What IG Data does and who it is for
IG Data provides programmatic access to publicly available Instagram metadata — things like user profile stats, post details, hashtag feeds, location feeds, follower/following lists, stories, reels, and contact information. It operates as an unofficial scraping layer rather than a first-party integration, meaning it does not require end-user OAuth consent and is not part of Instagram's official Graph API program.
The typical audience is developers building social analytics dashboards, influencer research tools, competitive monitoring scripts, or content aggregators that need Instagram data without the friction of Meta's official API review process. The freemium pricing model and the breadth of endpoints also make it attractive for quick prototyping and small-scale research.
Endpoint walkthrough
IG Data exposes 27 GET endpoints, all read-only, organized around the major Instagram data objects:
User data
/user/infoand/user/info/id— Return profile metadata including follower and following counts. The/idvariant accepts a numeric user ID, which is generally faster than resolving by username./user/feedand/user/feed/v2— Retrieve a user's post feed. V2 is available if you need a different data shape or pagination style./user/stories— Fetches currently active stories. Passinguser_idinstead of a username is explicitly recommended for lower latency./user/reels,/user/highlight/reels,/user/stories/highlights— Cover the reels feed, highlight reels, and story highlight metadata respectively./user/tagged/feed— Posts in which the target user has been tagged./user/guides/feed— The user's guides feed./user/contacts— Returns contact details such as email and phone number, but only when that information is publicly listed on the profile. The documentation is explicit: output will only include this data if it is actually available on the profile./user/search— Keyword-based user search./followersand/followings— Paginated lists of followers and followings. Both require a public profile.
Post data
/post/info— Post-level metadata for a given URL or shortcode. Profile must be public./commentsand/comments/v2— Post comments; V2 is described as returning more accurate data./likers— The list of users who liked a specific post. Public profiles only.
Hashtag and location data
/hashtag/info— Hashtag metadata including top posts and total post count./hashtag/feed,/hashtag/feed/v2,/hashtag/feed/reels— Different feed views for a hashtag./hashtag/search— Search hashtags by keyword./location/feed— Posts geotagged to a location./location/search— Resolves a location name to a numeric location ID needed by other location endpoints./location/stories— Stories attached to a set of location IDs.
Audio
/audio/feed— Posts associated with a specific audio track.
A recurring pattern across most user-centric endpoints is the option to supply a numeric user_id rather than a username string. The documentation consistently flags this as the faster path, which makes sense given that username-to-ID resolution is an extra round trip.
Pricing
IG Data uses a request-quota model with four tiers:
| Plan | Price / month | Monthly requests |
|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 | 25 |
| PRO | $19.99 | 15,000 |
| ULTRA | $69.99 | 55,000 |
| MEGA | $199.99 | 200,000 |
The free BASIC tier's 25-request ceiling is enough for local testing and exploring response shapes, but it is far too limited for any recurring workflow. A script that pulls a user's follower list, feed, and stories in a single run can exhaust that quota in one execution.
PRO at $19.99 delivers 15,000 requests, which works out to roughly $0.00133 per request — reasonable for low-frequency analytics tasks. ULTRA and MEGA scale volume while the per-request cost drops slightly. If you are running bulk data collection across thousands of accounts, MEGA's 200,000 monthly requests at $199.99 may still require careful batching.
Practical use cases
- Influencer vetting — Pull
/user/info,/followers, and recent/user/feeddata to evaluate engagement ratios before a partnership. - Hashtag trend tracking — Poll
/hashtag/infoand/hashtag/feedperiodically to monitor post volume and trending content in a niche. - Competitor content monitoring — Use
/user/feedand/user/reelsto track a competitor's posting cadence and content mix. - Location-based research — Combine
/location/searchwith/location/feedto analyze content generated at specific venues, events, or geographic areas. - Contact harvesting for outreach tools —
/user/contactscan surface public email or phone data at scale, though this must be handled within applicable privacy regulations.
Limitations to evaluate before integrating
Success rate. The reported average success rate is 70%. For a production service, three failed requests in ten is material. Any integration must implement retry logic with back-off, and any SLA-sensitive workflow should treat IG Data as a best-effort data source rather than a reliable data pipeline. Downstream processing should handle missing or null responses gracefully.
Latency. The average latency of 3,665 ms means typical responses take around 3.5 seconds. This rules out synchronous use in customer-facing web request paths. The right pattern is to fire requests asynchronously or via a background job queue, cache the results, and serve from cache.
Public profiles only. The majority of endpoints that touch user content — feeds, followers, followings, likers, comments — only work for public accounts. Private Instagram accounts are not accessible.
Unofficial API status. Because this is a scraping-based service rather than an official Meta product, Instagram's internal changes can cause endpoint failures or data gaps without notice. The 70% success rate may partly reflect this instability. Monitor your error rates after any Instagram platform update.
Request quotas are shared across all endpoint types. There is no per-endpoint quota; each call to any of the 27 endpoints counts against your monthly total. Plan accordingly if your use case calls several endpoints per monitored account.
Getting started
IG Data is accessible through the marketplace where it is listed. Subscribe to the BASIC plan to obtain credentials and inspect actual response schemas before committing to a paid tier. The provider maintains a Telegram channel (t.me/logicApi) for API news and announcements, which is worth following given the unofficial nature of the service — platform-driven outages or endpoint changes are likely to be communicated there first.
When building your integration, prefer user_id over username wherever the endpoint supports it, implement retry handling for the 30% of requests that may fail, and run all data collection asynchronously to avoid blocking on the multi-second average response times.
