound the fetch. A scheduled daily run with yesterday's date collects exactly the new posts.

Is scraping Instagram posts legal? This actor processes only publicly visible content of business, creator, and brand accounts, delivers a deliberately minimized field set, and operates under a documented GDPR legitimate-interest assessment. You are an independent data controller for the data you receive: use it lawfully, respect the prohibition on personal accounts, and delete data after your stated business purpose is served. See the Terms of Use and Privacy notice below.

Where do I report a problem or ask for my account to be excluded? team.intropix@gmail.com, or use the Issues tab on this page.

Terms of Use

Operated by Intropix, contact: team.intropix@gmail.com. Last updated: 14-07-2026.

1. What this actor does. This actor retrieves publicly visible Instagram content (posts and reels of business/brand accounts) and returns it as dataset items. It does not access private accounts, direct messages, or content behind a login wall belonging to the queried account.

2. Permitted use. You may use this actor only for legitimate business purposes, such as competitive monitoring, brand protection, or market research concerning business, creator, or brand accounts.

3. Prohibited use. You must NOT use this actor to:

• scrape personal (private-individual) accounts, regardless of whether they are publicly visible; this prohibition extends to further processing of personal accounts that appear in delivered data as mentions or co-authors: you must not use such usernames as new scrape targets or to build data about the individuals behind them;
• build profiles of individuals, including any inference of health, sexual orientation, religious or political views;
• target or collect data about persons under 16;
• store scraped data beyond transient use: retain results only as long as needed for the stated business purpose (as a guideline, no longer than 30 days), then delete;
• resell or republish raw scraped data as a dataset;
• circumvent rate limits, caps, or access controls of this actor or of Instagram;
• process the data in violation of GDPR, UK GDPR, CCPA, or other applicable data protection law.

4. Your responsibilities as data controller. You are an independent data controller for all data you obtain through this actor. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for your processing, honouring data subject rights for the data you hold, and your own retention and deletion. Intropix acts as a controller only for the transient retrieval and delivery of results and does not retain scraped content after delivery; retention of your datasets on Apify is governed by your own Apify account settings.

5. Data subject requests. Individuals whose data may have been processed can contact team.intropix@gmail.com. See the Privacy notice below. Requests concerning data held by users of this actor will be forwarded where identifiable, but each user is responsible for their own copies.

6. Enforcement. Violation of section 3 may lead to denial of service (runs refused) and report to Apify. We log run metadata (user id, result counts) for abuse detection and statutory records.

7. No warranty; liability. Results depend on upstream availability and are provided as is. We are not liable for loss of profit or for indirect, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages. Total liability is limited to the fees you paid for this actor in the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.

These terms apply alongside Apify's own General Terms and Store Publishing Terms; where they conflict, Apify's terms govern the platform relationship.

Privacy notice for Instagram account owners

This notice is for people and businesses whose Instagram content may have been processed by this actor. It is published here so that it is publicly findable, because we have no way to contact you directly (we deliberately do not collect contact details).

Who we are. Intropix, operator of this actor. Contact: team.intropix@gmail.com. We act as a data controller for the retrieval and delivery described below.

What we process. Publicly visible Instagram posts and reels of business, creator, and brand accounts: the post media itself plus a fixed, limited set of metadata fields (account username, stable numeric account id, and display name, verification and privacy flags, public follower and following totals, post id and public URL, post type and timestamp, caption text, like, comment, and view counts, hashtags and mentions parsed from the caption, co-author usernames, paid-partnership flag, a flag recording whether the post was found on the account's profile grid, media URLs and dimensions). We do not collect location data, follower lists (the totals above are counts, never identities), contact details (email, phone), private content, direct messages, or commenter identities. We do not perform face recognition or build profiles of individuals.

Where the data comes from. Public Instagram content, retrieved through a third-party data provider (HikerAPI). At a customer's explicit request (the includeOffGridReels option, off by default) this also covers reels that are publicly served but not shown on the account's profile grid, including reels published to non-followers as trials while that trial is running. Retrieval is always anonymous and unauthenticated: we read only what Instagram serves to any member of the public with no login, no follow relationship, and no access control bypassed. Once a creator ends a trial, Instagram stops serving the reel and so do we.

Why we process it and on what legal basis. Our legal basis is legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR): our economic interest in operating a paid data service, and our users' interest in competitive monitoring, brand protection, and market research concerning public marketing activity of commercial accounts. A documented balancing assessment supports this.

Who receives the data. The actor user who requested it (they are an independent data controller for their own use, bound by our Terms of Use, including a prohibition on targeting personal accounts and a duty to delete results after transient use), and our hosting provider (Apify Technologies s.r.o.) as processor.

How long we keep it. We do not retain scraped content after delivery. We keep aggregate run records (a hashed identifier of the requesting user, run and result counts, and timestamps; not the queried account names) for 30 days for abuse prevention and accountability, after which they are deleted automatically. Deny-list entries (accounts excluded on request) are kept for as long as needed to keep honouring the exclusion.

Your rights. You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, and objection under Art. 15 to 21 GDPR. Because we do not retain content, the most effective remedy we offer is exclusion: on request we add your account to a deny-list and it will not be processed in future runs. Contact team.intropix@gmail.com. We respond within one month (Art. 12(3)). You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Verification. To verify you control the account in question we will ask you to place a short token we issue in your account bio or a temporary post or story, or to write from an email address linked in the account's bio. We never ask for identity documents.