insto-gui

Paste your HikerAPI token once, add a few accounts, and a background service checks each new account straight away and then keeps checking it on the interval you choose — it goes on running after you close the window. The app saves a snapshot of every check and shows you the difference between any two of them: followers gained and lost, a rewritten bio, a new avatar, a profile that turned private. Because the checks go through the HikerAPI cloud instead of a logged-in session, your Instagram account never touches the flow.

Or look an account up on demand — where its posts are tagged, when it posts, which hashtags and accounts it mentions:

The interface is in English; Russian can be chosen in Settings.

• Watched accounts — add by username, give each one its own check interval (300 s and up), pause, resume or remove it; up to three watches run at a time
• Status you can trust — each row shows the last successful check, not the fact that a process is alive, plus the interval and any run of consecutive errors
• The profile, right away — a new account is checked as soon as you add it, and every tracked field except the avatar and banner hashes — followers, following, posts, bio, link, public email and phone, business category and the verified / business / private flags — appears in the window a few seconds later, dated to the check it came from
• Lookup on demand — type any public username and see its profile at once; ask for the analysis and you also get the geography of its recent posts (top places, how far apart they are), the posting rhythm by hour of the day and day of the week, top hashtags and mentions, and like statistics. It runs when you press the button, never on its own, and nothing it shows is written to disk
• Snapshot history — every successful check is stored; pick any two saved snapshots of one account and compare exactly those two
• Change feed — all accounts, newest first, filterable down to one; a first snapshot is labelled a baseline rather than dressed up as a change, and a comparison whose older snapshot lacked a field is labelled incomplete rather than guessed at
• Tracked fields — username, full name, biography, profile link, verified / business / private flags, follower, following and media counts, public email, public phone, business category, and avatar and banner hashes
• Background service — a macOS LaunchAgent that keeps checking with the app closed; start, stop and repair it from the app, and disable it from Settings before you move the app to the Trash
• Bundled core — a compatible Python insto core ships inside the app; no Python, uv or CLI install, and no downloads on first run
• Adopts an existing ~/.insto — inspect the folder first, connect it only after an explicit confirmation, and go back to the app's own profile later without the folder's files being touched
• Takes over a CLI service — a service registered by the insto CLI can be moved onto the runtime this app ships, automatically for the app's own profile and only on your command for an adopted one
• Reads nothing behind your back — nothing in the window reaches HikerAPI by itself: the checks belong to the background service, and a lookup happens only when you press its button and only after the window has said what it costs. Everything else is local state, and the remaining HikerAPI balance is shown with the time it was last checked
• Says when it does not know — an operation whose outcome cannot be confirmed is reported as unknown and the state is re-read, never silently repeated

Requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or newer.

Take the file for your Mac from GitHub Releases and drag insto.app to /Applications. Apple menu → About This Mac shows which chip you have.

Or install the cask:

brew install --cask subzeroid/tap/insto

The cask is published shortly after each release; if brew cannot find it yet, use the download. Either way, follow First launch below once. (Homebrew no longer has --no-quarantine. To skip the prompt from a terminal instead, run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/insto.app; do it only if you have checked the DMG hash against SHA256SUMS on the release page.)

The app is ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so macOS refuses it once:

1. Open insto.app. macOS says it cannot verify the app. Close the dialog.
2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to the message about insto and choose Open Anyway. On macOS 14, Control-click → Open also works.
3. Open the app again. This happens only once per download.

1. Sign up at hikerapi.com — the first 100 requests are free, no card needed.
2. Copy the token from your HikerAPI dashboard.
3. Paste it into the app on first launch.

Every check of a watched account spends HikerAPI requests, so the check interval — not the number of times you open the window — decides how fast the balance goes down, together with any lookups you run (see What a lookup costs below). The remaining balance is shown in the Service section together with the moment it was last read; it is a reading, not a live counter. You can replace the token later in Settings without losing history.

The app bundles its own Python insto core, so nothing is installed alongside it. When you connect a token, it registers a macOS LaunchAgent that performs the checks; that agent keeps running after the window is closed, and moving the app to the Trash does not remove it — disable it from Settings first, which leaves the settings, the snapshot history and the token in place.

If you already run the insto CLI, the app can work with that existing ~/.insto folder instead of its own: it inspects the folder, reports what it found, and connects it only after you confirm. The folder's own files are never rewritten, and you can return the app to its own profile at any time. A service the CLI registered stays the CLI's until you explicitly hand it over.

The Lookup section is the one section that spends HikerAPI requests on the accounts you ask about, and it does so only when you press a button — the price is written under each one beforehand. A profile costs 2 requests, or up to 4 if one of them has to be tried again. The analysis of the recent posts costs one request per page of posts: usually between 1 and 5 for the windows offered (the last 12, 30 or 50 posts). Reading stops after 6 pages, and a page that fails is tried once more, so one analysis costs at most 12 requests — then the app analyses what it already paid for and says how many posts it actually read.

A result stays in memory while the window is open, so leaving the section and coming back shows the same answer without paying for it again; nothing about a lookup is written to disk, and no snapshot or history entry is created. A private account shows its profile, but its posts are not public and cannot be analysed. The account you looked up can be turned into a watch with one button, if you have a free watch slot.

Requires Node 22+, Rust, and — for the bundled runtime — Python 3.12+ and uv. Preparing that runtime and running the release gates is described in packaging/README.md; those are build-machine steps, not installation instructions.

npm ci --ignore-scripts
npm test                                          # frontend unit and component tests
cargo test -p insto-desktop-host --locked         # host bridge tests
python3 -B -m unittest discover -s tests -v       # packaging and probe scripts

src-tauri is the app shell: it needs a staged runtime and a npm run build before cargo can build or test it — see packaging/README.md. Licence notices for the bundled third-party code are in THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.

The frontend runs in a plain browser against a mocked Tauri IPC with demo data — handy for UI work and for regenerating the picture above:

npx playwright install chromium
npx vite --host 127.0.0.1 &
npm run screenshot -- "http://127.0.0.1:1420/?mock=1&lang=en" docs/screenshot.png

• insto — the CLI this app bundles and monitors with
• insta-dl-gui — desktop app for downloading posts, reels, stories and highlights
• instagrapi / aiograpi — private-API libraries for logged-in automation

This app is not affiliated with, authorized, maintained, or endorsed by Instagram or Meta. It observes only publicly accessible profile data via a third-party API service, and a comparison says what differed between two saved snapshots — not when, or by whom, anything happened on Instagram. Respect creators' rights and local law; you are responsible for how you use it.

MIT