How to Scrape Instagram Followers in 2026

Updated July 2026 · Affiliate disclosure

Whether you're vetting an influencer's audience, analyzing a competitor's community, or building a market-research dataset, the follower list is where the answers live. Instagram doesn't let you export it — but for public accounts, scrapers can. Here's how it works in 2026, what it costs, and the limits nobody mentions.

The no-code way (works for any public account)

1. Open the Apify Instagram Scraper and create a free account — no credit card, and the free Instagram scraper tier covers your first runs.
2. Paste the profile URL (e.g. instagram.com/natgeo) and set the results type to followers.
3. Run and export — you get usernames, full names, bios, follower counts and verification status as CSV, Excel or JSON in a few minutes.

Pricing is pay-per-result (follower-count data runs about $1.30–1.60 per 1,000 records depending on the actor), so a 50k-follower export costs a few dollars — not a subscription.

The Python way

Developers can pull followers with Instaloader (profile.get_followers()) — free, but it requires a logged-in session, which risks the account you use, and rate limits make large lists painfully slow. Our Python guide covers the safer cloud-client route that doesn't touch your own account.

What people do with follower data

• Influencer vetting: check what share of an influencer's followers look real before paying for a campaign — fake-follower audits are the #1 commercial use
• Competitor analysis: see who follows your competitors and what other accounts that audience engages with
• Lead generation: filter follower lists of niche business accounts by bio keywords

The privacy part (read this)

Follower lists are personal data even when public. If you store or process them commercially, GDPR/CCPA can apply — keep only what you need, honor deletion requests, and don't spam-DM scraped lists (that's how accounts get banned and reputations die). Full picture in our Instagram scraping legality guide.