Leads Generator
Most Instagram lead tools need you to name the account to pull leads from. Ours starts from a few accounts, keeps the ones that match your words, and lets every match point it to more. You get businesses and creators you'd never have thought to type in.
The short answer
Instagram lead tools split into two kinds. Target tools like Mailerfind give you the people behind one account, post, hashtag or location that you pick, so the list is only as good as your guess. Keyword tools like IGLeads search Google for Instagram profiles with an email in them. The SocialToolsAI Leads Generator does a third thing: it starts from a few accounts like your leads, keeps only profiles that match your words, follower range and language, and keeps finding new matches from the ones it already found. In our customers' searches, 1,000 leads cost about 6,000 credits, or 11,000 with emails and phones looked up, and 47% of those came with a way to contact them. What it doesn't do is send the emails. You export the list and use your own sender, or upload it to Meta Ads as an audience.
The tool is rarely the bottleneck. Picking where to look is.
Type in the three biggest names in your niche and everyone else using the same tool gets the same people. The small bakery with 900 followers and an email in its bio never shows up, because nobody thought to start there.
One Capterra reviewer of Mailerfind went through 16,000 followers of one 240k account and got 270 emails. That's what happens when you take everyone and filter later. Keeping only profiles that say what you're looking for, before paying for contact details, is cheaper.
Only 5% of the leads our customers found had an email in the bio. Many more businesses put it behind Instagram's contact button instead. A tool that only reads bios, or only finds profiles Google has indexed with an email, never sees them.
How it works
You can fill the form yourself, or describe your leads in a sentence and let the assistant set it up.
"Wedding photographers in Texas", "UGC creators who post skincare", "gyms that might need a website". The assistant asks one question if it's unclear, then suggests up to 8 starting accounts, each with a reason.
Look among the starting accounts' followers, or the accounts they follow. Or switch to people who engage: everyone who liked those accounts' recent posts.
Words that must appear in the name or bio, words that rule an account out, a follower range, bio language. Only matches are kept, and only kept leads get the paid extras.
Each match becomes a new place to look, so the list keeps finding accounts nobody typed in. A spending cap (1,000 credits by default) and an early pause when results dry up keep it from running away.
Not sure the settings are right? The assistant can run a test capped at 200 credits, look at what came back with you (“14 of 20 fit”), fix the settings, and carry on from there.
Real numbers
Every vendor in this space quotes a price per credit. Nobody tells you how many credits a usable lead takes. Here's ours, from 108 searches run by 20 customers.
Leads only
6,000
credits per 1,000 leads (3,000 to 12,000 by niche)
With “Get hidden emails & phones”
11,000
credits per 1,000 leads
The extra roughly doubles what a lead costs but makes each contactable lead about 4x cheaper, so if you're going to email the list, switch it on. In the 16 searches that used it, the share of leads with an email ran from 18% to 85% (median 51%). Niches full of business accounts land at the top. Hobby and personal-brand niches land at the bottom, because personal accounts have no contact button to read.
Getting started
One-time payments, no subscription. Credits last 90 days and work on every tool. Lead counts are estimates from the averages above, so a rare niche gets fewer and an easy one gets more.
| Pack | Leads only | With emails & phones | Per contactable lead |
|---|---|---|---|
1,500 credits $4.99 | ~250 leads $0.020 each | ~140 leads, ~64 with a contact | $0.078 |
5,000 credits $14.99-10% | ~830 leads $0.018 each | ~450 leads, ~210 with a contact | $0.070 |
20,000 credits $49.99-25% | ~3,300 leads $0.015 each | ~1,800 leads, ~850 with a contact | $0.059 |
50,000 credits $99.99-40% | ~8,300 leads $0.012 each | ~4,500 leads, ~2,100 with a contact | $0.047 |
Sign up, buy the 1,500-credit pack for $4.99, and set the search's spending cap to match. That's about 250 leads, enough to see whether your niche works before you buy more. If you plan to email them, switch on “Get hidden emails & phones” and expect about 140 leads, around 64 of them with an email or phone.
Username, name, bio, followers, following, post count, business or personal, private or public, and which of your words it matched.
Emails and phones from the bio at no extra cost. Turn on the lookup to also get the ones behind business and creator contact buttons.
Optional, +2 credits: the date of their last post and their typical likes and comments, so you skip accounts that went quiet a year ago.
CSV, Excel or a plain text file. Load it into Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, Mailchimp or your CRM.
A file already in Meta's customer-list format. Upload it as a custom audience, or seed a lookalike so a new campaign starts from people like your best leads.
Send a read-only link to the results to a client or teammate. They don't need an account.
For people running Meta ads
A new Meta campaign spends its first days and dollars working out who to show your ad to. Interest targeting is a guess. A list of real businesses or creators that already match your customer is a much better starting point.
Pick Meta Ads audience (.csv) when you export. The file only has what Meta uses to match people (email, phone, first and last name, country), already formatted the way Ads Manager wants it. Upload it as a custom audience to show ads to those exact people, or use it as the source for a lookalike audience and let Meta find more like them. Meta needs at least 100 matched people for a lookalike, so turn on the email and phone lookup for this one.
This isn't a replacement for Meta's targeting. It's a head start for it.
Honest comparison
From each tool's own site and pricing page as of October 2026. Where a site doesn't say, we say so instead of guessing.
| Tool | Where the leads come from | Sending and integrations | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| SocialToolsAI Leads Generator | A few starting accounts (or AI-suggested ones), then every match leads to more. Keeps only profiles matching your words, follower range and language. | None built in. CSV, Excel, Meta Ads audience file, share link. | One-time packs from $4.99. About 6 credits a lead, 11 with contacts. |
| Mailerfind | An account's followers, people who liked or commented on a post, or posters on a hashtag or location. You choose each one; it doesn't look further on its own. | Built-in email sender (Gmail, Outlook, SendGrid, SMTP), warm-up, verifier on higher plans, name cleanup, Meta custom and lookalike audiences. | €97, €297 or €997 a month (10,000 / 40,000 / unlimited credits). A credit per email search, found or not; they quote a 9 to 45% find rate. |
| IGLeads | Up to 5 keywords or hashtags plus a country, found through Google rather than Instagram. Their FAQ says followers, likes and comments aren't available. | CSV only. Also covers TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Maps and more. Results average under 8 hours. | $59, $149 or $299 a month (10,000 / 50,000 / unlimited emails). |
| Apollo | A B2B database of people at companies, searchable by job title, industry and company size. Not Instagram. | Email sequences, dialer, CRM sync (Salesforce, HubSpot), LinkedIn extension. | free plan, then $49 to $119 per user a month (yearly billing), plus credits for emails and phone numbers. |
| PhantomBuster | Ready-made automations for LinkedIn, Instagram and others. The Instagram ones run on your own logged-in session. | Chains automations together, CRM and Google Sheets connections. | $69 to $439 a month. |
Local businesses in the niche you build for. Keep "bakery" or "salon", set a follower range that means a small team, and pitch the ones with no website in their bio.
Brands in your niche small enough to answer a cold email. Set a follower range and look among the accounts other UGC creators follow.
Booking software for barbers, supplies for tattoo studios, POS for cafés. Instagram is where these owners actually are.
Businesses posting in fits and starts. Turn on "Show when they last posted" and you can see which ones went quiet a month ago.
Micro-creators who already talk about your category, with their typical likes per post so you can see who has a real audience.
A few hundred matched businesses as a seed audience, so a new campaign doesn't start from interest guesses.
You give it a few starting accounts (or let the AI assistant suggest them from a plain-English description), and words your leads would have in their name or bio. It looks among those accounts' followers, or the accounts they follow, and keeps the ones that match. Every match then becomes a new place to look, so the list keeps growing into accounts you never named. Mailerfind and similar tools stop at the account you typed in.
About 6,000 credits for 1,000 leads with no extras (3,000 to 12,000 depending on how rare your niche is). With "Get hidden emails & phones" switched on it's about 11,000, because roughly half the leads need the paid contact lookup. You're billed for each profile checked, not each lead kept, so a niche where few accounts match costs more per lead.
Most Instagram profiles don't show one. Across 151,058 leads our customers found, 6% had an email or phone in their bio. Switching on "Get hidden emails & phones" also reads the contact buttons that business and creator accounts can add, which took it to 47%. Personal accounts have no contact button, so for them the bio is all there is.
No. There's no built-in sender, warm-up or email verification, and no direct CRM sync. You export the list as CSV or Excel and load it into whatever you send with (Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, Mailchimp, your CRM). If you want finding and sending in one place, Mailerfind does both.
Yes. Pick "Meta Ads audience (.csv)" when you export. The file is already in Meta's customer-list format (email, phone, first and last name, country), so you can upload it in Ads Manager as a custom audience, or use it as the seed for a lookalike audience. It only includes leads with an email or phone, since that's what Meta matches people on.
No. You never log in with Instagram or hand over a password, and only public profile information is used.
Buy the smallest credit pack (1,500 credits for $4.99, one-time). That's roughly 250 leads, or 140 with contacts switched on. Searches have a spending cap, so a test can't run past what you set. Credits last 90 days and work on every tool.
The data is public, but how you contact people is on you. Cold email to businesses is normal in most places when you follow the local rules (CAN-SPAM in the US: real sender, a working unsubscribe; GDPR in the EU: a legitimate interest and an easy opt-out). Messaging private individuals in bulk is a different story, and we'd skip it.
Describe your leads and let the list find the ones you didn't know about. Start with 1,500 credits for $4.99, one-time. No Instagram login required.
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