Building an Instagram Clone in 2026 with Django and django-pictures
A story about a billion-dollar exit, a chance meeting at a business plan competition, and why serving the right image to the right device is still harder than it should be.
Instagram Was a Django App
Before Instagram was a Meta property worth hundreds of billions of dollars, it was a Python project running on Django. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger launched it in October 2010 after pivoting away from a check-in app called Burbn (named for Systrom's love of bourbon whiskey). They stripped Burbn down to its one popular feature — photo sharing — renamed it Instagram, and shipped it. The technical stack was Django as the application server, PostgreSQL for user and media data, Redis for feed caches, and Gunicorn as the WSGI server. At peak load before the acquisition, those three engineers were handling 14 million users entirely within that stack.
When Facebook came calling in April 2012, the conversation was not entirely comfortable. Internal emails later released during antitrust hearings revealed Zuckerberg telling Systrom that Facebook was “messing with our photo strategy,” and that how Instagram engaged “now will also determine how much we are partners vs. competitors down the line.” Systrom reportedly told investors he feared Zuckerberg would go into “destroy mode” if he refused to sell. In the end, Systrom and Krieger accepted $1 billion in cash and Facebook stock — a deal that closed on April 9, 2012, with just 13 employees on the Instagram payroll.
