My open source Instagram bot got me 2,500 real followers for $5 in server costs
Tags: Instagram, JavaScript, Tech, Social Media, Python

Here, again, we can really see what an impact the script had. Even on the older posts, which have been there, before the script started.

Getting called out as immoral

Right at the start of the fourth month, I posted the link to my GitHub repo on Reddit to spread the word a bit more and maybe get some developers helping me test it and report bugs.

What I got was this issue:

Screen of the “Immoral Projct” Issue

After stating my point of view on this topic, the exact same guy wrote me this E-Mail:

I’m the guy with the cheeky github issue on InstaPy I founded a platform for influencers on Instagram called ******. We’re the biggest influencer platform in Europe (or at least one of the top three). We’re doing well on the business side and we have an great product team in Iceland. I was impressed with your InstaPy project. I’m a Python developer myself and our backend is a Flask/PostgreSQL/AWS stack. We’re moving to a mono-repo to have more flexibilty and the ability to break our backend down into smaller services. Are you looking for a job in the near term? Interested to hear what your plans are in the future.

What really impressed me was that even with such a quick and dirty automation script, I managed to get their attention.

Since I’m, at the time of writing this part, an Intern at Bosch Engineering, I couldn’t consider joining their team. But with its beautiful nature and nice people, I’d love to work in Iceland one day, .

Me in Iceland

Moving from DigitalOcean to a 35$ RaspberryPi 3

Since I wanted to be able to keep this experiment running for some more time, I thought about a way to pay once, then keep the service running basically forever.

A RaspberryPi3 seemed like the perfect fit for it. It was small, powerful enough and cheap enough.

For ~35$ you can get a small unix computer upon which, with some tinkering, you can run Google Chrome.

With this guide: How to run Google Chrome on RaspberryPi and some time, I was able to install InstaPy on my RaspberryPi and get it up and running.

This has more than just the advantage of cheaper service. When checking for bots, most services have a list of IP’s of data centers. DigitalOcean and other Infrastructure as a Service providers have dedicated IP’s which can be traced back to every datacenter.

A small computer like a the RaspberryPi runs in your home network, and has the same IP address as your computer or smartphone.

The infamous robots.txt

At the moment of wrapping this whole article up, I thought about not publishing it, because “automating” a site against it’s robot.txt — the document that tells bots what parts of the website the website owners would prefer they not scan.

For example, Facebook’s robot.txt starts with the following lines:

# Notice: Crawling Facebook is prohibited unless you have express written permission. See: http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php

A whole bunch of sites have them:

Google

Amazon

Even a local branch office of the Volksbank

Interestingly, Instagram doesn’t have one at all.

This is may contribute to my observation that there are a lot of bots on Instagram. Instagram itself doesn’t mind so much, since more bots mean more activity in the whole system.

Edit: Some pointed out, that Instagram in fact does have a robots.txt. You can check it out here.

Conclusion

As of writing this, I have ~2,800 followers. I plan to keep running my script until I either get banned from Instagram or rise to the highest heights.

No, seriously. I’m really interested seeing how far this can go.

Of course I’ll get back to you if there are some great breakthroughs or findings.

Up to now, I’ve only spent only $5 on renting a server. With the $50 coupon from GitHub’s “Student Backpack” I could let this run for another 5 months without investing a penny more. With the $35 RapsberryPi 3 probably forever.

If you’re into RaspberryPi’s, you could also just get one of the Model3’s and install all the necessary tools to let it run there for a one time cost of ~$35. That is what I did in the fourth month. If you’re interested check out How to run Google Chrome on RaspberryPi.

Also, I spend around $16 for the shipping of a giveaway I did when reaching 2,000 Followers.

So, without all the extra stuff, it would be only $5. If we’d include all the costs (including the ones I didn’t pay) I would’ve payed ~$100 to run it essentially forever.

Note: If you want to get started with automation with python, definitely check out “Automate the Boring Stuff”!

Who can use it?

Everyone. I’m serious. Even if you don’t want to bother with getting it up and running on a server, you can easily download the script and run it manually.

There are a lot of professional services that do exactly the same stuff that my script does. The only real difference is that they cost quite a lot of money (like FollowLiker for $100). Mine’s free.

We now have a dedicated repository to get your started in less than 10 minutes!

If you’re curious, check out the documentation on GitHub.

And if you invest some more time, you can checkout my step-by-step guide on how to setup a server for selenium automation.

If you like what I did, consider following me on

GitHub, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Be sure to star it on GitHub :P

Thank you for reading. I’m curious about what you think so hit me with some comments.

You can also get in touch me directly through email.