Instagram Profile Scraper

Instagram Profile Scraper: bios, exact follower counts and contact details from a list of handles

Paste handles or profile links and get one row per account: the bio, the exact follower, following and post counts, the verified and private flags, the business category, and whatever e-mail, phone and links the account publishes. Making an account private hides the posts and nothing else, so private accounts still come back with a full row.

One thing to know before you build on it. The engagement figures are arithmetic over the recent posts Instagram hands a logged-out reader, which is 6 to 12 of them at most. That makes them a picture of current form, not a lifetime average, and on some accounts those posts do not come back at all. Every row carries postsAnalysed so you can see which you got.

🔍 What Instagram Profile Scraper does

You hand it a list of accounts, it hands back a table. nasa, @nasa, instagram.com/nasa and https://www.instagram.com/nasa/ all mean the same thing, so you can mix whatever forms your list already has. Duplicates are dropped before anything is charged.

Counts come back exact, not rounded the way the page prints them: 104,352,629 followers, not "104M". Each field comes from a surface known to report it correctly, so a field nobody could answer for comes back null instead of wrong.

Every row also carries two worked-out blocks at no extra cost. engagement has average and median likes and comments, an engagement rate against followers, posts per week, when the account last posted, what share of recent posts are video, and its most-engaged recent post. signals has the follower tier, the follower-to-following ratio, whether there is a real contact route, link count and bio length.

📥 What you give it

{
  "usernames": ["nasa", "@gopro", "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"],
  "maxItems": 50
}

Run it with the input empty and you get one labelled sample row, free, so you can look at the shape before spending anything.

📤 What you get back

A real row from a real run. The picture links and the bio are cut short so the block stays readable, and relatedProfiles is trimmed to one of its 49 entries:

{
  "ok": true,
  "charged": true,
  "recordType": "profile",
  "inputUrl": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
  "id": "528817151",
  "username": "nasa",
  "url": "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
  "fullName": "NASA",
  "biography": "Making the seemingly impossible, possible. ...",
  "externalUrl": "https://www.nasa.gov/",
  "externalUrls": [
    { "title": "NASA.gov Homepage", "url": "https://www.nasa.gov", "linkType": "external" },
    { "title": "NASA Internships", "url": "http://intern.nasa.gov", "linkType": "external" }
  ],
  "followersCount": 104352629,
  "followsCount": 91,
  "postsCount": 4928,
  "verified": true,
  "private": false,
  "isBusinessAccount": true,
  "isProfessionalAccount": true,
  "categoryName": "Government Agencies",
  "businessCategoryName": "Government Agencies",
  "businessEmail": null,
  "businessPhoneNumber": null,
  "businessAddress": null,
  "profilePicUrl": "https://scontent-lga3-3.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/...",
  "profilePicUrlHD": "https://scontent-lga3-3.cdninstagram.com/v/t51.2885-19/...",
  "highlightReelCount": 6,
  "igtvVideoCount": 171,
  "hasChannel": false,
  "joinedRecently": false,
  "pronouns": [],
  "relatedProfiles": [
    { "id": "524549267", "username": "microsoft", "fullName": "Microsoft", "isVerified": true, "isPrivate": false, "profilePicUrl": "https://scontent-lga3-3.cdninstagram.com/..." }
  ],
  "emailsFound": [],
  "phonesFound": [],
  "bioHashtags": [],
  "bioMentions": [],
  "latestPosts": [],
  "fbid": "17841401474538262",
  "dataSource": "profile-api",
  "limitedData": false,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-09-21T01:45:24.304Z",
  "accountAbout": { "available": false, "country": null, "dateJoined": null, "accountAgeDays": null, "accountAgeYears": null, "formerUsernames": [], "formerUsernameCount": null, "verifiedOnAboutPanel": null },
  "engagement": { "postsAnalysed": 0, "avgLikes": null, "medianLikes": null, "avgComments": null, "medianComments": null, "engagementRate": null, "engagementPerPost": null, "videoSharePct": null, "avgCaptionLength": null, "postsPerWeek": null, "lastPostAt": null, "daysSinceLastPost": null, "activeLast30Days": null, "topHashtags": [], "topMentions": [], "topPost": null },
  "signals": { "followerTier": "celebrity", "followerToFollowingRatio": 1146732.19, "followsPerPost": 0.02, "hasContactInfo": false, "contactEmailCount": 0, "contactPhoneCount": 0, "externalLinkCount": 5, "bioLength": 44, "hasBioLink": true }
}

🧾 Reading the output

Three kinds of row land in your dataset, and one flag separates them.

Filter on charged == true and you have your profiles. Treat that flag as the marker that tells a real row apart from a sample or a diagnostic, not as a receipt.

A diagnostic row never fails the run and is never billed.

▶️ How to run it

1. Open Instagram Profile Scraper and click Try for free. 2. Paste your handles into Instagram usernames or profile URLs, one per line. 3. Set Maximum profiles while you are testing, since you pay per profile. 4. Click Start. 5. Download the dataset as JSON, CSV or Excel, or pull it from the Apify API.

💰 How much does it cost?

$0.70 per 1,000 profiles. Flat on every Apify plan, no volume tiers.

The About panel is the one extra: tick Country, join date and former usernames and those profiles cost $5.00 per 1,000 on top. Leave the box alone and you pay the profile price only.

Duplicate handles are collapsed before the run starts, so you pay once per account. The sample row, every diagnostic row and a handle that turns out not to exist cost you nothing.

💡 What people use it for

• Shortlisting creators. Drop in a few hundred handles, sort by follower count or category, and open

Instagram only for the ones worth it.

• Enriching a lead list. Business accounts publish a category, an e-mail and a phone, and the bio

often carries a second address.

• Weekly tracking. Re-run the same list and diff followersCount and postsCount to see who is

growing and who has gone quiet.

• Cleaning a list. verified, private and the NOT_FOUND rows tell you which handles are still

real accounts.

🚧 What it does not do

• No follower or following lists. The counts only.
• No posts unless you ask. latestPosts is empty unless you turn it on, and even then it covers

the recent handful rather than a full history.

• Nothing behind a private account. A private profile returns its bio, counts and flags. The

content stays private, with latestPosts empty and the engagement block null.

• followsCount is sometimes null. A null beats a wrong number, and re-running usually

fills it.

• Some rows come back limited. Now and then Instagram serves a profile only through its public

embed card. Those rows carry limitedData: true, are charged like any other row, and a later re-run usually returns the full profile.

• Country does not show on every account. Instagram puts that line on larger accounts. Smaller

ones still return the join date with country null.

• Former usernames come back as a count, not as names. Instagram keeps the names behind a tap.
• Entries that are not handles are dropped quietly, so check your list if a row is missing.
• 1,000 profiles per run. Split a bigger list across runs.
• Picture links are signed and expire. Counts are a snapshot, so two runs an hour apart disagree

slightly on a big account and neither is wrong.

🧭 Which Instagram scraper do you need?

❓ Questions people ask

Do I need an Instagram account? No. Profiles are read logged out and that answers almost every handle. The cookie field is there for the rare one that gets refused.

Can it get e-mails and phone numbers? It returns the business e-mail and phone when the account publishes them, plus anything written into the bio text. Personal accounts usually publish neither.

What happens to a handle that no longer exists? One free NOT_FOUND row, and the run carries on down your list.

Is scraping Instagram legal? This reads public profile pages only, never private accounts or messages. Results can still contain personal data, which GDPR and similar laws cover, so have a reason for collecting it. 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. Include the handles you used and the run ID, and the log is enough for us to see what happened.