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Scraper API for Instagram

The ScrapeBadger Instagram API turns instagram.com’s public surface into a clean JSON feed: user profiles and their posts, media detail by shortcode, and paginated comments.
Every other Instagram endpoint needs the authenticated (account-pool) tier, which is temporarily unavailable while we scale the pool: related profiles, user about/videos/reels/tagged/pinned, followers/following, stories/highlights, media oembed, media and comment likers, comment replies, all hashtag endpoints (info, top, recent, reels), all locations, audio, and all search variants (hashtags, top, users/places/reels/music/autocomplete). They currently return 503 {"error": "temporarily_unavailable"} with a Retry-After header and are not billed. The hashtag and search pages stay published, flagged, so the request shape is known when they return.
All endpoints are GET, live under https://scrapebadger.com/v1/instagram/*, and authenticate with the X-API-Key header. No Instagram account or upstream API key is required — ScrapeBadger handles authentication, rate limiting, TLS fingerprinting and proxy rotation transparently. Credits are charged per request (see the table below) and reported on the X-Credits-Used response header.

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Features

  • Profiles — full public profile by username: bio, links, counts, verification, business/professional metadata, plus paginated posts.
  • Media — media detail by shortcode code and paginated comments.
  • Hashtags & search — temporarily unavailable (see above).

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Honesty caveat

These endpoints read Instagram’s public surface only. Private accounts expose profile metadata but not their posts or media. Fields reflect what Instagram serves to an unauthenticated client; some professional/business fields are only present when the account has opted into them.

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Conventions

  • Pagination. List endpoints take amount (page size) and a cursor (opaque next-page token). Every list response is wrapped in { items, count, next_cursor, has_more } — pass next_cursor back as cursor to walk forward until has_more is false.
  • Datetimes. Every datetime ships in both a Unix form (*_utc) and an ISO 8601 UTC string (*_at), e.g. taken_at + taken_at_utc.

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Credits

Standard read (5) covers profile and media detail. Paginated listings (8) cover posts and comments. A 503 temporarily_unavailable from a gated endpoint costs 0 credits.

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Quickstart

Resolve a handle with /users/{username}, then page their media with /users/{username}/posts by passing the returned next_cursor back as cursor until has_more is false.
ScrapeBadger is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Instagram or Meta. “Instagram” is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc., used here only to describe the platform this scraper is designed to work with.