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

You could write a script to scrape it. I would do it by making the script through an api endpoint, hosting it through tailscale or if you own a website using it that way, (tailscale is free) send a https reuqest to activate it, and once it returns the data you use an ai agent node to analyze it.

If you have claude code installed, you can write one to do it for you without having coding knowledge.

As for ethics, scraping throws those out the window, but apify also breaks TOS of instagram technically so don’t fret, the companies wont come after you as long as you use the data responsibly, such as not selling it to other people. If its for your own use. and its public shorts or your own, its perfectly ok. Web scraping would be best, though the script would need to use user agents, and other common browser mimics that would get past the bot detection.