Instagram Followers & Following Scraper

Instagram Followers & Following Scraper

Extract follower or following profile rows from public Instagram accounts. Runs work with no setup: no login, no cookie, no app review.

What you need to know before you run it

Follower lists work out of the box. Instagram serves relationship lists only to a signed-in caller, so this actor reads them through a licensed data source. You supply nothing.

following lists need your own cookie. This is the one real limitation and it is worth knowing before you start: the licensed source covers follower lists only. Ask for a following list without supplying a cookie and you get an uncharged PROVIDER_UNSUPPORTED row explaining exactly that — never a silent empty result, and never a charge.

To unlock following, or to run on your own account's rate limit rather than a shared one, put your own cookie in sessionCookies:

• In Chrome: F12 → Application → Cookies → https://www.instagram.com → copy the sessionid

value. Pasting the whole cookie string works too.

• Your cookie takes priority over everything else. The run uses it and nothing else, which is the

point — you are buying isolation and full following support.

• Use an account you own and are authorized to automate.

Cookie values, proxy URLs, and request headers are never logged or written to output. Logs contain only slot numbers, counts, retry reasons, and result totals.

Input

• profiles: up to five usernames, handles, or Instagram profile URLs.
• listType: followers, following, or both. See the note above — following needs a cookie.
• maxItemsPerProfile: 1-1,000 rows per source profile and list; default 100.
• sessionCookies: optional. Your own Instagram account cookie.
• proxyConfiguration: proxy configuration. Your own proxyUrls are used exactly as supplied;

metered Apify groups (RESIDENTIAL, GOOGLE_SERP) are not offered and are replaced with rotating datacenter addresses, with a warning in the log and run status.

• maxAttempts: 1-12 bounded attempts; default 8.
• requestTimeoutSeconds: 5-30 seconds per request.
• maxRunSeconds: 20-180 second run deadline.

Empty profiles returns one clearly labeled _sample row and makes no request, proxy connection, or billing event.

What you are charged for

You are charged per delivered follower row, once each, and for nothing else.

Every other outcome is free and clearly labeled. Sample rows, unresolvable profiles, unsupported following requests, and runs that stop early all arrive as uncharged diagnostic rows carrying an errorCode and a plain-English details field. A run that returns nothing costs nothing.

If a run stops before reaching your requested limit, everything it already collected is delivered and correct, and one uncharged row tells you it stopped and why. Re-run to continue.

How it works

The source username is resolved from the public, logged-out profile endpoint first, because that answers a guest request and costs nothing. Only if Instagram gates that lookup is a paid resolution used. The relationship list itself has no logged-out route, so it is read from the licensed source, or from your cookie when you supply one.

Failures are named for what they are rather than flattened into one generic error: a rate limit reads as a rate limit, an upstream outage as an upstream outage, and a problem on our side is never reported as a problem on yours.

Output

Each genuine row includes the relationship account ID, username, full name, privacy and verification flags, profile image, source profile, relationship type, and profile URL.