If you search for a way to pull Instagram profile data, Apify is the first answer you get. It deserves to be. The catalogue is enormous, the platform is mature, and for a lot of scraping problems it is the right tool.
But the price of a run is harder to work out than it looks, and the reason is structural rather than sneaky. This post does the arithmetic.
Every Apify figure below was read from Apify's own pages on 23 September 2026. Prices change. Check the source before you rely on a number in a comparison post, including this one.
The sticker price
Apify's Instagram Profile Scraper uses pay-per-event pricing:
| Plan | Price per 1,000 results |
|---|---|
| Free | $2.60 |
| Starter | $2.30 |
So a thousand profiles is $2.60. That is the number most comparisons stop at.
What the sticker price leaves out
Three things, and all three are documented by Apify — they are just documented somewhere else.
Proxies, storage and data transfer are billed separately, out of the same credits. A profile scrape that needs a residential proxy pays for the profile and for the proxy. The $2.60 is the actor, not the run.
Unused credits expire monthly. They do not roll over. If your usage is uneven — a burst in one month, quiet the next — you pay for the peak every month.
The underlying unit is compute, not results. Apify meters compute units, where one unit is 1 GB of RAM for one hour, at $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business. Pay-per-event actors shield you from this, but the platform underneath is metered by time and memory, which is why the same job can cost different amounts on different days.
The plans
| Plan | Monthly | Platform credits included |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 |
| Starter | $19 | $19 |
| Scale | $199 | $199 |
| Business | $999 | $999 |
The credit allowance equals the subscription. The subscription buys you a lower per-unit rate and a bigger ceiling; it does not buy you usage on top of what you paid.
Working it through
On the free plan: $5 of credit at $2.60 per thousand is roughly 1,900 Instagram profiles a month — before any proxy cost. That is a generous free tier, and it is worth saying plainly.
On Starter: $19 of credit at $2.30 per thousand is roughly 8,260 profiles for $19, or about 435 profiles per dollar.
Both numbers assume no proxy spend, no storage, no data transfer. Your real number is lower. How much lower depends on which proxy tier your targets force you onto, and you find that out by running it.
What this costs on HonestHook
I build HonestHook, so treat this section as a vendor talking. The numbers are checkable in ten seconds at /pricing, which reads them from the same catalogue the OpenAPI spec is generated from.
An Instagram profile call costs 1 credit. Every key gets 1,000 credits a month free, with no card. Paid: $9/month for 5,000 credits, or $79/year for 60,000.
| Apify | HonestHook | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier, this use case | ~1,900 profiles | 1,000 profiles |
| Profiles per dollar, paid | ~435 | ~555 |
| Unused credits | expire monthly | do not expire |
| Proxies, storage, transfer | billed separately | included |
| When the balance runs out | keeps billing | returns 402, stops |
| Response shape | varies by actor and author | one shape, every platform |
Apify's free tier is larger than mine for this specific job. Nineteen hundred profiles against a thousand. If you need a few thousand Instagram profiles a month and nothing else, Apify's free plan is the cheaper answer and you should use it.
Apify's catalogue is vastly larger than ten platforms. Thousands of actors against nineteen endpoints. If your job is outside what I cover, this is not a close call.
So what is the actual argument
Not price. Predictability.
On Apify, "Instagram scraper" is not one product. It is a marketplace: different authors ship different actors for the same job, at different prices — I found the same category advertised at $0.05, $2.30, $2.60 and $2.70 per thousand while writing this. Each one returns its own shape. Proxy and transfer come out of the same wallet. The number you budget is not the number you are billed.
That is fine when scraping is your project. It is expensive when scraping is a line item inside something else you are actually building.
What you get from a fixed catalogue instead:
- The cost of every endpoint is published, and generated from the same table that serves the requests. It cannot drift from what you are charged.
- A call that finds nothing doesn't charge.
archive/moverscosts 10 credits and bills zero when nothing moved. - Checking your own balance costs nothing.
- When the balance is gone, the API returns
402and stops. There is no overage, so there is no surprise invoice.
How to decide
Use Apify if you need breadth, if your job is outside a fixed catalogue, or if a couple of thousand Instagram profiles a month on the free plan is genuinely all you need.
Use something with a fixed catalogue if you need the same handful of platforms every month, in the same shape, at a cost you can put in a spreadsheet before you write the code.
Neither of those is a clever answer. They are just different problems.
Apify figures read 23 September 2026 from apify.com/pricing and apify.com/apify/instagram-profile-scraper. HonestHook figures are generated from the live catalogue and are current as of page load.