Building an Instagram Data Project Without Maintaining Scrapers

I recently worked on and needed a way to reliably pull Instagram profile/post data without spending half my time fixing scrapers.

At first I tried along with instagrapi. It worked for a while, but eventually I ran into the usual problems:

The biggest issue wasn’t even the coding — it was keeping everything alive.

So I started looking for a simpler approach and ended up trying hikerapi.com.

Why I Tried HikerAPI

What caught my attention was that it’s just a REST API with simple authentication using an x-access-key header.

No browser automation.
No Selenium.
No proxy management.
No account babysitting.

The pricing model also made sense for my use case because it’s pay-per-request (starting from around $0.001/request) instead of another monthly subscription. They also give 100 free requests which was enough for me to test things properly.

Quick Example

This was basically enough to get started:

import requests

headers = {"x-access-key": "YOUR_KEY"}

r = requests.get(
"https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username?username=instagram",
headers=headers
)

print(r.json())

I was able to pull profile data and integrate it into pretty quickly.

My Actual Use Case

In my case, I needed Instagram data for .

Originally I planned to build and maintain my own scraping stack, but the maintenance cost started becoming larger than the actual project itself.

Using a REST API simplified things a lot because I could focus more on:

processing data
automation logic
analytics
building features

instead of fighting Instagram sessions every few days.

Honest Tradeoffs vs Scraping

I don’t think APIs like this completely replace scraping. There are definitely tradeoffs.

Where scraping/instagrapi still wins
More low-level control
Potentially cheaper at very large scale
More customizable workflows
Full ownership of infrastructure
Where HikerAPI helped me
Faster setup
Less maintenance
More reliable for my use case
Easier integration into existing backend code
No need to manage proxies/accounts

For smaller teams, prototypes, internal tools, or side projects, I honestly found the convenience worth it.

Final Thoughts

I still think direct scraping has its place, especially if you already have stable infrastructure running.

But after spending too much time maintaining sessions and proxies, I’ve started appreciating APIs that let me focus on the actual product instead of scraper maintenance.

Curious how other developers here are handling Instagram data these days — still scraping directly, or moving toward APIs?