Looking for a low-cost way to scrape viral TikTok / Instagram content (without Apify)

Questions
1

Hi everyone :waving_hand:

I’m currently exploring ways to identify and collect viral content (scripts, captions, hooks, formats) from TikTok and Instagram, ideally across any niche, to analyze what’s working and why.

I wanted to ask the community:

  • Is there any existing n8n workflow that does this?
  • Or a reliable approach to scraping TikTok / Instagram without using Apify or expensive paid APIs (especially for someone just starting out)?

What I’m mainly interested in:

  • Viral videos or posts
  • Captions / scripts / hooks that perform well
  • Engagement metrics (views, likes, comments — even partial data is fine)
  • A solution that can scale later, but is budget-friendly at the beginning

I understand the platform limitations and TOS concerns, so I’m open to:

  • Browser-based scraping approaches
  • RSS / third-party data sources
  • Creative workarounds using public endpoints or web scraping tools
  • Any hybrid solution that plays well with n8n

If you’ve built something similar, seen a workflow, or have ideas on how to approach this efficiently and ethically, I’d really appreciate your insights.

Thanks in advance :raising_hands:

2

Actually Apify has a forever free tier (with $5/mo usage), so I would definitely look into that.

Building custom scrapers that actually keep working for these sites is very hard, so I don’t think there’s a much better solution than trying to look for free tiers - either Apify or similar tools

For something semi-manual you can also look into Chrome extensions such as this one: Instagram Scraper: Export Posts, Reels, Users & more - Chrome Web Store – I doubt these would scale well, but you can get started with it and then later switch to something more scalable.

3

Use Playwright/Puppeteer to scrape public TikTok/Instagram explore or hashtag pages (cheap, just proxy costs), or a low-cost API like ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee, or PhantomBuster instead of Apify. These handle JS rendering and blocks and are much cheaper for small volumes.

4

Seconding the Apify free tier suggestion — the $5/month credit goes further than it looks for TikTok/Instagram actors if you run them on a schedule instead of on-demand. Building your own scraper for these platforms is a constant maintenance battle, not worth it for most use cases.