Instagram, comment monitoring

Monitor Instagram comments every day, filtered before you pay

Schedule a run over your own posts and your competitors'. Each run returns only the new public comments, and the keyword, like and date filters run before billing, so you pay only for the comments you keep: $1.90 per 1,000 on the Free and Starter plans, $1.50 on Scale and $1.10 on Business.

• $1.90 per 1,000 comments
• Keyword alerts
• Only new comments
• No login

Two ways to monitor

Both bill per saved comment, and comments your filters skip are never charged. For a one-off export instead, see export Instagram comments to Excel.

Keyword alerts

Put the words you care about in keywords: complaints ("broken", "refund", "never arrived"), buying questions ("price", "where", "link"), product names or a competitor's brand. Matching is case-insensitive, and only matching comments are saved. Run it daily with newerThan set to 24 hours and the dataset is your alert list.

Most-liked first

sort: "top" reads up to 2,000 comments per post and returns the most-liked ones, which is the quickest way to see what an audience agrees with. Add minLikes to drop the long tail.

To Sheets, Slack or your inbox

Apify's integrations send each finished run to Slack or Gmail, or call a webhook; Make, Zapier and n8n can append the rows to Google Sheets. Keep the comment id column to drop duplicates if two runs overlap.

Sentiment: bring your own model

The Actor returns the comment text, likes, date and commenter; it doesn't score sentiment. Send the text column to your own classifier or an LLM, or ask for the comments from ChatGPT or Claude and have the assistant summarise them.

What it costs per month

Ten posts gaining about 50 new comments a day is about 15,000 comments a month: $28.50 on Free and Starter, $22.50 on Scale, $16.50 on Business, before keyword filters cut it down. The Free plan stops each run at 100 comments, so daily monitoring is a paid-plan job. There is no start fee.

apify/instagram-comment-scraper can also return replies (its README describes an includeNestedComments option for paid plans, read October 6, 2026); ours can't, so pick it if you need reply threads.

Limits

• No replies. Instagram shows reply threads only to logged-in users.
• Up to about 4,800 comments per post in one run.
• Counts differ. Instagram's comment count includes replies and hidden or deleted comments, so you'll see fewer rows.
• Not instant. A schedule runs as often as you set it, not on every new comment.

Ask for it from ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor

The Instagram Comments Scraper works as a tool in ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and VS Code through Apify's hosted MCP server. Add this URL as a custom connector and sign in with your Apify account; runs bill to that account. Then ask in plain English, for example "pull today's comments on our last 5 posts that mention price or shipping and summarise the complaints".

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,yugenox/instagram-comments-scraper

claude mcp add --transport http yugenox-instagram-comments "https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=fetch-actor-details,yugenox/instagram-comments-scraper"

The AI setup guide walks through each client.

Run it from code

New comments from the last 24 hours on a profile's latest posts that mention price, shipping or a refund, 500 at most: $0.95 or less on the Free plan rate (Free runs stop at 100).

// Save as run.mjs, then: npm i apify-client && APIFY_TOKEN=... node run.mjs
import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: process.env.APIFY_TOKEN });

const run = await client.actor('yugenox/instagram-comments-scraper').call({
  postUrls: [
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"
  ],
  newerThan: "24 hours",
  keywords: [
    "price",
    "shipping",
    "refund"
  ],
  maxComments: 100,
  maxItems: 500
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const item of items) console.log(item.postUrl, item.likeCount, item.text);

import os
from apify_client import ApifyClient  # pip install apify-client

client = ApifyClient(os.environ["APIFY_TOKEN"])

run = client.actor("yugenox/instagram-comments-scraper").call(run_input={
    "postUrls": ["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"],
    "newerThan": "24 hours",
    "keywords": ["price", "shipping", "refund"],
    "maxComments": 100,
    "maxItems": 500,
})
if run is None:
    raise RuntimeError("Run did not finish")

for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("postUrl"), item.get("likeCount"), item.get("text"))

# Small jobs: runs the Actor and returns the rows in one call (up to 5 minutes).
curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/yugenox~instagram-comments-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"postUrls":["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/"],"newerThan":"24 hours","keywords":["price","shipping","refund"],"maxComments":100,"maxItems":500}'

Last updated 2026-10-06.