I spent the last week building a small "who unfollowed me" tool, which means I needed one boring thing: the follower list of an Instagram account. Here is everything I measured while figuring out how to get it in 2026 — what's dead, what's free, and what the paid options actually cost.
The free paths are mostly dead
Follower lists require a logged-in session. Period. I tried three separate unauthenticated paths (web API, GraphQL, mobile endpoints) and every one returns 401 for list data. No header combination fixes it.
Follower counts are still public — web_profile_info with the x-ig-app-id header returns the count, privacy flag, and following count in one response. But it's aggressively rate-limited per IP: in my tests, roughly 20 requests inside a 30–60 minute sliding window trips a 401 block that recovers after ~29 minutes. Spacing requests out doesn't help; it's a sliding window, not a fixed quota.
Don't bother from cloud servers. The same endpoint that worked from my home IP returned 429 with a 0-byte body in 16ms on the very first request from a cloud IP (I tested from a Vercel build container). That's not my usage history — that's the entire IP range being pre-banned. Public cloud IPs inherit the abuse history of every tenant before you, so you cannot have a "clean" cloud IP.
