Build or Buy: Instagram Scraper API

The age old question, to build the scraper in-house or to buy something that's good to go and can be integrated right away. Well, there's no definitive answer to this but here's why we believe using SocialScrape for your Instagram data needs is far better than coding something from scratch.

Speed

This probably goes without saying, as it's already built it's going to take far less time to integrate into your product than building the scraper from scratch. The best thing about using existing scraping technology is the speed it provides to going live. The builders of the scraper has already figured out rotating IPs, proxies, coded the bot that scrapes the data and the endpoints required to fetch the data. This might look like a weekend project but might be a complete sidestep from focusing on your core product.

Reliability

Building a scraper in-house might feel like the right move, you have full control over the codebase and you've built it in a way that fits exactly to your use case. However all those benefits might also be impeding your ability to rely on the data being generated by the scraper. Using a pre-built scraper, such as SocialScrape, provides more peace of mind to the reliability of the data. You won't be the scrapers only customer or use case and therefore it's been built for scalability and quality. That means the scraper can handle your concurrent requests, but also lots of other customers. It also means that the scraper has found solutions for all the anti-bot mechanisms encountered in scraping, like a quality proxy pool. Therefore when you build instead of buy you might incur the need for workarounds and avoid being blocked.

Customer Support

When you build a scraper internally, you are ultimately responsible for the build quality. You have only yourself or team to turn to when things go wrong. Luckily when you use a pre-built scraper, you're getting 24/7 access to the product but also to the dedicated team of developers that will be happy to update the API with an edge-case they may have missed in the first place. At SocialScrape we provide email and chat support and pride ourselves in getting a response to customer in a timely manner, to reduce any impact to your business operations.

To conclude, no matter the path taken – build or buy – a company considering to leverage an Instagram Scraper will do well to understand the features that are required of a best-in-class scraper such as SocialScrape. In terms of building, given the amount of money that will need to be invested, having a clear understanding about the features present in state-of-the-art scraping will serve as a valuable road map when implementing a solution.

Bottom line, if you need a scraper of high quality, accuracy and volume, it gets progressively less expensive to license solution like SocialScrape than building your own solution. Making the right choice for your business takes research and preparation, but those efforts can pay off in multiple ways.

Get started

That's all you need to get started scraping Instagram with SocialScrape. Next step is to create an account and redeem your free credits, test out the API by visiting our docs here. If you run into any problems or need some advice, just email hello@socialscrape.com and we'll try to help.

If you need to scrape Instagram at scale or need an end-to-end solution, you can request a custom solution.