Social media decision
Instagramapi
A single competent developer can build a limited self-hosted proxy that returns public profiles and basic insights, but reproducing the full hosted product (credit billing, MCP agent server, multi-endpoint coverage, operational reliability) is a larger operational effort.
Visit website↗Built by Andrew Seeley, who ships 7 products in this index
$20/mo
$240/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$50one-off19 h to build
$40/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Instagramapi alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Query Instagram public resources, normalize JSON, store results, compute simple insights, expose a tiny REST wrapper.
What it still won’t have
- Hosted reliability, uptime guarantees and transparent provider-side rate limiting
- Built-in MCP (agent) server and prebuilt agent/tool integrations
- Prepaid credit billing UX and dashboard
- Operational anti-abuse, provider integration fixes, and legal/terms handling
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal Instagram public-data proxy using Node.js (Express), Postgres, and Docker. Core features in scope: (1) implement auth via a single static API key, (2) endpoints: GET /v1/profile, /v1/profile/posts, /v1/insights/profile/engagement, (3) upstream HTTP client with pagination, retry and per-request billing metadata in responses, (4) normalize provider JSON into Postgres schema and compute engagement_rate, (5) simple caching layer to reduce duplicate upstream calls, (6) a tiny admin route to view remaining credits and revoke keys. Out of scope: MCP/tool protocol server, full dashboard UX, prepaid credit purchasing UI, and commercial billing. Include error handling, typed JSON responses matching the documented envelope, unit tests for the HTTP client and insight calculations, and deployment Dockerfile plus a CI pipeline that runs tests and builds the image.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productInstagram API: The Instagram Data API for developers
- official pricingPricing · Instagram API
- official docsDocumentation · Instagram API
- open sourceqeeqbox/social-analyzer
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
