What the IG API does and who it is for
The IG API is an Instagram scraping layer — a crawler that sits between your application and Instagram's private endpoints — and exposes the data you'd normally need an approved Instagram developer account (and often specific permissions) to access. It covers the core social-graph objects: users, media posts, stories, reels, highlights, comments, likers, tagged posts, and hashtag feeds.
The typical users are developers building social analytics dashboards, influencer-marketing tools, brand-monitoring services, research datasets, or lightweight "Instagram viewer" apps. Because the API abstracts away Instagram's session management and rate-limit handling, you get a simple REST GET interface rather than having to maintain authenticated scraping infrastructure yourself.
With an average success rate of 100% and around 8,900 active subscribers, the provider has demonstrated reliable uptime. The average response latency sits at roughly 1,189 ms — a figure to factor into any UX that shows Instagram data in real time, though it's acceptable for background data-collection jobs.
Endpoint walkthrough
The IG API exposes 21 GET endpoints. They fall into four logical groups:
User identity and profile
/user_info— Retrieves a user's profile data. The provider notes that phone numbers and email addresses are returned where available, which implies the crawler pulls data from Instagram's internal account endpoints rather than only the public profile surface./usernameand/username_v2— Reverse-lookup endpoints that convert a numeric user ID back to a username./suggested_user— Returns Instagram's suggested users list, useful for recommendation features or discovering related accounts.
Social graph
/followersand/following— Paginated lists of an account's followers and followings respectively./search_followersand/search_following— Filtered search within those lists, handy when you need to check whether a specific user follows an account without paginating through thousands of entries.
Content
/mediasand/medias_v2— Fetches a user's media posts. The v2 variant likely returns a different schema or pagination model; check the provider docs to decide which fits your data model./media_infoand/media_info_v2— Detailed metadata for a single piece of media./stories— User stories (time-limited posts that disappear after 24 hours on Instagram itself)./audio_reels— Reels grouped by audio track, useful for trend-detection around sounds./user_reels— All reels published by a specific account./user_highlights— A user's saved highlight albums./user_tagged— Posts in which a specific user has been tagged by others.
Discovery and engagement
/hash_tag_medias— Media associated with a hashtag, the primary tool for hashtag-based campaign monitoring./media_comments— Retrieves comments on a specific post./media_likers— Lists accounts that have liked a post./search— A general-purpose Instagram search across users, hashtags, and places.
Pricing breakdown
The IG API follows a freemium model with four tiers:
| Plan | Price | Daily requests | Rate limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| BASIC | $0 / month | 10 | 3 / minute |
| PRO | $5 / month | 200 | 5 / minute |
| ULTRA (recommended) | $10 / month | 500 | 10 / minute |
| MEGA | $100 / month | 6,000 | 25 / minute |
The BASIC tier is genuinely free but extremely constrained: 10 requests per day at 3 per minute. That works for testing the endpoints and verifying the response shape for your integration, but it won't support any production workload.
PRO at $5/month triples the rate limit and gives you 200 daily requests. This is a viable entry point for a single-user personal project or a proof-of-concept with light traffic.
The provider marks ULTRA as the recommended plan. At $10/month you get 500 daily requests and 10 per minute — enough for a small production service that polls a manageable set of accounts or hashtags without hammering the limit. The price-to-quota ratio here is the most attractive across all tiers.
MEGA jumps to $100/month for 6,000 daily requests at 25 per minute. This is appropriate for agencies, larger analytics platforms, or research projects that need to track hundreds of accounts. The provider also mentions custom plans are available on request, so if MEGA still isn't enough, direct negotiation is possible.
Practical use cases
- Influencer research tools: Pull
/user_info,/medias, and/followersto build engagement-rate calculators and audience-quality reports without needing an advertiser relationship with Meta. - Hashtag monitoring: Use
/hash_tag_mediason a schedule to track brand mentions, campaign hashtags, or trending topics in a niche. - Competitor auditing: Combine
/medias,/media_comments, and/media_likersto analyze a competitor's content performance and audience interaction patterns. - Stories and ephemeral content archiving:
/storiesgives access to content that disappears on Instagram, making it useful for brands that want to archive their own output or monitor time-sensitive announcements. - Audio trend tracking:
/audio_reelsis a relatively specialized endpoint for tracking which sounds are gaining momentum — relevant for music marketing teams.
Limitations and things to check before integrating
Latency: At ~1.2 seconds average, the IG API is not suitable for any use case where Instagram data needs to appear in under a second (e.g., real-time autocomplete). Design your application to fetch data asynchronously and cache aggressively.
Daily caps are strict: Unlike some APIs that throttle by the minute only, IG API enforces hard daily request ceilings. If you exhaust your daily quota, you'll have to wait until the next reset — plan your polling schedules accordingly, especially on ULTRA.
Terms of service: This is a third-party crawler, not an official Meta/Instagram API. Instagram's platform policy restricts automated data collection. Evaluate your legal and compliance obligations, particularly if you're building a commercial product or handling data about users in GDPR-regulated jurisdictions.
No versioning guarantee: With v2 variants of several endpoints already present, the API is actively evolving. Monitor the provider's changelog so schema changes don't silently break your integration.
Data availability: Some fields (phone, email) are labeled "if possible," meaning coverage will be inconsistent. Do not build a workflow that depends on those fields being present for every account.
Getting started
Sign up on the marketplace, subscribe to the BASIC plan, and grab your API key. All endpoints use GET requests, so you can test immediately with curl or a browser. Start with /user_info for a username you control so you can validate the response schema before writing production parsing logic. Once you've mapped the fields you need, move to /medias and one of the social-graph endpoints to understand pagination. When you're satisfied with the integration, upgrade to ULTRA — the $10/month plan is the most practical starting point for a live product — and set up daily-quota monitoring so you're never caught short mid-day.
