# Measuring a campaign hashtag inside its own window

Instagram Hashtag Scraper charges $0.016 per hashtag with the first sixty items included, then $0.0004 each. Because the sixty is per hashtag rather than per run, a campaign measured across several related tags costs far less per post than the same volume pulled from one.

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**29 September 2026** Published

**2 min** Read

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-   Sixty items come free with every hashtag query, and the allowance does not pool across the run.
-   Five related tags at sixty posts each cost eight cents and nothing in items.
-   One tag taken three hundred deep costs the same query fee plus 240 item charges.
-   Breadth is subsidised, depth is not. Choose the shape that matches the question.

## The allowance decides the method

Instagram Hashtag Scraper bills two events: $0.016 for each hashtag you query, with roughly the first sixty items inside it, and $0.0004 for every item past that.

Read those two numbers together and a strategy falls out. The query fee is forty times the item price, but it arrives with sixty items attached. So the first sixty items on any tag cost about a fortieth of a cent each, and the sixty-first costs $0.0004.

The economics reward asking more questions, not asking one question harder.

## The same money, two shapes

A campaign typically spawns a cluster of tags: the branded one, the misspelling, the generic category, the event hashtag. You have eight cents.

**One tag, deep.** `#brandlaunch` taken to 300 posts: $0.016 + 240 × $0.0004 = **$0.112**

**Five tags, shallow.** Each to its free sixty: 5 × $0.016 = **$0.08**, and no item charges at all

The second run is cheaper and returns three hundred posts rather than three hundred. Identical volume, lower price, and it answers a question the first one cannot: which of the five tags people actually used.

## What the wide version tells you

A deep pull on the tag you assumed was the campaign’s tells you about that tag. If the audience adopted a different one, or if the branded tag was mostly used by the brand itself, a deep pull makes that invisible, because everything in the dataset came from the tag you picked.

Querying all five surfaces the distribution. That is usually the finding: not how many posts the campaign got, but which label they gathered under.

```
TAGS = ["brandlaunch", "brandlaunch2026", "brandname", "categoryterm", "eventname"]

for tag in TAGS:
    rows = hashtag(tag, max_items=60)      # the free page, $0.016
    print(f"#{tag:<20} {len(rows):>3} posts  "
          f"{sum(r['likesCount'] for r in rows):>8,} likes")
```

Five queries, eight cents, and a ranking of where the conversation actually lives.

## Then go deep, once

Having found the tag that carries the campaign, spend the depth budget on it alone. The item rate is the same wherever you spend it, but now you are paging through the tag that matters rather than the one you guessed.

The sequence is the point: breadth is cheap because of the allowance, so buy breadth first and let it tell you where the depth belongs.

## The scrapers behind this

-   [Instagram Hashtag Scraper Top posts and reels for any hashtag; 60 items free per hashtag $0.016 / hashtag + $0.40 / 1K](/scrapers/instagram-hashtag-scraper/)

## Questions people ask

### How much does it cost to scrape an Instagram hashtag?

$0.016 for the hashtag query, which includes roughly the first sixty items, then $0.0004 per item after that. A tag taken only to its first page costs a cent and a half flat.

### Is the free allowance per run or per hashtag?

Per hashtag. Five tags in one run carry five allowances of about sixty items each, which is why spreading a budget across related tags returns more posts per pound than going deep on one.

### How should I measure a campaign that uses several tags?

Query each tag separately rather than picking the biggest one and paging through it. The per-tag allowance makes the wide version cheaper, and it also tells you which tag people actually used, which the deep version cannot.

1.  [Instagram Hashtag Scraper, pricing and inputs](https://apify.com/apidojo/instagram-hashtag-scraper) apify.com

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## [Apidojo](/blog/authors/apidojo/)

15+ years of experience in data retrieval.

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-   🏯 15+ years of experience in data retrieval.
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-   [Instagram profiles: search or handle lookup? A keyword search costs $0.02 and brings forty profiles. A handle lookup costs $0.01 and brings one. The right choice depends on what you already know.](/blog/instagram/instagram-keyword-vs-handle/)
-   [What replyCount tells you before you pay Instagram comments are billed per post plus per comment, and reply threads are comments too. The top-level replyCount is your estimate, free.](/blog/instagram/instagram-reply-threads-cost/)