Needed public Instagram profile data (bio, followers, profile pic, private-account handling) for a side project. Tried three approaches:
DIY (instagrapi/instaloader) — free, but you own proxy rotation, session/cookie management, and rate-limit/ban handling. Fine for a script you run once, not for something that has to keep working.
Public-data-only scraping APIs — clean single-call fetch, but returned nothing for private accounts, which was a hard requirement for me.
HikerAPI — ended up here. Simple REST call:
curl -H "x-access-key: YOUR_KEY" \
"https://api.hikerapi.com/v2/user/by/username?username=example"
Pay-per-request from $0.001, 100 free requests to test. It resolved private accounts the public-only option couldn't, and there's no infra on my side — no proxies, no cookies, no retry/backoff logic to write.
Trade-off is obvious: you pay per call instead of paying in maintenance time. For irregular volume that's a good deal; at high sustained volume the math might flip back toward self-hosting.
Anyone else weighing hosted API vs. DIY for social data? What tipped it for you?