Apify Instagram Scraper
Apify Instagram Scraper
Actor model isolates each scraping task; profile/posts/hashtag/comments priced separately
Pay-per-result pricing accumulates fast at scale ($1.50 per 1,000 items)
Sign up at apify.com to get an API token, then call the Apify Instagram Scraper actor with directUrls or a username list as input.
Uptime · 30-day window
About this API
Officially maintained by the Apify team, this is one of the most-installed Instagram actors on Apify Store. The actor model splits each scraping job into its own unit — scrape profiles, scrape posts, scrape comments, scrape hashtags, scrape reels are priced separately, billed dually by result count ($1.50 per 1,000 results) or compute units. The $5/month free credit converts to roughly 2,100 Instagram comments, enough for a personal project to validate the full pipeline. Starter plan is $29/month including $29 of store credit. SDKs available for Node.js (apify-client) and Python (apify-client). Built on top of Apify residential/datacenter proxies and dataset/key-value storage infrastructure.
What you can build
- 1Public Instagram data scraping (profile, posts, comments, reels)
- 2Hashtag monitoring and brand tracking
- 3E-commerce competitor analysis and influencer evaluation
- 4Dataset building for BI or ML training
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Actor model isolates each scraping task; profile/posts/hashtag/comments priced separately
- $5/month free credit is enough for small projects to validate end-to-end
- Residential and datacenter proxies built in — no need to source your own
Limitations
- Pay-per-result pricing accumulates fast at scale ($1.50 per 1,000 items)
- When Instagram changes anti-scraping logic, actors may need to wait for community/official patches
- Different actors return slightly different schemas — switching actors means rewriting parsers
Example request
curl https://apify.com/apify/instagram-scraper/<endpoint> \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY"Getting started
Sign up at apify.com to get an API token, then call the Apify Instagram Scraper actor with directUrls or a username list as input.
FAQ
How is Apify Instagram Scraper billed?+
Dual track: $1.50 per 1,000 results, or by compute units — Starter $0.20/CU, Scale $0.16/CU, Business $0.13/CU. Free tier includes $5 of credit per month.
Is the free tier enough?+
The $5 monthly credit covers about 2,100 Instagram comments — enough to validate a pipeline, not enough for sustained production.
Can I scrape stories?+
The official actor focuses on profile/posts/comments/reels/hashtags. Stories typically require a different actor from Apify Store or a custom one.
Technical details
- Auth type
- api_key
- Pricing
- freemium
- Rate limit
- $1.50 / 1,000 results (actor pricing); platform compute units billed at $0.13 - $0.20 per CU depending on plan
- Free tier quota
- $5 free credits per month — about 2,100 Instagram comments via the official actor
- Protocols
- REST
- SDKs
- javascript, python
- Response time
- 164 ms
- Last health check
- 5/20/2026, 8:19:46 AM