Instagram Followers & Following Scraper

Instagram Followers & Following Scraper: who follows a public account

Give it a public Instagram handle and get its follower list back as rows. Username, full name, profile picture, profile URL, and whether that account is verified or private. One row per person.

The awkward part, and it is better to know now than on run two: the following list needs your own Instagram cookie. Followers come back without one. Ask for following or both with no cookie and you get the followers plus a labelled row telling you the other half was not available.

🔍 What Instagram Followers & Following Scraper does

It walks the follower list of the handles you name and writes each account it finds as a row. Every row says which of your handles it came from and which list it came from, so you can send several profiles in one run and still tell the results apart afterwards.

Rows arrive in the order Instagram serves them, which is neither alphabetical nor by date. Treat the order as meaningless and sort on your own side.

Nothing to install and no API key. For followers there is nothing to log into either.

A private source account cannot be read at all. Neither can a private account that appears in the list, beyond its name and picture, which is exactly what Instagram shows a stranger.

📥 What you give it

{
  "profiles": ["nasa"],
  "listType": "followers",
  "maxItemsPerProfile": 100
}

Start a run with no profiles at all and you get one labelled sample row showing the output shape. That row is not charged and no credentials are touched.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run, with the long picture link cut short:

{
  "ok": true,
  "recordType": "relationship_profile",
  "id": "27736785273",
  "username": "rashiniesansadi",
  "fullName": "Rashinie Sansadi Wijesooriya",
  "isPrivate": true,
  "isVerified": false,
  "profilePicUrl": "https://scontent-iad6-1.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.82787-19/...",
  "sourceUsername": "nasa",
  "sourceProfileId": "528817151",
  "listType": "followers",
  "profileUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/rashiniesansadi/"
}

Nothing is guessed. A field Instagram did not send comes back empty rather than filled in.

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row land in your dataset, and only the first kind is billed.

Filter on recordType == "relationship_profile" and you have your list.

The code on a diagnostic row says what happened:

A diagnostic row never bills you for results, and a bad handle does not stop the other handles in your list.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Followers & Following Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Put your handles into Instagram profiles, up to five. 3. Leave List type on Followers unless you have a cookie to paste. 4. Set Maximum rows per profile and list, then click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or read it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.60 per 1,000 rows. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

One charge per account written to your dataset. A both run bills each list separately, because it returns two lists. Sample rows and diagnostic rows are not billed, and a profile whose list comes back empty is not billed for results.

💡 What people use it for

• Checking the overlap between two accounts' followers to see how much of an audience is shared.
• Pulling the verified accounts out of a follower list as a shortlist of people worth approaching.
• Watching who a competitor started following this month, with a cookie and a weekly schedule.
• Measuring how much of a follower list is private accounts, which is a rough tell for bought

growth.

🚧 What it does not do

• The following list needs your own cookie. Without one you get followers and a labelled row

saying the rest was unavailable.

• No private source accounts. If the profile you name is private, there is no list to read.
• No complete list of a large account. 1,000 rows per profile per list is the ceiling, and a

million-follower account gives you the first slice of it.

• No cursor between runs. Run it twice and it starts from the top again, returning the same

rows.

• The order is Instagram's, not yours. It is not newest first and it is not alphabetical.
• No follower counts, bios, emails or posts. Those live in the profile actor.
• Picture links expire within hours.
• Five profiles per run. A longer list needs splitting.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an Instagram account? Not for followers. For a following list, yes, your own cookie.

Where do I find the cookie? In Chrome, F12, then Application, Cookies, instagram.com, and copy the sessionid value. Use a throwaway account if you would rather not use your main one.

Can I get all 100 million of an account's followers? No. The ceiling is 1,000 per profile per list, and there is no way to page past it on a later run.

Why are the rows in that order? Because that is the order Instagram hands them over. Sort them yourself once they are in your sheet.

Will a wrong handle fail the run? No. It gets an uncharged row of its own and the rest of your profiles carry on.

Is scraping Instagram legal? This reads public profiles only, never private accounts or messages. Follower lists are personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a lawful reason for collecting them. Apify's write-up on the legality of web scraping is a good starting point, and we are not lawyers.

🆘 If something breaks

Open the Issues tab on the actor page. Send the handle you used and the run ID. The code on the diagnostic row usually explains it on its own.