Common workflows
- Influencer vetting — pull the followers of a creator you're considering for a sponsorship; spot-check the list for bot accounts, spammy display names, or inflated foreign-bot ratios.
- Competitive analysis — export a competitor's followers and see what other brands they follow (clue: their full follow graph reveals their persona).
- Lead generation for B2B — when an industry-specific account has only ~1,000 followers, every follower is a potential lead. Export and enrich with their bio link.
- Audience overlap — export your followers + a partner brand's followers, diff in Excel, find the shared and the unique audience for collab planning.
- Influencer discovery — export the followers of a niche micro-influencer; the verified accounts in the list are usually the next-tier creators in the same niche.
Public vs private accounts
Public accounts: anyone can fetch the follower list; no login required. Private accounts: you must be a follower yourself, and the export uses your authenticated session — your password is never stored, the auth is OAuth-style and scoped read-only.
Pacing and Instagram rate limits
Instagram heavily rate-limits anonymous reads of follower lists. A small account (under ~10,000 followers) usually finishes in a few minutes. A large one (hundreds of thousands of followers) can take a few hours because we have to fetch them in small pages without tripping Instagram's anti-scrape signals. You can close the tab — we email you when the file is ready.
What you can NOT export
- The follower's follower count, following count, or post count — Instagram only exposes those on the profile pageview, not in the follower-list endpoint. To get them, paste each follower URL into our Instagram exporter separately, or use the API.
- Email or phone — never exposed by Instagram even if the user has them set on their business profile.
- Stories, posts, or DMs from those followers.
Plan limits
Per-export size scales with your plan. Free (no signup): up to 100 followers per export. Personal: 5,000. Premium: 50,000. Business: 250,000 — see pricing for the full feature comparison and API tiers for the API-specific limits.