Instagram, monitoring

Track Instagram accounts: follower change and new posts, daily

Give it a watchlist of public accounts and schedule it. Each run returns one row per account with what changed since the last check (followers gained or lost, a new bio, a new link) and only the posts published since the last run. $1.90 per 1,000 results on the Free and Starter plans, $1.50 on Scale and $1.10 on Business.

• Follower change per account
• Only new posts
• Memory in your own account
• $1.90 per 1,000 rows

Set up a watchlist

1. Put the profile links in startUrls.
2. Turn on includeDetails so each account gets a profile row, and set maxItemsPerQuery to the posts you want per account plus one for the profile row (13 = profile + 12 posts).
3. Turn on monitor and give the watchlist a monitorKey, one per list.
4. Save it as a task and schedule it daily.

{
  "startUrls": [
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
    "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"
  ],
  "includeDetails": true,
  "maxItemsPerQuery": 13,
  "monitor": true,
  "monitorKey": "competitors"
}

The changes block

From the second run on, every profile row gains a changes object (it is null on the first check):

Only new posts

The Actor remembers what earlier runs delivered for the same monitorKey. Posts it already saved are skipped and not charged, and on profiles the paging stops at the newest post an earlier run delivered, so repeat runs are quick. The memory is a key-value store in your own Apify account (instagram-monitor-<key>), not with us.

What daily tracking costs

One profile row per account per run, plus whatever new posts they publish. A hundred accounts checked daily is 3,000 profile rows in 30 days: $5.70 on the Free and Starter plans, $4.50 on Scale and $3.30 on Business, plus about the same price per new post. Free Apify plans cap each run at 100 results, so a watchlist of real size needs a paid plan.

What you can't track logged out

• Who followed or unfollowed. Follower lists are visible only to logged-in accounts, so you can't get them; you get the count and its change.
• History before your first run. The time series starts when you start.
• Stories. You get latestStoryAt and hasActiveStory, not story contents.

Send it somewhere

Each run is a dataset you can pull over the API, or send to Slack, Gmail or Google Drive with Apify's integrations, or to Google Sheets through Make, Zapier or n8n. Comments on those accounts' posts can be watched the same way: see comment monitoring.

Ask for it from ChatGPT, Claude or Cursor

The Instagram 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 "which of my 20 competitor accounts gained the most followers this week, and what did they post?".

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

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

The AI setup guide walks through each client.

Run it from code

The watchlist above as code: on the first run, at most 26 results ($0.0494 on Free); later runs, two profile rows plus only the new posts.

// 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-scraper').call({
  startUrls: [
    "https://www.instagram.com/nasa/",
    "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"
  ],
  includeDetails: true,
  maxItemsPerQuery: 13,
  monitor: true,
  monitorKey: "competitors"
});

const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
for (const item of items) console.log(item.dataType, item.url, item.changes);

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

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

run = client.actor("yugenox/instagram-scraper").call(run_input={
    "startUrls": ["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/", "https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"],
    "includeDetails": True,
    "maxItemsPerQuery": 13,
    "monitor": True,
    "monitorKey": "competitors",
})
if run is None:
    raise RuntimeError("Run did not finish")

for item in client.dataset(run.default_dataset_id).iterate_items():
    print(item.get("dataType"), item.get("url"), item.get("changes"))

# 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-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"startUrls":["https://www.instagram.com/nasa/","https://www.instagram.com/natgeo/"],"includeDetails":true,"maxItemsPerQuery":13,"monitor":true,"monitorKey":"competitors"}'

Last updated 2026-10-06.