Gramscraper

Arjun building GramScraper — Instagram data API. Fresh data, no subscription, credits never expire. Building in public.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

Instagram + TikTok data without fragile scrapers. GramScraper provides structured public data for profiles, posts, Reels, comments, TikTok videos, hashtags and search through simple REST APIs. 100 free credits. No card. Credits never expire.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@threerouter Banning is cat-and-mouse with better mice. From the API side I see it daily: every block list breeds a smarter fingerprint. The toll booth is the honest answer — charge for access and you stop needing to detect who's legitimate, they tell you.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@AnthonyCasauria @HyperDMapp I've fought this exact problem. The durable fix is a system user token: Business Settings → System Users → add the Instagram asset. Those never expire and aren't tied to a person. Rotating user tokens will always break eventually.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@giiicestone Yep. I treat the last 10 posts like a ledger: posting cadence vs engagement curve. A creator who slows from 3x/week to monthly right when deal talks start is the flag, not follower count — reach is rentable, cadence is a habit.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

"Credits that never expire" shouldn't be a differentiator. But every scraping API runs on subscriptions that punish sporadic use.
Most developers need Instagram data 4 times a year. They shouldn't pay 12 months for it.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@themuscleai This is the real ops skill. My rule: alert on schema drift, never on markup diffs. If the fields you consume are stable, a deploy is noise. Page on missing or renamed fields and type changes only — everything else is a log line.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@threerouter Exactly right. The front-desk model is where this goes — identity and billing for agents. Blocking everyone suspicious just creates a black market for access. Clean credentials through tolerated channels will win the builders.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@giiicestone Fair point — UGC flips the model. The brand rents your creative, not your reach, so distribution metrics drop out and the vetting moves to the samples themselves: consistency across the last 10 posts, native pacing, no engagement pods. Totally different fraud surface.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@pujasr22 For public profiles and posts, a purpose-built REST API beats wiring your own scraper. Two things to check before committing: data freshness (cached reads go stale fast) and field coverage. We built https://t.co/yDhFXFoLRC for exactly this — fresh pulls, no login needed.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@imot_46 @junwatu Good comparison. One thing I'd add: the retrieval layer matters more than the model. An LLM can't reconstruct engagement data the scraper never captured — garbage in, garbage out. Pick your scraper for coverage, your model for parsing.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@eduardosch Classic failure mode: scrapers stop when the profile grid stops returning new edges instead of paginating the feed — so 12 comes back looking complete. Diff against the profile's published post count and keep paging until they match. Silent truncation is the worst kind of wrong.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@cathitdog @CuriousRadish One criterion I'd add: data freshness. A lot of scraper APIs serve cached reads — fine for dashboards, dangerous for creator vetting or anything time-sensitive. Ask when the data was actually pulled, not just when it was delivered.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@araskodluyor @Avenoxai Yes — Meta's official Graph API covers posting, comments, and insights, but only for accounts you own. There's no official API for reading other people's public profiles — that's the whole reason the scraping-API market exists. Built my whole company in that gap.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

"Free cached reads" — the feature every scraping API brags about and nobody questions.
Cached = stale. If you're vetting a creator on 3-week-old engagement data, you're making decisions on fiction.
Freshness is the spec nobody publishes. Ask for it.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

Meta killed third-party data access and called it privacy. It was moat-building. Your own account data: free. Everyone else's: good luck. An entire industry of data APIs exists because of that one policy decision.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@tiagozip_ @coah80 Static datasets are great until you need yesterday's data. The hard part of scraping isn't the first 10M rows — it's keeping the pipeline alive through signature changes, rate limits, and fingerprint rotation. Freshness is the feature.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@JikanleOficial The ToS says you can't scrape. The rate limiter says you can't scrape. Only one of them responds in under 200ms.

[Gramscraper @Gramscraper]

@kiaralab7 For business accounts: yes. Meta's messaging APIs expose conversations, and webhooks push new messages. No polling.

For personal C2C chats: no official API exists. Anything claiming otherwise is device automation — fragile, against ToS. Design around that boundary.