Social media decision
InstaTrack
A technical user can build the core follower-detection workflow (scraping, diffing, timeline) but reproducing the app's App Store polish, subscription plumbing, and reliable scraping at scale is nontrivial; open-source scraping/analyzer projects make a narrow replacement realistic but not a full clone.
View on the App Store↗$12.99/mo
$156/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off44 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
No open-source build does this yet
Nothing published replaces this one, so a replacement starts from an empty file. Here is what it would have to cover.
What a replacement has to do
- Periodically fetch a public account's follower list, diff it with the previous snapshot to detect follows/unfollows, store those events and display a timeline, and notify the user of changes.
What it still won’t have
- Polished native iOS app distributed via the App Store
- Built-in App Store subscription billing and account management
- Designer polish, translations, App Store listings and reviews
- Operational scale and resilient scraping infrastructure maintained by the vendor
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 1 seat.
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 follower-tracking web service using Node.js (Express), Postgres for storage, and Puppeteer for scraping public Instagram follower pages. Core features in scope: (1) register and verify one user via email (no paid billing), (2) add Instagram usernames to monitor, (3) scheduled scraper jobs that snapshot follower lists and persist diffs, (4) activity timeline page showing follow/unfollow events per tracked account, (5) email notification on new events, (6) basic admin UI to inspect job runs and errors. Out of scope: App Store native iOS app, subscription billing, scale-oriented distributed scraping cluster. Deliverables must include error handling for scraping failures, retry/backoff, unit and integration tests for scraper and diffing logic, and Dockerfiles + deployment instructions for a single VM.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score55
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 · 1
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productInstaTrack: Follow Tracker on the App Store
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
