Short version: there is no single "price per 1,000 Instagram API calls" that works for every vendor. Some bill per result (a post, profile, or comment). Some bill per HTTP request, and one request can return a page of items. Some sell credits with a published dollar value. At least one official pricing page lists credit rates but not the dollar price of a credit. The table uses only figures from each provider's own official pricing page, checked on 10 Nov 2026 IST. Where the math to $ per 1,000 of a single unit is unambiguous, we show it. Otherwise we show the raw published price and mark it not directly comparable.
| Official source | Billing unit | Cheapest published paid entry | Computed $ / 1,000 (same unit only) | Free start (as published) | Notes | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Instadata | https://instadata.dev/pricing/ | Credit; most reads 1 credit per result (a post, profile, comment, reel, hashtag, or place). Some endpoints cost more per result. Reel transcript is 1 credit for the reel plus 20 per started minute. | Monthly plan $5 for 1,000 credits a month (unused credits roll over). Same $5 per 1,000 on free/monthly top-ups. Annual plan $54 for 12,000 credits up front; annual top-ups $4.50 per 1,000. | $5.00 / 1,000 results on 1-credit endpoints at the monthly grant or free/monthly top-up rate. $4.50 / 1,000 results on 1-credit endpoints at the annual grant or annual top-up rate. | Free plan $0: 25 credits at signup, no card, 20 requests a minute. | Errors, timeouts and upstream failures are never charged. Empty results are free up to 25 a day per account, then 1 credit. Cached reads cost the same as live reads. |
| ScrapeCreators | https://scrapecreators.com/ (pricing section on the homepage; /pricing was 404 this run) | Credit; official copy says 1 credit equals 1 request for most endpoints, and a few use more (cost is in the docs). Cache hits cost 0 credits. | Freelance pack $47 for 25,000 credits, advertised as $1.88 / 1k requests. Business pack $497 for 500,000 credits, advertised as $0.99 / 1k requests. | $1.88 / 1,000 one-credit requests on the Freelance pack ($47 / 25,000). $0.994 / 1,000 one-credit requests on the Business pack, which they advertise as $0.99. | ScrapeCreators gives 100 credits to start. Up to 1,200 extra credits can be claimed from the dashboard (100 for how you found them, 100 for starring GitHub, 1,000 for a G2 review). | Pay as you go, no subscription. Purchased credits have no expiration date under the policy stated on the page (with a future-change disclosure). This $ / 1,000 is per request, not per result. A list call that returns many posts may still use one credit. |
| SocQ | https://socq.ai/pricing | Credits based on returned results for most Instagram endpoints; a few Instagram endpoints are priced per request (Location Info, Location Search). Prices are estimates; final credits are settled by the backend task result. | Dollar price of a credit, and dollar prices for Growth or Scale plans, were not published on the official pricing page this run. The FAQ refers to plans with a monthly request allowance without listing USD amounts. | Not directly comparable. No official USD-per-credit or USD-per-1,000 figure was on the page. | Not listed as a priced free credit grant on the pricing page this run. The site has a "Start building" / "Create an API key" path; no signup credit amount was on the pricing page. | Published Instagram credit rates include Posts 0.34 credits/result, Comments 0.3, Profiles 0.6, Transcript 0.7, Reels 0.52, and others. Use those rates only after you know what a credit costs in your account. |
| Bright Data (Instagram Scraper API) | https://brightdata.com/products/web-scraper/instagram | Successfully delivered record. Official copy says failed deliveries are not charged, and proxy, unblocking and parsing are included in the record price. | Pay as you go $1.5 / 1K record. Scale plan $499 / month with 384,000 records included and $1.3 / 1K additional records. Enterprise is custom. | $1.50 / 1,000 records on pay as you go. Scale included rate is $499 / 384,000 records, which is about $1.30 / 1,000 records, matching the $1.3 additional rate they publish. | 5,000 records per month, no credit card required. Unused free credits do not roll over. Credits also apply to Unlocker API and SERP API, not only Instagram. | A time-limited 60% off code (API60, 3 months) was on the page this run. Do not use the promo as the list rate. One API call can return many billable records. |
| Apify (apify/instagram-scraper Actor) | https://apify.com/apify/instagram-scraper and https://apify.com/pricing | Pay per event: one result equals one scraped item (a post, reel, comment, profile, hashtag, or place). Platform plans are a separate monthly fee plus included Store/platform spend. | Actor rates published on the Actor page: Free plan $2.70 / 1,000 results; Starter $2.30; Scale and Business "$1.90 with 104,700 results per month" and "$1.50 with 666,000 results per month" respectively. First paid platform plan: Starter $19 / month + pay as you go, with $19 to spend in the Store or on your own Actors. | $2.70 / 1,000 results on the Free plan (unambiguous Actor rate, no Store discount). $2.30, $1.90, and $1.50 / 1,000 results on Starter, Scale, and Business as published for this Actor. The monthly platform fee is extra and is not folded into those per-result figures. | Free platform plan $0, $5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors, no credit card required. | Official Actor copy: free-plan comments are limited to one page per post (about 15 comments). Rates are for this first-party Instagram Scraper, not every Instagram Actor in the store. |
| instapi.co | https://instapi.co/ and https://instapi.co/docs (no /pricing URL; that path was 404) | 1 credit = 1 data request (REST or MCP). | $1 minimum purchase = 100 credits, also stated as $1 per 100 credits. | $10.00 / 1,000 data requests ($1 / 100 credits, times 10). | 10 free credits on signup. | Per-result cost is not directly comparable: the posts endpoint is 1 credit per request and accepts a count parameter (official docs example uses count=3; /api/help says count defaults to 12). A max page size was not verified this run. 404 user_not_found and private_account for posts on a private account are not charged. 502 upstream errors are refunded, per the docs. |
| HikerAPI | https://hikerapi.com/pricing | Pay per request on a prepaid balance. No subscription. | Popular plan $1 per 1,000 requests. Volume rate $0.60 per 1,000 requests. 100 free requests. | $1.00 / 1,000 requests on the popular plan. $0.60 / 1,000 requests at the published volume rate. | 100 free requests. | Balance never expires, per the page. Official FAQ: 200, 400, 403 and 404 responses are charged; 50x is not; deprecated 410 is never charged. Volume rates unlock after a balance threshold, but the numeric thresholds were not in the fetched page copy this run, so treat $0.60 as a published volume rate whose unlock amount is unspecified here. |
These figures are not a ranking of "cheapest Instagram API." A $1.88 per 1,000 requests row can be cheaper or more expensive than a $5.00 per 1,000 results row. It depends on how many items each request returns, cache hit rates, failed-call policy, and which endpoints you actually use. Promotional discounts, custom enterprise quotes, and unofficial marketplace Actors are out of scope.
From https://instadata.dev/pricing/ on 10 Nov 2026 IST, most list and lookup endpoints are 1 credit per result. Higher published rates include 3 credits per ad, 3 credits per collaboration, 4 credits per Profile About or Hashtag Analytics, and 8 credits per media download. A reel transcript is 1 credit plus 20 per started minute. A reel summary is 4 credits plus 20 per started minute. At the $5 per 1,000 credit top-up rate, a 1-credit result is $0.005, and a 3-credit ad is $0.015.
Plans also set request rate: free 20 requests a minute, monthly 200, annual 300. Every plan includes the endpoint sheet, the MCP server and the agent skills.
Included: Instadata, ScrapeCreators, SocQ, Bright Data Instagram Scraper API, Apify Instagram Scraper (apify/instagram-scraper), instapi.co, HikerAPI (added because it publishes official per-request Instagram API pricing).
Dropped this run: we did not add another well-known Instagram scraper API beyond these seven. That keeps us near the cap of eight, and it avoids rows without a first-party official price. ScrapeCreators /pricing and instapi.co /pricing were not used (404); pricing was taken from each site's official homepage (and instapi docs). Third-party blogs were not used as price sources.
Because the unit is different. Compare $ per 1,000 results only with other per-result prices, and $ per 1,000 requests only with other per-request prices. Then look at how many items your typical call returns.
On 1-credit endpoints, $5.00 per 1,000 results at the monthly plan grant or free/monthly top-up rate, and $4.50 per 1,000 at the annual grant or annual top-up rate. Transcripts, ads, collaborations and a few other endpoints use more credits.
Errors, timeouts and upstream failures are never charged. Empty results are free up to 25 per day per account, then cost 1 credit.
No. A request is one API call. A result is one returned record. Some vendors charge for the call, some for each record inside it.
No. Bright Data showed a time-limited 60% off code this run. The table uses list rates from the official pages.
Not as a blanket claim. Several official per-request or per-record rates are lower than Instadata's $5 per 1,000 1-credit results. Whether your bill is lower depends on the unit, the endpoint mix, and failed-call policy.
Provider prices checked on official pages on 10 Nov 2026 IST (Asia/Calcutta). Tell us if something is out of date.