InScrape
$0.60–$1.20 per 1,000 standard requests
- Entry
- 100 free; $12 for 10,000
- Billing unit
- Successful request
- Non-200 responses
- 0 credits
- Purchased-credit expiry
- Never
Compare · reviewed 20 September 2026
Scrapingdog Alternative for Instagram — Typed JSON Instead of Markup You Parse
Scrapingdog is a general-purpose scraping and proxy layer, and general purpose is exactly right when your targets are arbitrary. It stops being right when the target is one site whose markup changes on somebody else's schedule.
Quick verdict
Choose InScrape when you want Instagram-shaped JSON without maintaining a parser. Choose Scrapingdog when you need arbitrary websites, Google, LinkedIn or other scraping APIs under a monthly capacity plan.
- Current entry
- 200 free credits; paid plans start at $40/month
- Published rate
- $0.20 per 1,000 credits on Lite; requests can use multiple credits
- Billing unit
- Credits that vary by API and request options
- Best for
- General web scraping and several structured search APIs
Pricing snapshot
InScrape and Scrapingdog use different cost models.
Normalize the workload before choosing a lower-looking number. InScrape prices below are for standard one-credit requests; followers and following cost two credits.
Scrapingdog
$0.20 per 1,000 credits on Lite; requests can use multiple credits
- Entry
- 200 free credits; paid plans start at $40/month
- Billing unit
- Credits that vary by API and request options
- Failure billing
- Failed requests are not charged
- Best fit
- General web scraping and several structured search APIs
When Scrapingdog is the right call
When Scrapingdog is the better choice.
A comparison page that says the competitor is bad at everything is a comparison page nobody believes. Here is where they genuinely win.
- You scrape arbitrary sites and want one proxy and rendering layer in front of all of them
- Google SERP or LinkedIn data is on your list; they have dedicated scrapers for those and we have none
- You already own parsers and would rather have raw markup than somebody else's field names
- Your target list changes weekly, and only a generic endpoint can keep up with that
Why people switch
Why teams compare InScrape with Scrapingdog.
These are the four reasons that show up in support conversations, not a marketing list.
A generic scraper hands you a page, not an answer
The response is markup. Turning it into a follower count, a caption and a media URL is your parser, your fixtures and your pager at 2am when a class name changes. That work does not go away because the request returned 200.
Markup changes are your incident, not the vendor's
With a general-purpose scraper the vendor's obligation ends at delivering the page. Nothing in that covers the selector that stopped matching last night. With typed endpoints a payload change is our incident and it gets fixed once, for everyone, before most customers notice.
Instagram mechanics are not part of a generic API
Cursor pagination through followers and comments, highlight trays and the items inside them, stories that disappear twenty-four hours after they are posted, telling a private account apart from a deleted one. A generic endpoint has no opinion on any of it, so you build and maintain all of it yourself.
You pay for the fetch, not for the data
Generic scrapers bill per successful fetch and per rendering option, so a heavy page you then fail to parse still costs. Here confirmed private accounts return 200 and are charged at the endpoint rate. Inspect credits_charged for each result, including service errors.
Side by side
InScrape vs Scrapingdog: API differences.
| InScrape | Scrapingdog | |
|---|---|---|
| What you receive | Typed JSON with documented fields | Markup you parse yourself |
| Who maintains the Instagram parser | We do — it is the entire product | You do |
| Pagination | Cursor pagination on every list endpoint | Yours to work out per page |
| Private accounts | 200 with available profile details, billed at the endpoint rate | A page that renders, which you must detect |
| Coverage of arbitrary sites | None — Instagram only | Any URL, plus dedicated Google and LinkedIn scrapers |
| Cost when parsing fails | Nothing — we charge only a parsed 200 | The fetch is billed; the parsing is yours |
| Time to first useful field | One GET | One GET plus the parser you write |
FAQ
Scrapingdog Instagram alternative FAQ.
A proxy API looks cheaper per request. Is it?
The per-request line often is lower, because it is buying less. The comparable number is the request plus the parser you write, the tests around it and the incidents when Instagram's markup shifts. Price the engineering as well as the call.
Can I use both?
Commonly the right shape: Instagram through typed endpoints here, everything else through a general scraper there. They are not competing for the same job.
Do you return raw HTML if I want to parse it myself?
No. Every endpoint returns parsed JSON against a fixed envelope. If you specifically want the markup, a general-purpose scraper is the correct tool and we are not it.
What about Google, LinkedIn or the rest of the web?
We do not cover them and are not planning to. Public Instagram data is the whole catalogue — 16 endpoints, nothing else.
Compare next
Evaluate the closest alternatives with the same method.
Each page separates billing units, product fit and the cases where the other provider is the better choice.