Instagram Creator Lead Finder

Discover creator and business Instagram accounts by hashtag, and extract their public bio/business email, follower count, category and profile URL.

Give it a list of hashtags and a follower band; it pulls recent post authors for each hashtag, looks up each profile, and outputs the accounts that fall inside your band — optionally only the ones that publish a contact email.

Input

Field	Type	Notes
hashtags	array	Hashtags to scan (no #).
postsPerHashtag	integer	Recent authors to pull per hashtag (default 30).
followerMin / followerMax	integer	Follower band to keep (default 1k–1M).
onlyWithEmail	boolean	Keep only accounts with a public email (default false).
sessionids	array	Required. Instagram sessionid cookies from accounts you control.
minDelay / maxDelay	integer	Per-session request throttle, seconds (default 3–6).
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy to reach Instagram. Residential strongly recommended.

Getting a sessionid

Log into an Instagram account you own in Chrome → DevTools → Application → Cookies → https://www.instagram.com → copy the value of the sessionid cookie. Supply one or more; the Actor rotates across them and parks any that get rate-limited.

Output

One dataset item per in-band account:

{
  "username": "creatorhandle",
  "name": "Full Name",
  "followers": 24300,
  "email": "hello@creator.com",
  "bio": "...",
  "category": "Digital creator",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/creatorhandle"
}

Why this Actor exists (project note)

This is a publishable port of lead-engine-2/ig_scraper.py. Two reasons it's here:

1. It unlocks free Apify Creator-plan credits (~$500 / 6 months). Publishing a working Actor to the Apify Store qualifies the account for the Creator Plan. Those credits then fund the lead discovery in ../lead-engine/discover.py from Apify's own residential infrastructure — so no burner accounts run on your machine and nothing depends on your laptop being awake.
2. It runs on Apify Proxy (residential), which is the legitimate fix for the "datacenter IPs get IG-blocked instantly" problem that forced the old engine to run locally.

Publish steps (one-time)

npm install -g apify-cli      # if not installed
cd apify-actor
apify login                   # use your ONE permanent Apify account
apify push                    # builds + uploads the Actor to your account

Then in the Apify Console: open the Actor → Publish → set it public to qualify for the Creator Plan. Run it once from the Console to confirm a green run and a populated dataset.

Local run

cd apify-actor
apify run -i '{"hashtags":["parentingcoach"],"sessionids":["<your-sessionid>"],"postsPerHashtag":10}'