Instagram scraper options compared, and what each charges
Published
If you need an Instagram scraper, the decision is not which vendor is best — it is which billing unit matches the shape of your job. A tool that charges per result is cheap for one big pull and expensive for hourly polling. A tool that charges per query is the reverse. A subscription is excellent across a dozen automations and poor across one. This page prices four options that genuinely return Instagram post data, using figures read from their own pages as of September 2026, and says who should pick which — including the cases where the answer is not this site's tool.
One thing to settle first, because it decides more than price: does the tool ask you for an Instagram login? Some do not, and for a security review that is often the whole conversation.
The Instagram scraper options, side by side (as of September 2026)
| Option | What it returns | Instagram login? | Billed on | Price, as of September 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify's own Instagram Hashtag Scraper | posts and reels for several hashtags per run | no | per result | "Pricing from $1.90 / 1,000 results"; $2.60 per 1,000 on the Free plan |
| apidojo's Instagram Scraper (Pay Per Result) | posts from profiles, tags, locations, audio | no | per post | "Pricing from $0.47 / 1,000 posts"; its own page says "$0.50 for every 1000 posts" |
| apidojo's Instagram Hashtag Scraper | posts and reels for a hashtag | no | per query plus per item | "$0.016 / hashtag gets you 60 items FREE, then $0.0004 / additional item" |
| Bright Data Scraper API | records from Instagram URLs you supply | no | per record | Scraper APIs listed "FREE TIER Starts from $1 $0.75/1k rec" |
| This site's actor | one hashtag's recent posts, with a date window | yes — your own session cookie | per delivered post | $0.0005 per delivered post, on every plan |
Every row above is a real product you can run today. The last row is ours, and the rest of this page is written so you can rule it out quickly if it does not fit.
What actually separates one Instagram scraper from another
Four questions decide the bill, and none of them is the headline price.
- Does it need a session? Apify's own actor, apidojo's actors and Bright Data's Scraper API all work without an Instagram login. This site's actor requires a session cookie from an account you control. If pasting a cookie is off the table for you — as a matter of policy, not preference — stop here and take one of the other four.
- Can you cap the result count exactly? A limit that is honoured to the row is the difference between a predictable bill and a surprise one.
- Is there a real date filter, and does it stop the run? A filter applied after collection gives you the same rows and a bigger bill. One that ends the walk when the feed reaches your date is a cost lever, not a convenience.
- What does a run that finds nothing cost? This is the question that separates these options fastest. On a per-query meter an empty poll still costs the query. On a per-delivered-row meter it costs nothing.
The platform bill and the tool bill are two different bills
Three of the five rows above run on Apify, and Apify charges for the platform separately from whatever you run on it. Its plans, read from apify.com/pricing as of September 2026:
| Plan | Monthly | Prepaid usage included | Compute unit | Max concurrent runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | $0.2 / CU | 5 |
| Starter | $19 | $19 | $0.2 / CU | 32 |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | $0.16 / CU | 128 |
| Business | $999 | $999 | $0.13 / CU | 256 |
The monthly figure is prepaid credit, not a fee on top of it. Apify's own wording is "$19 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors" — so on the Starter plan, $19 of scraping is what the $19 buys. That matters when you compare it against a subscription tool, where the monthly price and the usage allowance are not the same money.
Bright Data prices its own way: its pricing page lists Scraper APIs with a free tier and a per-record rate, and its Instagram scraper page states that "Every new Bright Data account automatically includes 5,000 free credits per month (approximately $7.50 in value) — no credit card required, no promo code, no commitment." For a small job, 5,000 records a month for nothing is the best offer on this page, and no per-row rate beats free.
A worked cost: 10,000 posts from one hashtag, every month
Same job, five meters. Figures follow from the rates above.
| Option | Monthly cost for 10,000 posts | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Apify's own actor, Free plan | about $26.00 | the $5 credit caps you well short of 10,000 results |
| Apify's own actor, higher tiers | as low as about $19.00 | at the "from $1.90 / 1,000 results" floor |
| apidojo's Pay Per Result scraper | about $5.00 | at $0.50 per 1,000 posts |
| apidojo's hashtag actor | about $4.00 | $0.016 for the query, 60 items free, then $0.0004 each |
| Bright Data Scraper API | about $7.50 | at $0.75 per 1,000 records; the free 5,000 covers half of it |
| This site's actor | $5.00 | $0.0005 × 10,000, drawn from your Apify prepaid usage |
At this size the whole spread is about twenty dollars a month, which is the honest reading: for a single monthly pull, pick on fit and not on price.
Now change the job to polling one hashtag every hour, which is what hashtag monitoring usually is: roughly 720 runs a month, most of them finding a handful of new posts or none at all. The per-query charge is now the dominant term — 720 queries at $0.016 is about $11.52 before a single extra item is billed — and a tool with no date filter re-reads the top of the feed on every run and bills you for posts you already have. Deduplication in your spreadsheet happens after the meter.
Who should stay where
Stay with Apify's own actor if you want several hashtags in one run, no login, and a vendor-maintained scraper with the platform's schedules, webhooks and integrations behind it. It is the least surprising choice and the one to hand to somebody who will not be maintaining it.
Stay with apidojo's actors if your job is large, one-shot pulls and you want the lowest per-row rate on Apify without a login. Read the meter carefully: a fixed per-query charge is cheap when spread across thousands of items and expensive when spread across six.
Stay with Bright Data if you already send it URLs and take delivery into S3, Snowflake or a warehouse, if you need profiles and reels across a large URL list rather than one tag's feed, or if your monthly volume genuinely fits inside the free credits. Its per-record meter includes proxies, retries and unblocking, and moving off a pipeline that already works is usually a downgrade.
Consider a subscription tool if the hashtag export is one of a dozen automations you want in one place; that is a different shape of product, and the PhantomBuster comparison covers it.
Consider this site's actor only for the narrow case it was built for: one hashtag, polled on a schedule, where you want the exact row count, a real date window, and no charge for rows you were not handed. It takes a hashtag, a resultsLimit, and onlyPostsNewerThan / onlyPostsOlderThan — the date filter ends the run when the feed reaches your date, rows past your limit and duplicates within a run are not delivered and not billed, and a poll that finds nothing costs nothing. The trade is explicit: it runs on your own Instagram session cookie, and it does one hashtag per run.
How to choose in five minutes
- Answer the login question first. If a session cookie is unacceptable, four of the five options above still fit and one does not.
- Write down your real shape. One pull a month, or a poll every hour? The two answers point at different meters.
- Ask what an empty run costs on each option you are considering. It is one question and it eliminates faster than any price table.
- Check the free tiers before you pay anything. Bright Data includes 5,000 records a month; Apify's Free plan includes $5 of usage, which is a real test run on any actor here.
- Run the smallest honest job on your shortlist and compare the invoices rather than the rate cards.
If the platform bill is the part you are unsure about, what an Instagram hashtag job costs on Apify walks the same job across three actors, and Bright Data vs Apify compares the two platforms on it. To find out whether a hashtag has enough recent activity to be worth watching at all, the free checker reads one without starting a run.
Prices and plan limits on all of these change. Every figure here was read from the vendor's own page as of September 2026; check it before committing to a large run.