Instagram Follower Tracker — New Followers & Unfollows

Watch a public Instagram account. The first run saves who follows them today. Every later run (or a schedule) returns who joined and who left. No login, no cookies. $0.002 per change row.

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Why Use This Tracker?

• First run is a baseline of the current follower list (newest first)
• Later runs emit only new_follower and unfollowed rows
• Snapshot lives in a named key-value store in your account, so a schedule on the same Actor keeps working
• Private and missing accounts return an error row and are not charged
• Cap the walk (maxFollowers, default 2500) so a celebrity account cannot empty the wallet
• changesOnly skips the baseline dump when you only want the next diff

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How It Works

1. Resolve each handle and walk its public follower list up to maxFollowers.
2. Compare against the last snapshot in snapshotStoreName (default ig-follower-tracker).
3. Push change rows, then a free summary row (currentCount, newCount, unfollowedCount).
4. Write the new snapshot so the next run has something to diff.

Schedule the Actor daily or weekly on the same input. The named store is what makes it a tracker instead of another list scrape.

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Input

Field	Default	What it does
usernames	required	Handles, @handles, or profile URLs
maxFollowers	2500	How deep to walk the current list
changesOnly	false	First run saves the snapshot without a row per follower
snapshotStoreName	ig-follower-tracker	Named store that holds the last list

{
  "usernames": ["nasa"],
  "maxFollowers": 500,
  "changesOnly": false
}

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Output

Change row (rowType: "change")

Field	Meaning
changeType	baseline · new_follower · unfollowed
username / userId / profileUrl	The follower (or the account that left)
previousSnapshotAt	When the last snapshot was taken (null on baseline)
sourceUsername	The account you are watching

Summary row (rowType: "summary", not billed)

Field	Meaning
changeType	snapshot_saved · diff · no_change
currentCount	Followers stored this run
newCount / unfollowedCount	Diff against the previous snapshot

A scheduled run that found nobody new still returns a no_change summary, so the dataset is never empty after a successful walk.

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FAQ

Do I need cookies? No.

Why is the first run large? It is the baseline. Turn on changesOnly if you only want later diffs.

Where is the snapshot stored? In a named key-value store in the account that ran the Actor. Keep snapshotStoreName the same on the schedule.

What about private accounts? They return private_account and are not charged.

What does it cost? $0.005 to start the run, then $0.002 per baseline / new / unfollowed row. Summary rows are free.

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Support

Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab, or email muhamed.didovic@gmail.com.

This Actor is not affiliated with Meta Platforms, Inc.