Looking for a third-party Instagram profile search API

Hey all,


Working on a project that needs to search Instagram profiles by username and pull publicly available data. Instagram's native API only supports business accounts so it's a non-starter.


Looking for a third-party API that can reliably return things like bio, profile picture, follower/following counts, post count, and any other publicly visible fields on a private account. Reliability and keeping up with Instagram's changes are the main things I care about, along with reasonable pricing.


Anyone using something like this that's actually held up well recently? Paid is fine.


Thanks

Hi,
SERP / social public data API might actually fit your use case quite well.

If your need is simply to retrieve Instagram public profile data by username (such as bio, profile picture, follower/following counts, post count, etc.), this can typically be achieved through third-party Instagram profile APIs. These services basically return structured data extracted from publicly visible profile pages.


If you’re interested, I can share a quick demo or more details on how this works in practice.

Two routes depending on volume. Low volume (under ~500 lookups/day) — use one of the reverse-engineered Python libs that talk to IG's mobile internal API (instagrapi is the maintained one) on a single warmed Instagram account through a residential proxy. Free, you control the stack, but breaks every few months when IG rotates their internal endpoints. High volume or production — pay a managed scraping service that exposes a stable REST API and handles the IG-side breakage for you. The reliability/price tradeoff is real. Either way, IG aggressively limits how many web_profile_info lookups you can do per session, so build retry-with-backoff and rotation into whatever you pick.

yeah @vierasen is right about instagrapi. i tried running a cluster of accounts with it last year and the checkpointing was a constant headache. even with good mobile proxies we were constantly solving captchas and verifying phone numbers.

if you want a paid API that actually works without the maintenance nightmare, look at RocketAPI. been using them for a while for profile lookups and they are pretty solid. they handle all the proxy rotation and session stuff on their end so you just query the username and get the json. pricing is reasonable too compared to building your own proxy pool.

Yeah, the checkpoint cascade is exactly why instagrapi's "free" gets expensive fast — you save the API fee but burn through warmed accounts and proxy rotation budget. Haven't run RocketAPI specifically so can't speak to it directly, but the managed-API model is the right call once your lookup volume is steady enough to make the maintenance overhead irrational. Rough threshold I'd say: if you're spending more than 2-3 hours a week babysitting account checkpoints, you've already crossed the break-even line.

honestly its better to look for a proxy provider that offers a built in web unlocker api, you just pass the ig url and it returns the raw json profile data without breaking.