How I Built an Instagram Profile Scraper in Go and Shipped It to Apify

I recently built a small Instagram profile scraper in Go, packaged it as an Apify Actor, and published it so other people can use it without maintaining the infrastructure themselves. The goal was simple: fetch public Instagram profile data by username and return clean, automation-friendly JSON. I did not want browser automation, heavy dependencies, or deeply nested output that becomes painful to use in datasets, exports, or pipelines. The problem A lot of scraping projects work, but they are hard to operationalize. They rely on full browser stacks, break on minor changes, or return raw payloads that still need another transformation layer before they become useful. For profile lookups, I wanted something much lighter: input: one or more Instagram usernames output: structured profile data deployment: packaged for Apify operations: proxy-ready and resilient to partial failures The approach I built the Actor in pure Go with no external dependencies beyond the standard library. Instead of