Instagram API Limits

⚠️ Don't use this! This method will not work for Basic Display API applications.

Working with API Limits

The Instagram Basic Display API is rate limited according to the number of users assigned to your app. When you first create your app, you only have a single test user, so whatever is using your tokens (for example, instafeed.js on your website), can make 200 requests per hour. A busy website will easily exhaust this limit.

Instagram Token Agent's requests do also count towards this limit, but these are a tiny number compared to the traffic from a typical website.

The actual request limited is calculated as:

Maximum requests per hour = 200 * (number of users)

This is subtly different to "200 requests per user, per hour", and means that one workaround to increase your limit is to assign extra test users to your app. You don't need to do anything with those users, just assign them, then Instagram Token Agent and Instafeed.js (or whatever else) will consume the shared pool of requests.

From the docs:

About Basic Display Application-Level Rate Limiting

Rate limiting defines limits on how many API calls can be made within a specified time period. Application-level rate limits apply to calls made using any access token other than a Page access token and ads APIs calls. The total number of calls your app can make per hour is 200 times the number of users. Please note this isn't a per-user limit. Any individual user can make more than 200 calls per hour, as long as the total for all users does not exceed the app maximum.