§ 01
Creator-discovery feeds
Hashtag + reels-search endpoints power influencer-marketing pipelines. Filter by engagement, region, posting cadence. JSON is flat and stable enough to drop into a Postgres column without normalisation.
§ The Instagram hub
Instagram
scraper.
No proxy needed. 11 pre-built endpoints, parsed JSON in seconds.
11 endpoints·From $0.003 per call·Median under 2s
§ One call
Send a handle.
Get back JSON.
The profile scraper takes one input: handle. The response carries every public field Instagram exposes about that account.
Request
cURL
curl https://api.hproxy.com/v1/scrape/instagram/profile \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $HPROXY_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"handle":"anthropicai"}'POST // 1 call · ~$0.003 · <2s
Response200 OK
{
"platform": "instagram",
"scraper": "instagram-profile-collect-by-handle",
"input": { "handle": "anthropicai" },
"data": {
"id": "59918438103",
"username": "anthropicai",
"fullName": "Anthropic",
"biography": "Building reliable AI systems.",
"followers": 184320,
"following": 12,
"posts": 47,
"verified": true,
"category": "Science, technology & engineering",
"externalUrl": "https://anthropic.com",
"profilePicUrl": "https://…cdn.instagram.com/…"
},
"creditsUsed": 1,
"elapsedMs": 1840,
"requestId": "req_01J6X…"
}Renderedwhat you’d build with it
One real call · one rendered profile
§ Coverage
What you can
actually pull.
§ 01
Public profiles
Bio, follower count, following count, post count, verified flag, category, external link, profile picture URL.
§ 02
Posts and reels
Pull every post or reel from a handle, with caption, like count, comment count, view count, media URLs, and timestamps.
§ 03
Hashtag and search
Reels by keyword. Returns top results with engagement metadata and media references.
§ 04
Comments
Every comment on a post, including replies, author handle, timestamp, like count, edited flag.
§ 05
Highlights
List a user’s pinned highlight reels and pull the individual highlight items inside any one of them.
§ 06
Transcripts
AI-fallback transcript of any reel or video — audio-to-text when no caption exists, captions otherwise.
§ Every endpoint
The full list.
Prices included.
Every line is a live endpoint. Click through for input schema, response shape, and the curl recipe.
Instagram Profile
/v1/scrape/instagram/profile-collect-by-handle
Collect a public Instagram profile by username — bio, followers, posts, links.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram Basic Profile
/v1/scrape/instagram/basic-profile-by-id
Lightweight profile lookup by Instagram numeric user id.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram Post
/v1/scrape/instagram/post-collect-by-url
Fetch a single Instagram post or reel by URL with full metadata.
$0.0330
per call
Instagram User Posts
/v1/scrape/instagram/user-posts-collect-by-handle
Paginated feed of a user's public Instagram posts.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram User Reels
/v1/scrape/instagram/user-reels-collect-by-handle
Paginated reels feed for a public Instagram user.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram Media Transcript
/v1/scrape/instagram/media-transcript
AI-generated transcript for a public Instagram video post or reel under 2 minutes.
$0.0300
per call
Instagram Reels Search
/v1/scrape/instagram/reels-search-by-keyword
Search public Instagram reels by keyword via Google indexing.
$0.0050
per call
Instagram Post Comments
/v1/scrape/instagram/post-comments-collect-by-url
Fetch top-level comments on a public Instagram post or reel.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram User Highlights
/v1/scrape/instagram/user-highlights-collect-by-handle
List all story highlight albums for a public Instagram user.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram Highlight Detail
/v1/scrape/instagram/highlight-detail-collect-by-id
Fetch the contents of a specific Instagram story highlight album.
$0.0030
per call
Instagram Profile Embed HTML
/v1/scrape/instagram/user-embed-html-by-handle
Get the embeddable Instagram profile-widget HTML for a username — the iframe-ready snippet you'd drop into a webpage.
$0.0030
per call
§ What people build
From feeds to ad libraries.
One Instagram scraper, four shapes of work.
§ 02
Brand monitoring
Pull every public post mentioning a brand handle. Parse caption sentiment downstream. The comments scraper carries the reply tree so social-listening models see the full thread, not just top-level reactions.
§ 03
E-commerce intelligence
Shoppable-post scraping at scale. Track competitor product launches, see which posts moved engagement, archive media URLs to your own CDN through the imageFieldPaths capture pipeline.
§ 04
Ad library mirroring
Build your own Instagram-Meta ad archive. The profile scraper carries the verified/category flags that classify brand vs creator. Combine with the post endpoint to cross-reference sponsored content.
§ Customer reviews
What people say
after the first call.
4.9 average across 4 verified reviews
I had a working Instagram pipeline running an hour after sign-up. The handle scraper alone replaced 800 lines of our custom anti-detect setup. JSON shapes are predictable and the pricing is honest about per-record cost.
Daniel R.
Growth engineer · SaaS startup
Used the reels-search endpoint to build a creator-discovery feed across 14 niches. Pulled clean structured data without writing a parser. Cost so far on 40,000 calls is what BrightData wanted as a monthly minimum.
Marina K.
Affiliate marketing director
Comments scraper actually returns the reply trees, not just top-level comments. Latency is consistently sub-2-second on profiles. The "$2 to start, refundable 24h" line is real — I tested it before committing.
Jonas P.
Open-source social analytics
Switched from a Smartproxy + custom-parser stack. The single API key is the whole integration. We send a URL, we get a record. Survey-tier $0.99/GB residential pool is what keeps the per-record cost where it is.
Aïcha M.
E-commerce intelligence lead
§ Questions
The honest
answers.
Eight questions that come up before the first call. If yours isn’t here, the founder reads support email himself — just write in.
Do I need proxies to use this Instagram scraper?
No. The endpoint runs on our residential pool — fifty million IPs sourced through opt-in partner SDKs. You send an HTTP request with your API key; rotation, retries, and anti-bot handling are ours to worry about.
How does HProxy get past Instagram’s rate limits and bot detection?
Each call is routed through a residential session that matches typical organic traffic patterns — mobile user agents, plausible request cadence, and pool-level rotation. We don’t advertise specifics; what matters is the result: 99%+ success rate on public-data endpoints in real customer traffic.
What does the JSON response look like?
Every endpoint returns a flat top-level wrapper (platform, scraper, data, creditsUsed, elapsedMs, requestId) with the parsed Instagram entity inside data. The profile scraper returns id, username, fullName, biography, followers, following, posts, verified, category, externalUrl and profilePicUrl — see the live example above this section.
Is scraping public Instagram data legal?
Public data scraping (no login, no private content, no PII outside what Instagram itself publishes) sits within the boundaries set by hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn and similar US/EU precedents. We don’t serve endpoints that touch authenticated content. You’re responsible for your own use of the data under your local jurisdiction’s data-protection law (GDPR, CCPA, etc.).
What does each call cost?
From $0.003 per call on the standard endpoints. Endpoints that do heavier upstream work — AI transcripts, posts with media archived to R2 — cost more (up to $0.033 per call). The exact per-call price shows on each endpoint card on this page. One call = one charge, never multiplied by record count.
Can I get a free test before signing up?
Yes — the wallet starts with a $2 deposit that’s refundable for 24 hours. That runs ~1,000 profile scrapes at the floor price; plenty to verify the response shape matches what you’re building.
How fast are the responses?
Median response time across the Instagram endpoints is under 2 seconds. Heavier endpoints (post-comments with deep replies, user-reels with cursor pagination) can run 4-8 seconds depending on the page depth requested.
Do you store the data I scrape?
Optional. The default is "fire and forget" — the response goes to you, we keep request logs (rate-limit + billing) but not the parsed payload. If you want persistent storage with a dataset view, the dashboard exposes a per-scraper toggle that pipes responses into your data lake.
§ Try it
Two dollars,
first run.
Sign in with Google, drop $2 in the wallet, fire your first /instagram/profile call. If it doesn’t do what you need, the balance is refundable for 24 hours.