Instagram Influencer Finder — AI-vetted creators & emails on the Apify Store →

How to find and vet Instagram influencers for a campaign in one run (with engagement rate, e-mail and an AI opener)

Draft for the Apify blog guest program, dev.to, Medium or Hashnode. ~1,200 words. Disclose at the top when you post it: "I built this Actor."

Tool: Instagram Influencer Finder on the Apify Store: https://apify.com/rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier


The problem: a scraper gives you posts, you need people

If you run influencer campaigns, you know the routine. You open Instagram, search #cleanbeauty, and scroll. Or you run a hashtag scraper and get a spreadsheet with one row per post: 500 rows, the same creator appearing 12 times, half of them off-niche, none with an engagement rate and none with a way to contact them.

Then the manual part starts, for every creator:

  1. open the profile and check the follower count,
  2. work out whether the likes and comments are real or bought,
  3. read a few captions to judge whether they fit your brand, and whether anything in the feed is a brand-safety risk,
  4. find an e-mail in the bio, the captions or the link-in-bio page,
  5. write a first line that isn't "Hi, love your content!".

That is 5–10 minutes per creator. A shortlist of 30 takes an afternoon, and next week you do it again and meet the same creators.

The approach: one row per creator, vetted, and you pay only for the ones that pass

Instagram Influencer Finder is an Apify Actor that runs the official Instagram Scraper (or TikTok Scraper) on your Apify account, then folds the posts into creators and vets each one:

Creators that fail your filters are never charged. You pay per qualified creator: $0.004 with rules only, $0.01 with the AI assessment, and the first 25 qualified creators per account are free.

Step 1: try the free demo (about 10 seconds)

Open https://apify.com/rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier and click Try it. The form is pre-filled with 18 sample Instagram and TikTok records. They fold into 6 creators, the rules keep the good ones, and nothing is charged. In our local AI run on that sample, 3 creators qualified. One of them (sample data, shortened):

{
  "username": "glow_by_jules",
  "platform": "tiktok",
  "followersCount": 88000,
  "tier": "tier_micro",
  "engagementRate": 14.96,
  "contactEmail": "jules.creator@gmail.com",
  "contactChannel": "email",
  "flags": ["tier_micro", "high_engagement", "contact_in_bio", "email_found", "reels_creator", "low_sample"],
  "ruleScore": 74,
  "fitScore": 78,
  "label": "hot",
  "brandSafetyRisk": "none",
  "recommendedNextStep": "Email jules.creator@gmail.com"
}

Note the low_sample flag: that creator's metrics rest on 2 sampled posts, and the Actor tells you so instead of pretending to be certain.

Step 2: describe who you are looking for

Switch Source to Instagram (or TikTok) search and fill in three things:

Here is the ready-made beauty-ugc-creators Task, as input JSON:

{
  "sourceMode": "actor",
  "platform": "instagram",
  "nichePreset": "beauty",
  "goalDescription": "UGC and micro creators in skincare and makeup who post honest reviews, 5k–100k followers, active in the last month, brand-safe, reachable by e-mail — for product seeding of a new moisturiser.",
  "minFollowers": 5000,
  "maxFollowers": 100000,
  "minEngagementRate": 1.5,
  "requireContact": "email",
  "maxQualified": 30,
  "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
  "enableAi": true
}

maxDiscoveryChargeUsd caps what the Instagram Scraper may spend on your account. The run stops the source at that amount.

Step 3: read the shortlist

Results land best-first in three views: Shortlist (who to contact first), Metrics (the numbers behind the score) and Outreach (contact and opener, ready for a mail merge). With AI on, the same creator gets judged against your brief. From the README's local run on the sample:

{
  "username": "skin.by.sam", "followersCount": 45200, "engagementRate": 1.574, "audienceQuality": 80,
  "ruleScore": 63, "fitScore": 78, "label": "hot",
  "contentThemes": ["cleanbeauty", "skincareroutine", "spf"],
  "recommendedNextStep": "Email hello@skinbysam.co with campaign details."
}

Every reason must name a field or quote the record, and brand-safety evidence must be a verbatim quote. The model is not allowed to invent.

What it costs

The Actor's README gives a worked example for 2 hashtags × 50 posts. It is an estimate until a public live run is published:

PartAmount
Instagram Scraper on your account (≈ 130 results × $0.0027)≈ $0.35
≈ 20 qualified creators × $0.01 (AI tier)$0.20
AI tokens (≈ 2,600 per creator, measured)≈ $0.08
Total≈ $0.63, about $0.03 per vetted creator

The first 25 qualified creators on your account are free, and the demo is always free.

Step 4: run it weekly and only pay for new creators

Save the input as a Task and schedule it weekly. With dedupeAcrossRuns on (the default), every creator you already received is remembered, so each run delivers and charges only new creators. Add digestWebhookUrl (Slack / Discord / Teams) to get one message per run: "7 new, 2 hot, top 3 with links".

Step 5: plug it into your stack

Python:

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("<YOUR_API_TOKEN>")
run = client.actor("rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier").call(run_input={
    "sourceMode": "actor", "platform": "instagram", "nichePreset": "fitness",
    "goalDescription": "Home-workout creators, 10k–150k followers, reachable by e-mail, for a resistance-band brand.",
    "requireContact": "email", "maxQualified": 30, "maxDiscoveryChargeUsd": 0.5,
})
for c in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items():
    print(c["username"], c["engagementRate"], c["label"], c.get("contactEmail"))

Outreach tools: set exportPreset to instantly, lemlist, hubspot or sheets and import EXPORT.csv from the run's key-value store with no column mapping. The opener goes into the personalisation column.

AI agents: add Apify's MCP server with this Actor as a tool (https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier) and ask Claude or ChatGPT to "find 20 brand-safe fitness creators with an e-mail".

Limits, honestly

Try it

The demo is free and takes about 10 seconds: https://apify.com/rich_minds/instagram-creator-qualifier. If it saves you an afternoon, a review on the Store helps other marketers find it.

Instagram Influencer Finder — AI-vetted creators & emails on the Apify Store →