Social media decision
Last Followed
A single capable developer can build a useful replacement (scraper + diffing + notifications + UI) in about a week using available open-source tooling, though they will not match the vendor's production-scale scraping, anonymity or brand trust.
Visit website↗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 Last Followed alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- 1) Fetch a public Instagram account's follow list by scraping or public endpoints; 2) normalize and diff follow lists to detect new follows; 3) persist timelines and tracking state in a database; 4) deliver real-time alerts via SMS and email using third-party providers; 5) provide a web UI for entering usernames, viewing timelines, and managing trackers.
What it still won’t have
- Scale and reliability of a production scraping fleet (IP pools, rate-limit handling, retries)
- The product's claimed anonymous/managed operations and legal/terms handling
- Stripe-managed billing portal and consumer trust/brand
- Long-term historical indexing and unlimited tracking at scale
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted by over 211,033+ users
First-year cost
No published price
Last Followed does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
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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 self-hosted Last Followed clone using Node.js (Express) + Postgres, Playwright for resilient scraping, a background worker (BullMQ) for snapshotting and diffing, Twilio for SMS and SendGrid (or SES) for email, and a React single-page UI. In scope: user-facing form to enter a public Instagram username, scheduled scraping of that account's follow/following list, diffing to emit "new follow" events, storage of timelines in Postgres, endpoints to list timeline events, and notification delivery via configured providers. Out of scope: building a paid billing portal, handling enterprise scale, or implementing anonymizing IP pools. Include error handling on network and parsing failures, retry/backoff, basic rate-limit handling, tests for scraping/parsing and API endpoints, and deployment instructions for Docker on a single VPS.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Evidence score86
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 productTrack Instagram Followers & New Activity | Last Followed
- official productTrack Instagram Followers & New Activity | Last Followed
- open source6551Team/opentwitter-mcp
- open sourceqeeqbox/social-analyzer
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
