Instagram Profile Scraper — profile stats, with a spend cap that holds

Follower counts, following counts, post totals, bios, bio links and verification for any public Instagram profile. Paste 300 handles, get 300 rows, and never spend more than you said you would.

What changed in September 2026 — read this first

Instagram closed the endpoint that served per-post data to logged-out visitors. This Actor no longer returns posts, likes, comments or engagement rate, because that data is no longer reachable without logging in, and an Actor that returns a column of nulls is worse than one that tells you the truth.

What it does return is the profile block, which is still complete and exact: follower and following counts to the digit, post totals, bio, every link in bio, verification, privacy, highlights and the account's Threads handle.

If engagement rate is what you came for, this is the wrong tool today. Better you know that here than after a run.

The limit you set is the limit you get

The most-used Instagram scrapers on this store carry thousands of monthly users and ratings in the 3s. Their reviews explain why, in their own words:

"I set the limit but this actor fetched a lot of records and I spent hundreds of USD in vain. I want my credit back"

"Even though I set a limit on the request, it fetched thousands of records and simply used up hundreds of dollars"

Two different people, same actor, same complaint. So this one is built the other way round:

• maxProfiles and maxCostUsd are checked before each request, not applied to the results afterwards. When the ceiling is reached the run stops fetching. Trimming the output after the money is gone is not a limit.
• Filtered-out profiles are never charged for. Private accounts and profiles under your follower minimum cost nothing.
• A profile that could not be read is never charged for either.
• Every run writes a summary telling you exactly what you spent against your cap.

What you get

One row per profile:

Field	Notes
followers, following	Exact counts, not the rounded "104M" Instagram shows
postsTotal, postsTotalLabel	Lifetime post count. Instagram publishes it exactly up to about ten thousand and abbreviates above that, so postsTotal carries the exact number when there is one and postsTotalLabel always carries what Instagram actually showed - 4,913 or 32K. A rounded figure is never dressed up as an exact one
fullName, biography	Display name and bio text
externalUrl, bioLinks	The link in bio, and every link when the account lists several
isVerified, isPrivate, isMemorialized	Account state
hasReels	Whether the account posts Reels
threadsUsername	The account's Threads handle, when it has one
highlights, highlightsCount	Story highlight titles
profilePicUrl, profileUrl	Avatar and canonical URL
userId	Instagram's stable numeric id, which survives a rename

Two honest limits, stated up front

No post-level data. No likes, comments, captions, hashtags or engagement rate. See the note at the top — that data is behind a login now, and this Actor does not ask you for an Instagram session.

A minority of accounts publish nothing at all logged out. Measured across a sample on 2026-09-07: most accounts return their full profile block, but some return Instagram's login wall on every attempt regardless of how many addresses are tried. It has nothing to do with account size — a 6,600-follower account returned data while a much larger one did not.

Those profiles come back in the run summary as UNAVAILABLE_LOGGED_OUT, and you are not charged for them. Instagram serves a byte-identical page for an account that withholds its data and for a handle that has been deleted, so this Actor will not guess which one you are looking at. Reporting "not found" for an account that exists is the kind of quiet wrong answer that ruins a list of 300 handles.

What it is for

• Lead qualification — the link in bio, the Threads handle and the follower count for a list of prospects.
• Competitor monitoring — follower and post-count trends across a category, on a schedule.
• Creator shortlisting — reach, verification and bio for a list of candidates, in one run.
• Audience reporting — client and competitor numbers pulled the same way every week.

Input

{
  "profiles": ["nasa", "@bbcnews", "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"],
  "maxProfiles": 100,
  "maxCostUsd": 5,
  "minFollowers": 10000,
  "skipPrivate": true
}

Usernames, @handles and full URLs all work, so a column pasted straight from a spreadsheet is fine.

Reliability

One bad handle never fails the run. Anything that could not be read is recorded in the run summary with the reason, while everything else continues.

Instagram serves a login wall to a share of logged-out requests at random. Every attempt for a profile uses a fresh residential address, and by default a profile gets four attempts before it is reported as unavailable — enough to clear a reachable account in almost every case. You can raise it with maxAttemptsPerProfile if you are seeing accounts you know are reachable come back unavailable.

Requests go through Apify Proxy residential, which is the only route Instagram answers with data. Changing it will usually break the run.

FAQ

Do I need an Instagram account or login? No. The Actor reads the public profile page Instagram serves to logged-out visitors. There is no account of yours to get flagged or banned.

Why is there no engagement rate any more? Instagram stopped serving post data to logged-out visitors in 2026. Engagement rate was calculated from per-post likes and comments, so it went with them. Returning a made-up or empty number would be worse than removing it.

Do private accounts work? Their follower, following and post counts are public and do come back. Nothing behind the privacy setting does. Set skipPrivate to leave them out entirely at no cost.

Can I export to CSV or Excel? Yes — every run's dataset downloads as CSV, Excel, JSON or JSONL straight from the platform, or via the API for pipelines.

Can I run it on a schedule? Yes. Create a Task with your handle list and schedule it hourly, daily or weekly. Each run writes a fresh dataset.

What happens when a profile fails? It is retried on fresh addresses first, then listed per handle in the run summary with the reason — never silently dropped from your results, and never charged for.

Notes

Reads only public profile data, logged out — the same information any visitor sees without an account. No login, no cookies of yours, no account of yours involved. This Actor is unofficial and not affiliated with Instagram or Meta. Content belongs to the people who posted it; use it in line with applicable laws and terms.