instagram

List Instagram following

Returns a paginated list of the accounts an Instagram user follows. Each account includes username, display name, avatar URL, verification status, and profile URL. Pass either handle or user_id, and page through with cursor. A public account that follows nobody returns 200 with an empty list and data.total 0, not an error, and is not charged. A plain walk can end before the profile's following count: on most accounts it ends within a few rows of that count, and on large verified accounts Instagram caps every route at about 50 rows with no cursor, so a plain walk ends there. data.total carries the profile's own count on every page, so compare the rows you collected against it. Send coverage=full with handle to walk a merged list instead: each page is drawn from several reads of the list and carries no account twice inside a page, until the rows reach the count or no read has more. Across consecutive pages a handful of accounts can repeat on the pages one source covered on its own; the merged walk, which never returns an account it has already given you, runs wherever that source cannot cover the list. A full-coverage page costs 10 credits instead of 5 and takes longer, and its cursor only continues a coverage=full walk.

get/instagram/following

Request

  • Base URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1
  • URL: https://www.socialcrawl.dev/v1/instagram/following
  • Auth: API key in header x-api-key

Query parameters

handlestring

Instagram username without the @ symbol. (one of: handle, user_id; at least one required)

user_idstring

Instagram numeric user ID. Use this for faster responses. (one of: handle, user_id; at least one required)

cursorstring

Pagination cursor. Use the next_cursor from the previous response to fetch the next page.

coverage'full'

Send full to walk a merged list: accounts are added from several reads of the list and no account appears twice inside a page, until the rows reach the profile's count in data.total. On the pages one source covered on its own a handful of accounts can repeat across consecutive pages; wherever that source cannot cover the list the merged walk runs instead, and it never returns an account it has already given you. Requires handle. 10 credits a page instead of 5, settled down to 5 on any page a single read covered in full. Up to three reads are merged into one page, typically about 50 accounts, so a full list costs at most roughly the account count divided by 50, times 10 credits: on 13/09/2026 a following list of 2,652 took 54 pages and a follower list of 2,360 took 59, because the later pages of a follower walk add fewer new accounts. A page usually takes about 8 seconds and can take up to about 45, and a 503 is retried with the same cursor. A cursor from this mode only continues this mode.

Headers

Cache-Controlstring

Send no-cache to bypass the response cache and force a live fetch. Billed at the normal endpoint cost; the fresh result is written back to cache for the next caller. Only the no-cache directive triggers this. See the Response Schema guide for details.

Idempotency-Keystring

Optional UUID that makes the request safely retriable. The key is reserved atomically per account before billing. A concurrent retry receives 409 IDEMPOTENCY_IN_PROGRESS with a Retry-After of 1 second while the original is young, growing to a quarter of the time it has been running (at most 30); a crashed reservation expires after 5 minutes. A replay keeps the cached payload immutable except for billing metadata: credits_used becomes 0, idempotent_replay becomes true, and credits_remaining is refreshed to the current balance. A known current balance appears in both the body and X-Credits-Remaining header; no balance row resolves to 0. On a transient lookup failure, body credits_remaining is null and X-Credits-Remaining is omitted. Completed outcomes expire after 24 hours. If the claim store is unavailable, the request fails closed before billing. GET endpoints do not combine idempotent replay with Server-Sent Events: use Accept: application/json when sending this header. The unsupported key-plus-SSE combination is rejected before billing.

Response

Successful response

successboolean required

Whether the request succeeded

platformstring required

Platform name

endpointstring required

API endpoint path

credits_usedinteger required

Number of credits consumed

credits_remaininginteger nullable required

Current account balance, or null when this response could not establish one. Free cache hits always return null because they do not establish an authoritative post-request balance. An idempotency replay also returns null when its current-balance lookup fails. It is never a fabricated zero, so a zero here means the account really is empty. The authoritative reading is the one on a billed response, which comes straight from the deduction.

request_idstring required

Unique request identifier for support

cachedboolean required

Whether the response was served from cache

idempotent_replayboolean

True only when this response is an idempotency replay

Example response

{
  "success": true,
  "platform": "instagram",
  "endpoint": "/v1/instagram/following",
  "data": {
    "truncated": true
  },
  "credits_used": 1,
  "credits_remaining": 4999,
  "request_id": "req-abc123",
  "idempotent_replay": true,
  "meta": {
    "hint": {
      "code": "search_multi",
      "message": "You searched \"matcha\" on 3 platforms one call at a time; /v1/search/multi returns each platform's own search rows in one call at the same price per platform, and a platform with no rows is not charged.",
      "method": "GET",
      "path": "/v1/search/multi?query=matcha&platforms=instagram,tiktok,youtube"
    }
  },
  "pagination": {
    "next_cursor": "sc.eyJ2IjoyLCJjIjoiMiIsInAiOiJwYWdlIn0",
    "has_more": true,
    "page_size": 30,
    "stopped_at": "known_id"
  }
}

Changes

No recorded changes to this operation across all 1 revision of this API.