Why We Say No to Certain Feature Requests

We get feature requests fairly often, and most of them are reasonable. But a few come up again and again that we've decided not to build, and we think it's worth explaining why instead of just quietly ignoring them.

Can you add private account access?

This is the one we hear most. Someone wants to see a private account — sometimes out of curiosity, sometimes because they've been blocked, sometimes for less innocent reasons they don't say out loud. The answer is always no, and it's not because it's technically impossible to build something shady that tries. It's because private means private. Someone chose that setting specifically so strangers couldn't see their content. Building a workaround would mean treating that choice as an inconvenience to route around, and we're not willing to be the tool that does that, no matter how the request is worded.

Can you let me bulk-export a whole account's posts?

We've had this one from people doing research, and honestly, some of the use cases sound legitimate. But bulk scraping crosses a different line than reading one caption at a time. One lookup is you reading something a person chose to publish. Hundreds of automated lookups start to look like harvesting someone's entire public output for a purpose they never agreed to. We'd rather stay useful for the specific, individual lookups this site was built for than become a scraping tool with better branding.

Can you show follower or following lists?

This one seems harmless on the surface, but follower lists get misused constantly — for stalking, for building target lists to harass someone, for figuring out who's connected to whom in ways the person never intended to broadcast. Instagram doesn't make this data easy to get for a reason, and we don't think it's our place to make it easy either.

Can you skip the "public accounts only" rule for verified researchers or journalists?

We get why this feels different — a journalist with a legitimate story isn't the same as a random stranger being nosy. But we have no real way to verify who's actually a journalist and who's just saying so, and building an exception "for good reasons" inevitably becomes an exception anyone can claim. The rule stays the same for everyone, without exceptions we can't actually verify.

Why we're telling you this instead of just staying quiet about it

It would be easier to just not respond to these requests and let people assume we simply haven't gotten around to it yet. But we'd rather be upfront: these aren't on a roadmap somewhere waiting for more engineering time. They're things we've thought about and decided against, on purpose, because they'd work against the people whose content is actually being looked up. If that means Instaustad stays smaller and more boring than some of the other tools out there, we're fine with that trade.