Instagram data.
Without the login.

FetchLayer's Instagram API returns public Instagram profiles, posts, reels, stories and comments as JSON over REST or MCP. A request is one page of results (Instagram serves 12 posts a page), and each request costs one credit: $1.99 per 1,000 requests pay-as-you-go, or $25 a month for 15,000, with 30 free requests and no card to start. A request that fails is not billed. The same key covers 36 other platforms, and every route is also a tool on FetchLayer's MCP server at https://mcp.fetchlayer.dev, for Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other MCP clients.

Here it means one HTTP endpoint that returns public Instagram data as clean JSON: an account’s profile and the story highlights on it, the posts it has published, its reels with play counts, the stories it has up now, one post or reel in full, the comments on a post and the replies to them, the reels Instagram lists as popular and the terms it is trending. You send a handle, a post URL or nothing at all with a Bearer token, and get back typed records. It is not Instagram’s own Graph API — there is no app review, no Business account requirement and no OAuth. Everything returned is what Instagram makes public.

No. You send your FetchLayer key and nothing else. There is no Instagram login, no app registration and no approval step. FetchLayer is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Instagram or Meta, and the Instagram name is used only to identify the platform the data comes from.

12 a page, and every post on the pages you ask for: pages: 2 returns 24 for 2 credits. Instagram serves a grid 12 posts at a time whatever limit says, so limit: 60 takes five pages and costs five credits — and the response states exactly what it did as pagesFetched, so a bill is never a surprise. Up to 240 items and 20 pages in one request. This is Instagram’s page size, not ours, and pretending otherwise would just mean a silently larger bill.

Comments page, newest first, 10–16 to a page. Ask for up to 10 pages in one request with pages, and continue from a nextCursor with cursor; each page costs one credit, so pages: 3 is 3 credits if three pages were fetched. A comment with no text is a GIF, photo or sticker — kind says which and mediaUrl links it. replyCount is the number of replies on every page, and /comment-replies returns the replies to any comment, about 8 to a page at 1 credit a page. totalCount counts replies too, so it is higher than the comments listed.

Follower, following and post counts, all exact: stats.postCount is the real number of posts, private accounts included, never a rounded “32K”. On the rare request where only a rounded figure is available, postCount is null, the note gives the rounded figure, and a retry usually returns the exact one — a null with an explanation rather than a wrong number. The profile also says whether the account has a story up now and when it last posted one. Pass include: ["country"] and it also returns where the account is based and the month it joined.

Two things, both free with a call you were already making. Story highlights: the profile response lists the id, title and cover of every highlight the account keeps, which is how an account organises itself over time — their contents are not public, and nothing here pretends otherwise. And engagement on listings: every reel comes back with playCount, likeCount and commentCount, and an account’s posts normally carry their dates and counts too, without a detail call each.

No, and it is worth being plain about why rather than listing it as “coming soon”. Instagram does not make hashtag pages, location pages or keyword search public. That is a different product with a different risk profile — not a feature we left out. What Instagram does publish is the reels it lists as popular and the terms it is promoting, and both are available here. A hashtag or place link still resolves through /resolve-url, which tells you what it names and that it is not available.

No. Instagram publishes none. What you do get is caption — the author’s own written post body — and altText, which is Instagram’s machine-written image description (“Photo by NASA on August 19, 2026. May be an image of text.”). Neither is a transcript of spoken audio, and the docs say so in the same words, because a caller who assumes otherwise builds something that quietly does the wrong thing.

A posts listing normally carries each post’s date, like and comment counts, and a video’s play count and length; those records say fieldsFrom “listing_full”, and with include every post has them. A post still missing one is named in notes by short code, with the fields it lacks; asking again with include returns them, and so does a detail call. The popular-reels feed always comes without likes, comments and dates. Repost, share and save counts come on request: add include with any of "reposts", "shares", "saves" to a posts, reels or detail call, at the same price. Shares and saves exist for reels and videos only.

One credit per page of results fetched, and every response states it as pagesFetched. A single-page request costs 1 credit whatever the page holds. Because Instagram’s page is twelve items, asking for sixty costs five. Parsing a URL with /resolve-url reaches Instagram not at all, reports pagesFetched 0 and is free.

Every route is monitored 24/7 and a failure alerts our team, and you are only charged for successful responses. Errors are specific rather than generic: a nonexistent account is a 404 saying so by name, not a 503 dressed up as an outage; an unrecognised field is a 400 naming the field; a 502 or 503 is temporary and worth retrying after a wait.

Yes. All ten routes are MCP tools on the same FetchLayer MCP server, named instagram_user_profile, instagram_user_posts, instagram_user_reels, instagram_user_stories, instagram_post_detail, instagram_post_comments, instagram_comment_replies, instagram_reels_feed, instagram_trending_searches and instagram_resolve_url. Tool calls use the same key and are billed exactly like REST.