Instagram Hashtag Scraper

Recent posts from one Instagram hashtag, written straight to your dataset — with an exact result limit, a real date filter, and billing only for rows actually delivered.

You are charged $0.0005 per delivered post and for nothing else. A run that delivers nothing costs nothing.

What "billed only for delivered rows" actually means

Most scrapers charge you for starting, for every dataset write, or per platform unit — so a run that returns duplicates, half-formed rows, or nothing at all still appears on your bill. This one has a single chargeable event, and a post is only charged after its row reaches your dataset having passed every one of these:

• it is not a duplicate of a post already delivered in this run
• it carries the required fields and matches the output schema
• it is inside the result limit you asked for
• it is inside the date window you asked for

Duplicates, malformed rows, rows past your limit and empty runs are free. Platform usage is included in that price rather than charged on top, so the number above is the number you pay.

What a run costs

At $0.0005 a delivered post, and nothing else on the bill:

What you run	Delivered posts	You pay
A first test run	10	$0.005
A day's check on one hashtag	200	$0.10
A week of a busy hashtag	1,000	$0.50
A month of a busy hashtag	10,000	$5.00
A poll with onlyPostsNewerThan where nothing is newer	0	$0.00

The last row is the point. There is no per-run fee, no per-hashtag fee and no charge for starting, so polling a hashtag on a schedule and getting nothing back costs nothing at all.

Deduplication is within a run, not across runs. Two runs over the same hashtag deliver — and charge for — the same posts twice. Use onlyPostsNewerThan to fetch only what has appeared since your last run; that is what makes repeated polling cheap.

Before your first run: two cookies

Instagram serves hashtag data only to a signed-in session. This actor holds no Instagram accounts and never will — you supply a session for an account you control.

Only two values are needed, sessionid and csrftoken, passed as:

sessionid=<your value>; csrftoken=<your value>

Where to find them

In a browser signed in to Instagram, open DevTools (F12) and go to Application → Storage → Cookies → https://www.instagram.com:

Copy the Value of csrftoken and of sessionid, and paste them into the Instagram session cookie field in the form above. Pasting your whole cookie header works too — the extra cookies are accepted and ignored. The field is marked secret, so it is not shown in the run log.

Do not use document.cookie

Running document.cookie in the DevTools Console will not work, and will look like it did. sessionid is an httpOnly cookie, so no JavaScript can read it — the Console returns every other cookie and silently leaves out the only one that matters. You get a long, plausible-looking string that fails with "has no sessionid".

That is the ringed tick in the picture. The Application tab shows httpOnly cookies; the Console cannot, by design. For the same reason there is no snippet or bookmarklet that can collect these for you.

How long a session lasts

Instagram issues sessionid with roughly a year of expiry, so it does not need refreshing often. What ends one early is signing out of that browser, changing the account password, or Instagram invalidating it — after which a run fails with "Instagram refused the session" and you copy a fresh value. Do not click Log Out on the browser you took the cookie from.

Expect the account you use to be rate limited and eventually actioned by Instagram. That is a property of the platform, not a fault in the actor. Use an account you are willing to lose.

Input

Field	Type	Required	What it does
hashtag	string	yes	The hashtag to scrape, with or without the leading #.
sessionCookie	string (secret)	yes	sessionid=…; csrftoken=… from an account you control.
resultsLimit	integer	no (default 100)	Exact ceiling on delivered posts. The actor never delivers or charges for more than this, whatever a feed page happens to contain.
onlyPostsNewerThan	string	no	Stop once the feed reaches this date. Takes a date (2026-08-01), a datetime, or a relative window (7 days, 3 months).
onlyPostsOlderThan	string	no	Skip posts newer than this date. Combine with the field above to scrape one window.
maxPages	integer	no (default 50)	Hard ceiling on requests to Instagram, so a very large hashtag cannot page indefinitely.

onlyPostsNewerThan stops the run at the date rather than filtering after the fact, so asking for a week costs a week of rows — not a month of rows narrowed to a week.

{
  "hashtag": "coffee",
  "resultsLimit": 100,
  "onlyPostsNewerThan": "7 days",
  "sessionCookie": "sessionid=<your sessionid>; csrftoken=<your csrftoken>"
}

Output

One row per post, newest first. Every field below is always present — optional ones come back as null rather than disappearing, so a missing value never breaks your schema.

One delivered row, in full — this is what lands in your dataset:

{
  "shortcode": "C9xKd2LuQpZ",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/p/C9xKd2LuQpZ/",
  "takenAt": "2026-08-25T10:38:41.000Z",
  "takenAtTimestamp": 1787654321,
  "caption": "Single-origin Ethiopian, poured this morning <3 #coffee #latteart #SpecialtyCoffee",
  "hashtags": [
    "coffee",
    "latteart",
    "specialtycoffee"
  ],
  "likeCount": 214,
  "commentCount": 0,
  "ownerUsername": "the.example.roastery",
  "mediaType": "carousel",
  "isVideo": false,
  "containsVideo": true,
  "carouselCount": 3,
  "displayUrl": "https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-15/example_1080.jpg"
}

The values are illustrative, but the shape is not: this example is generated by the same parser the actor runs, so it cannot drift from what you receive.

Field	Type	Meaning
shortcode	string	The post's code, as it appears in its URL.
url	string	Canonical post URL.
takenAt	string	Publication time, ISO 8601.
takenAtTimestamp	integer	The same instant as a Unix timestamp.
caption	string | null	Caption text, or null when the post has none.
hashtags	string[]	Every hashtag in the caption, lowercased and deduplicated.
likeCount	integer | null	Likes, or null when Instagram did not return a count.
commentCount	integer | null	Comments, or null when Instagram did not return a count.
ownerUsername	string | null	The posting account's username.
mediaType	string	One of image, video, carousel, unknown.
isVideo	boolean	True only when the post itself is a standalone video.
containsVideo	boolean	True when the post is a video or a carousel with at least one video slide.
carouselCount	integer | null	Number of slides for a carousel, null otherwise.
displayUrl	string | null	Cover image URL.

Two things worth knowing before you filter on them:

• Filter video with containsVideo, not isVideo. The hashtag feed serves images and carousels; a carousel can carry video slides while the post itself is not a video. isVideo means exactly what its name says, and on this surface it is almost always false — containsVideo is the field that answers the question you are actually asking.
• null and 0 are different. null means Instagram returned no count for that post; 0 means it returned zero. Treating them alike will quietly skew any average you compute.

How a run ends, and what to do about it

Every run ends in exactly one of these, and says which in its status message and run log — so you can act on it without reading the log line by line. Nothing ends in silence.

The run says	What happened	What to do
Delivered the number of posts you asked for.	It hit resultsLimit.	Nothing. Raise resultsLimit for more.
Reached your date cutoff — everything newer has been delivered.	It walked back to onlyPostsNewerThan and stopped.	Nothing. This is the cheap way to poll.
Instagram has no more posts for this hashtag.	The feed ran out before your limit.	Nothing. The hashtag is smaller than you asked for.
Stopped at the page budget.	It read maxPages pages without reaching your limit or your date.	Raise maxPages. A date far in the past will always hit this first.
Stopped at your run budget.	The platform's per-run charge limit was reached.	Raise the run's max charge in Apify, or lower resultsLimit.
Instagram refused the session.	The cookie is expired, wrong, or the account was actioned.	Supply a fresh sessionCookie from a logged-in browser.
Instagram rate-limited the session.	Too many requests from that account or IP.	Wait — the message carries the delay when Instagram gives one — then re-run.
Instagram has no hashtag "…".	The tag does not exist.	Check the spelling in the message; it quotes exactly what was asked for.
The request to Instagram failed: …	A network or HTTP error, quoted verbatim.	Re-run. If it repeats, the detail in the message is what to report.
Instagram answered with a shape this actor could not read.	Instagram changed its response and the parser stopped matching.	You were not charged. This one is our bug — please report it.

The last five rows exit the run as FAILED, not as a success with an empty dataset — everything Instagram refused, and the shape we could not read. A scheduled task or an API caller therefore sees a failed run rather than a clean one that happened to deliver nothing, which is the difference between "this hashtag is quiet" and "we never got to look".

What this actor does not do

Said plainly here so you find out now rather than in a run:

• One hashtag per run. There is no multi-tag input.
• The recent tab only. There is no "top posts" mode.
• Recent posts, not history. The feed is newest-first with no way to seek to a past date, so a window far in the past means walking forward through pages and will hit the page budget before it arrives.
• No comments, no follower data, no profile scraping, no stories.
• No email addresses or contact details, of anyone, ever.
• Individual carousel slide URLs are not returned — only the cover image.
• It cannot run without a session cookie. There is no unauthenticated path to Instagram's hashtag data.
• We do not supply, sell or rent Instagram accounts, and we do not provide proxies for rotating them.

Your data

Posts are written to your dataset on your Apify account. This actor keeps no copy of them: it has no database, no storage of its own, and nothing it could hand to anyone. The session cookie you supply is a secret input handled by the Apify platform and is not written to the run log.

You decide what you collect and what you do with it. Instagram's terms, and the law that applies where you are, are yours to judge before you run it.

No warranty

The actor is provided as is and as available, with no warranty of accuracy, completeness, uninterrupted operation, or correction of defects. Instagram changes its platform without notice and can refuse, rate limit or action any account at any time. Whether the output is fit for what you intend is your judgement, on every run.

Questions

Full documentation: https://instagram-hashtag-scraper.tiraisoft.com

Write to instagram-hashtag-scraper@tiraisoft.com.