When I started building , I needed reliable access to Instagram data. Like many developers, my first instinct was to use a self-hosted solution such as instagrapi. It worked for experimenting, but once I started depending on it for production workflows, I spent more time maintaining the scraper than building features. Eventually I switched to HikerAPI, a hosted REST API for Instagram. This post isn't about saying one approach is universally better—it's about why it ended up being the bette...