Instagram data API pricing compared (2026)
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Almost nobody in this market prices in the same unit. One charges per request, another per record, another in credits that buy different amounts per endpoint. The headline rates are not comparable. Everything below is normalised to one unit: US dollars per thousand results delivered.
The rates, normalised
| Provider | Per 1,000 results | Paid before your first call |
|---|---|---|
| SocialHolmes | $0.50 | None |
| HikerAPI | $1.00 | None |
| Apify | $1.50 | None |
| Bright Data | $1.50 | $499.00 |
| EnsembleData | $2.00 | $100.00 |
Other providers' figures are their own published rates as at August 28, 2026, normalised to dollars per thousand results. They change often — check before you rely on them, and tell us if one is wrong.
Every figure is the provider's own published rate, with the date it was checked printed under the table. They move.
The two costs the table cannot show
- What a unit contains
- One paged call returns four hundred comments or three, depending on what was there. Priced per request those cost the same. Priced per result they differ by a hundred times, and most real target lists are full of private, deleted and region-locked accounts that return nothing.
- The monthly floor
- A subscription paid before your first call. Against fifty thousand results a month, a floor in the hundreds works out at several dollars per thousand on its own — many times the advertised rate. It hurts exactly the people least likely to model it: teams evaluating, prototyping, or running something seasonal.
Free tiers come in three shapes
- A block of credits on sign-up
- Enough to check the response shape. Not enough to run anything.
- A monthly allowance
- Enough to run something small indefinitely.
- A daily allowance that does not roll over
- Enough to test, awkward to build on: a quiet week is allowance you have already lost.
How to actually choose
Take a hundred targets from your real list — the private accounts and the deleted posts included — and run them through two or three providers. Compare how many came back complete, how long the median run took, and what it cost. Fill rate varies far more between providers than price does, and it is invisible until you run your own targets. An afternoon settles this in a way no pricing page can, including this one.
Where we sit
Smallest top-up is $5 and credits do not expire. A run that returns fewer results than you asked for costs less. That is the part we would point at rather than the headline rate: it shows up on the invoice rather than on the pricing page.
Questions people ask
How much does an Instagram API cost per 1,000 results?
Which Instagram API has no monthly minimum?
What is the difference between per-request and per-result billing?
Do unused credits expire?
Try it on your own targets
The only comparison that settles anything is your own. A new account gets 1,000 credits, needs no card, and runs on the same endpoints and rate as a paying one.