Instagram Influencer Finder — AI-vetted creators & emails

Instagram and TikTok creators who fit your campaign — vetted, with an e-mail and an opener.

⚡ First 25 creators free · 💵 $0.004 per qualified creator · 🤖 ≈ $0.014 with AI vetting, tokens included · ⏱️ demo in ~10 s

Click Try it — the form is pre-filled with a free demo: 18 sample Instagram and TikTok records that fold into 6 creators, nothing charged. Then pick a niche preset or type your hashtags; your first 25 qualified creators are free. → What a run costs · What the AI adds · Run it weekly

⚡ At a glance

What you get	a ranked creator shortlist: engagement rate, audience quality, e-mail, brand safety, AI fit score and an opener
You provide	hashtags, a niche preset, lookalikes or a profile list, plus one sentence about your campaign
Output	a ranked sheet (Excel / CSV / Google Sheets), best first, plus an e-mail digest and a CSV for Instantly, Lemlist or HubSpot
Typical run	2 hashtags × 50 posts → ≈ 40 creators found → ≈ 15–20 qualified in 3–6 minutes (estimate)
Cost of that run	≈ $0.43 rules only · ≈ $0.63 with AI (Instagram Scraper ≈ $0.35 on your account included)
Which plan	Free demo and your own list (list mode, template): any plan · live search: a plan that runs Store Actors
Keys / setup	none where your Apify plan includes model access — otherwise your own Gemini / Groq key (a free key gives 1–3 AI verdicts per run)
Agencies	one saved Task per client, its own memory via dedupeStoreName; 10 clients weekly ≈ $22 a month all in

🎯 What this Actor does

Instagram Scraper returns one row per post. This Actor turns those posts into one row per creator, vetted and ready to contact, and charges only for the ones that pass your filters:

• Influencer discovery by hashtag, niche preset or lookalike — type hashtags, pick a niche, or name creators you like.
• Real engagement rate — % of followers, posting cadence, reel and sponsored share, from recent posts.
• Influencer vetting — audience quality from real comments, a fake follower check, a brand safety screen with quotes.
• A way to reach them — an e-mail from the bio, captions or link-in-bio page (checked on request), or the DM route.
• AI assessment — a fit score against your brief with reasons, content themes and an opener that names a real post.

🚀 How to use it

1. Click Try it. The free demo is pre-filled; rows show up in about 10 seconds.
2. Type your hashtags (or pick a niche preset, or name lookalikes) and your Brand brief — they replace the sample and start the live search. Leave AI on.
3. Start. Qualified creators land best-first in the Shortlist, Metrics and Outreach views.
4. Schedule it weekly — each run delivers and charges only creators you have not had yet.

📚 Learn more: Step-by-step tutorial — how to find Instagram influencers with this Actor

🔎 Niche presets, lookalikes, Instagram or TikTok

A niche preset (beauty, fitness, food, travel, fashion, parenting, gaming, tech, home, pets) adds six proven hashtags to yours; lookalike search starts from 1–5 creators who already work for you; TikTok creators get the same row. With no search term typed, the hashtags come from your Brand brief.

🕵️ Influencer audit — fake follower checker for your list

Paste the handles an agency sent you into Profiles, set Min score to 0, and every creator comes back with the verdict: suspicious_ratio (≥ 50k followers, < 0.3 % engagement), audience quality, and the brand safety quote.

✉️ E-mail check, 📬 digest and 📤 export

verifyEmails checks syntax, MX record and role addresses. notifyEmail or a Slack / Teams digestWebhookUrl gets a digest of the new and the hot creators. exportPreset writes an EXPORT.csv Instantly, Lemlist, HubSpot or Sheets imports as is.

📦 Already scraping Instagram? Vet your Instagram Scraper data

Set the source to dataset and paste the dataset ID of your Instagram Scraper or TikTok Scraper run: no scraper starts, you pay only per qualified creator. The after-every-scrape recipe.

🆚 Why this instead of running Instagram Scraper yourself?

	Instagram Scraper (apify/instagram-scraper)	Instagram Influencer Finder
Price	$0.0027 per post row · 43,155 users / 30 days	$0.004 per qualified creator, first 25 free
100 clean creators	≈ $1.89 for ≈ 700 post rows, then vetting by hand	≈ $3 all in with AI, contact and opener
Your time per 100 creators	≈ 8–16 h (5–10 min each)	0 h — read the sheet
Unit	one row per post, the author in ownerUsername	one row per creator, deduplicated
Vetting	follower count only	engagement rate, audience quality, fake follower flag, brand safety, contact
Repeat runs	the same creators again	cross-run memory: only new creators are delivered and charged

💵 Pricing — what a run really costs

Pay per result: one event per qualified creator. No start fee, no charge per filter.

Event	When it is charged	Price
free-tier	your first 25 qualified creators on this Actor (up to 10 per run)	$0.00
qualified-creator-basic	AI off: every metric, contact and flag, a rule score and a template opener	$0.004
qualified-creator-ai	AI on: plus fit score, reasons, summary, themes, brand-safety verdict, opener and next step	$0.01

Never charged by us: the free demo, creators below Min score, creators that fail a filter, creators on your exclude list, creators you received in an earlier run. The Instagram Scraper scan runs on your Apify account (≈ $0.0027 per post, capped by Max source spend).

How that compares: $0.004 is 1.48× the median raw-row price of the Instagram / TikTok scrapers ($0.0027). But one qualified creator replaces 5–10 raw post rows (≈ 7 raw rows, $0.0189 of scraping) plus the profile look-up and the vetting — and you pay only for creators that pass.

Worked example (estimate until the first published live run): 2 hashtags × 50 posts + details for ≈ 30 candidates ≈ 130 results × $0.0027 ≈ $0.35 on your account → ≈ 20 qualified with AI → 20 × $0.01 = $0.20 here

• ≈ $0.08 AI tokens = ≈ $0.63, ≈ $0.03 per vetted creator — AI tier ≈ $0.014 per creator all in with tokens. At volume: an agency with 10 clients, 15 new creators each a week ≈ $22 a month; a D2C seeding team at 100 creators a month ≈ $3.

🤖 What the AI tier adds

The same creator, AI off (qualified-creator-basic, $0.004) — facts, flags, a rule score and a template opener:

{"username": "skin.by.sam", "followersCount": 45200, "engagementRate": 1.574, "audienceQuality": 80, "contactEmail": "hello@skinbysam.co", "ruleScore": 63, "fitScore": null, "score": 63, "label": "warm", "generatedText": "Hi Sam Okafor — loved your #cleanbeauty content. We're working on Skincare creators posting honest routines and product reviews, 10k–200k followers, active weekly…; open to a quick chat?", "aiModel": null}

AI on (qualified-creator-ai, $0.01) — the same row judged against the brief (local run on the demo sample with an own Gemini key, 2026-10-16):

{
  "username": "skin.by.sam", "followersCount": 45200, "engagementRate": 1.574, "audienceQuality": 80,
  "contactEmail": "hello@skinbysam.co", "ruleScore": 63, "fitScore": 85, "score": 85, "label": "hot",
  "scoreReasons": ["description: \"Skincare without the fluff 🧴 Business inquiries: hello@skinbysam.co · collabs open\"", "followersCount 45,200 (tier_micro within 10k–200k target)", "contactEmail \"hello@skinbysam.co\" found", "audienceQuality 80 with \"specific, varied comments\""],
  "summary": "Sam Okafor is an Instagram digital creator sharing double cleansing tips, empties reviews, and honest skincare routines using #cleanbeauty.",
  "contentThemes": ["Skincare Routines", "Clean Beauty", "Empties"],
  "generatedText": "Hi Sam, loved your recent post explaining double cleansing! Your honest skincare routines and clean beauty recommendations are such a great fit for our upcoming paid launch. We'd love to collaborate—let us know if you're open to reviewing our clean beauty products!",
  "recommendedNextStep": "Send an e-mail to hello@skinbysam.co to share details about the paid clean-beauty campaign.",
  "aiModel": "google:gemini-3.6-flash"
}

By hand that is 5–10 minutes per creator (timed: read the feed, judge the fit, find the e-mail, write a first line). At $0.01, 30 vetted creators cost less than one of those minutes. A creator the AI scores below Min score is not delivered and not charged — the status and OUTPUT.aiRejected say so. On a plan without model access the free demo shows labelled sample AI verdicts, and your first 5 real creators get live verdicts on us.

⚙️ Input

{"sourceMode": "actor", "platform": "instagram", "nichePreset": "beauty", "hashtags": ["cleanbeauty"],
 "goalDescription": "Skincare creators with honest reviews, 10k–200k followers, brand-safe, reachable by e-mail — for a clean-beauty launch.",
 "minFollowers": 10000, "maxFollowers": 200000, "requireContact": "any", "maxQualified": 30, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5}

Field	Default	What it does
sourceMode	actor — with nothing to search the free demo runs, nothing charged	Search live, read a dataset, or paste records (the form starts on the free list demo; typed hashtags switch it to the live search)
platform	instagram	Instagram Scraper or TikTok Scraper
nichePreset	none	Six proven hashtags for your niche, merged with yours
hashtags / lookalikeOf / profiles	—	What to search
goalDescription	—	Brand brief: what the AI scores against and writes the opener from
minFollowers / maxFollowers	—	Follower band
activeWithinDays	60	Latest post must be newer than this
requireContact	none	Require a contact route, or an e-mail
minScore	45	Below this = not delivered, not charged
maxQualified	100	Hard cap on output and on spend
maxDiscoveryChargeUsd	2	Stops the source scan at this spend (the form uses 0.5)
enableAi	true	AI assessment on / off

📤 Output

One dataset item per qualified creator — JSON, CSV or Excel, or streamed to a webhook. Views: Shortlist (who to contact first), Metrics (the numbers behind the score), Outreach (contact + opener for a mail merge). Sort by score; ruleScore is the rule part and fitScore the AI's — trend across runs on ruleScore.

Upsert key for a CRM or Sheet: dedupeKey — platform:profileId, stable across runs.

⭐ Found it useful? A review on the Store helps others find it.

🔁 Run it weekly

1. Put your e-mail in notifyEmail — the weekly digest ("7 new, 2 hot") lands in your inbox.
2. Actions → Schedule in the Console (weekly, your input saved as a Task).
3. Keep dedupeAcrossRuns on: each run delivers and charges only new creators for that search, and OUTPUT.newVsPrevious compares with last week. exportPreset or the Sheets integration puts them where you work.

Weekly cost is new creators only: ≈ 15 new × $0.01 + ≈ $0.35 source + ≈ $0.06 tokens ≈ $0.56 a week; OUTPUT.yieldByQuery shows the hashtags that found nobody.

🎯 Try it for your niche

Niche	What it looks for	Task
Beauty / UGC seeding	nichePreset: beauty, 5k–100k followers, ≥ 1.5 % engagement, e-mail required	beauty-ugc-creators
Fitness on TikTok	platform: tiktok, nichePreset: fitness, 10k–300k, active in 30 days	fitness-tiktok-creators
Influencer audit	your profiles, minScore: 0, every creator back with the verdict	audit-my-creator-list

🔌 Integrations, automation and API

After every Instagram Scraper run: in apify/instagram-scraper's Integrations tab add "Run succeeded → start this Actor" with sourceMode: dataset, datasetId = the finished run's resource.defaultDatasetId and enableAi: false — every scrape you already pay for is vetted automatically, rules only until you switch AI on.

• Webhook: webhookUrl POSTs each creator as {"event": "creator.qualified", "creator": {…}} (batches with webhookBatchSize > 1).
• n8n / Make / Zapier: Run Actor rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier → Get dataset items → your CRM, upserting on dedupeKey.

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier").call(run_input={
    "sourceMode": "list",  # free first call on your own records; switch to "actor" + "hashtags" to search
    "itemsList": [{"username": "skin.by.sam", "id": "1002", "followersCount": 45200,
                   "biography": "Business inquiries: hello@skinbysam.co", "latestPosts": []}],
    "goalDescription": "Skincare creators for a clean-beauty launch; honest reviews, brand-safe, reachable.",
    "maxQualified": 30,
    "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,  # spend cap on your account once you switch to "sourceMode": "actor"
}, timeout_secs=3240)  # build="0.2.5" pins a build
out = client.key_value_store(run["defaultKeyValueStoreId"]).get_record("OUTPUT")["value"]
if out.get("sourceError"):
    raise RuntimeError(out["sourceError"])
for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(item["username"], item["engagementRate"], item["score"], item["contactChannel"])

MCP & AI agents — add Apify's MCP server with this Actor as a tool:

{"mcpServers": {"apify": {"url": "https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier"}}}

Minimal agent input: {"sourceMode": "actor", "hashtags": ["cleanbeauty"], "goalDescription": "…", "maxQualified": 10, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5, "dedupeAcrossRuns": false}

Run outcomes — what your integration sees

👥 Who is it for?

You are…	You run it to…	Start with
Influencer-marketing agency	shortlist 30 brand-safe micro creators per client brief, weekly	a niche preset + Brand brief + e-mail required, one Task per client
D2C brand running UGC / seeding	find UGC creators already posting about your niche, with an e-mail	beauty-ugc-creators
Brand checking a creator list	run an influencer audit for bought followers and bot comments	your profiles + Min score 0
Growth team with lookalikes	find more creators like the three that converted	lookalike creators
Creator-CRM / outreach tool builder	a scored, de-duplicated creator feed via API	list / dataset mode + webhook

🧠 How the AI works

• Grounded, not generative. One creator at a time; every reason names a field or quotes the record, brand-safety evidence is a verbatim quote, cold creators get no opener.
• Your brief, not a generic score. The fit score measures fit with your Brand brief; the opener follows your channel and tone and names one real post.
• Model access. anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5 through Apify's model access — no API key needed where your plan includes it — or your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or Groq key (llmProvider: byok).
• Graceful fallback. A refused or rate-limited model is said in the status (aiError); creators keep their rule score and the basic price.

🔒 Data, compliance and limits

• Public profiles and posts only, through the official Apify scrapers on your account: no login, no cookies, no follower lists. Private accounts are dropped and never charged.
• Contact data is what the creator publishes (bio, captions, bio-link page). Metrics come from a sample of recent posts; treat low_sample rows as indicative.
• Keep your use within Instagram's and TikTok's terms and applicable law (GDPR, CCPA): legitimate business outreach only.

❓ FAQ

How much will one run cost me? A 2-hashtag search with AI on is ≈ $0.63 all in (≈ $0.35 Instagram Scraper on your account, $0.20 here, ≈ $0.08 tokens). The demo is free, and your first 25 qualified creators are free.

Which Apify plan do I need? Any plan runs the free demo and your own list. The live search runs Instagram Scraper on your account — a plan that runs Store Actors. The AI uses Apify's model access where your plan includes it; otherwise your own key. If the AI is refused, creators are charged at the basic price.

How is this different from Modash, HypeAuditor or Upfluence? Those are seats from ≈ $199 a month over an ageing database; here 100 vetted creators cost ≈ $3, scraped fresh.

How is the engagement rate calculated? Average likes + comments per sampled post ÷ followers × 100.

Can it find UGC creators and run a brand safety check? Yes: beauty-ugc-creators finds UGC creators with an e-mail, and brandSafetyTopics adds your own no-go topics.

What happens if nothing matches my filters? The run succeeds with 0 rows and nothing is charged by us; the status says why.

Will I be charged for the same Instagram creators twice? Not for the same search — the memory is kept per search, and adding a hashtag keeps it. Use dedupeStoreName to keep clients apart.

How long does a run take? The demo ~10 s with rules, ~45 s with AI; a 2-hashtag search 3–6 minutes (estimate), mostly the scraper. Pass timeout_secs=900 to .call(). A rate-limited own key stops waiting after 60 s and the rest keep their rule score.

How do I send the openers safely? By hand, a few a day from an established account; no links in the first DM; paid collaborations through Instagram's branded-content tools. The AI leaves contact links out of the opener.

🧩 More Actors from the same developer

• Instagram Competitor Content — see which posts won for your competitors before you brief the creators you found here.
• Facebook Ad Library Winning Ads Finder — the long-running ads in your niche, with the hook and offer to hand your creators.
• Xiaohongshu KOL Finder — the same vetted-creator shortlist for RedNote, in English.
• Email List Cleaner — check the creator e-mails you collected before the outreach sequence goes out.

🆘 Support

Something missing or wrong? Open an issue on the Actor's page — buyer requests ship first. On the roadmap: a monitor mode for creators you already hold, YouTube Shorts and a native HubSpot push.

📝 Changelog

• 0.2.5 (2026-10-16) — The free demo's sample creators are never charged, even with the AI on or one record edited, and on any plan the demo now shows labelled sample AI verdicts; AI with your own key is gentler on free keys: it slows down after a rate limit, stops waiting after a minute and says why. If you leave the model empty, it now uses Gemini, the free key the page tells you to get; Each search keeps its own memory of creators already delivered, and adding a hashtag keeps it. A misspelt flag name stops the run with the list of valid flags, and if the source scraper changes its format the run fails with an explanation instead of quietly coming back empty.
• 0.2.4 (2026-10-04) — Bring your own data: rows in itemsList or a datasetId select their own mode, no source run.
• 0.2.2 (2026-09-28) — a form saved on an older build runs the free demo; hashtags typed next to the sample start the live search.