If you’re building creator discovery into a product, an internal tool or an AI agent, you need more than a scraping API. A scraper fetches one profile when you name it. To find creators you haven’t heard of, you need an influencer data API: a vendor’s own index of creators that you can search, rank and enrich.
Every vendor in our influencer data API ranking lets you search. How you ask is what differs, and it changes what you can find, what you pay and how much code you write around it.
In short
- Filters are precise and cheap per result, but you can only search for what the vendor decided to index. Modash and influencers.club have the deepest.
- Lookalikes start from creators who already worked for you. Influship takes up to 10 weighted seeds.
- Plain-language search lets you describe the creator you want. Influship’s is semantic, and returns ranked creators with written reasons and evidence.
- Search is step one. Plan for brief-fit scoring, fraud checks and email enrichment, and check how each is priced.
Three ways to search
Filters are the classic approach: followers between X and Y, engagement above Z, audience mostly in the UK. Lookalikes take one or more creators you know and return similar ones. Plain-language search takes a written brief and matches it against what creators post, say and are known for.
Most real products use more than one. This is what each is good at:
| What you need | Filters | Lookalikes | Plain-language search |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard limits on followers or engagement | Yes | Some | Some |
| Audience age, gender or country | Yes | No | Some |
| A niche no filter covers | No | Some | Yes |
| More creators like ones that worked | No | Yes | Some |
| Reasons you can show a client | No | Some | Yes |
Filter-based search
Filters suit products where users already know the numbers they want: an agency tool with follower bands, or a vetting step that drops anyone below an engagement floor. They’re predictable, they’re easy to put in a UI, and per result they’re the cheapest search in the category.
Modash has the deepest filters behind any API we rank. Its Discovery API covers Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, with filters on bio, brands, engagement rate, followers and follower growth, keywords and topics, plus audience filters on age, gender, interests, language and location that you can weight. A search result costs 0.01 credits, about $4.50 per 1,000 on the reported entry tier, and results come 15 to a page. The catches: the Discovery API starts at $16,200 a year, paid annually; rate limits on search are about 2 requests a second, shared across every key on the account; and Modash only indexes profiles with 1,000+ followers.
influencers.club is the self-serve alternative. Its discovery endpoint costs 0.01 credits per creator returned, or 0.03 if you ask for filter values back, and influencers.club says it has 40+ filters, including monetisation filters such as TikTok Shop and YouTube monetisation. At the best published rate of $0.23 a credit, 1,000 discovery results cost about $2.30. Discovery doesn’t return emails, and it has a daily credit cap on top of the 300 requests a minute limit. Pro, which includes the API, is listed from $208.
HypeAuditor also has a discovery API, with what it calls 27+ filters, but access is quote only.
Filter requests look broadly similar everywhere. This one is illustrative, so check your vendor’s docs for exact field names and units:
# Illustrative only: not any one vendor's exact syntax.
# Field names, units and paging differ between providers.
POST https://api.[provider].com/v1/instagram/search
Authorization: Bearer <your token>
{
"filters": {
"followers": { "min": 20000, "max": 250000 },
"engagement_rate": { "min": 0.02 },
"bio_keywords": ["recipes", "meal prep"],
"audience_location": [{ "country": "GB", "min_share": 0.4 }]
},
"page": 0
}The weakness is the edge of the schema. If the vendor didn’t build a field for “posts recipes for one”, “shoots on film” or “talks about ADHD at work”, a keyword filter is the best you’ll get, and bios are short.
Plain-language search
This is where Influship leads the category. Its search is semantic, not just natural language bolted onto filters: Influship says it tracks billions of facts about tens of millions of creators, so you can search by anything rather than only the fields a vendor chose to build. You send a brief in plain English and get ranked creators back, each with a score, written reasons, a confidence level and the evidence behind the match.
That changes what you can build. A user can type the brief they’d give an agency, and your product can show why each creator was picked instead of a bare list. An AI agent can pass a brief straight through and reason over the evidence that comes back. Influship’s search and creator data cover Instagram and TikTok, with YouTube coming soon.
The brief can be up to 500 characters, and you can add hard limits alongside it:
POST https://api.influship.com/v1/search
X-API-Key: <your key>
Content-Type: application/json
{
"query": "UK home cooks who film quick, cheap weeknight dinners and talk to camera",
"platforms": ["instagram"],
"filters": {
"followers": { "min": 20000, "max": 250000 },
"engagement_rate": { "min": 2 }
},
"creator_kinds": ["INFLUENCER"],
"limit": 25
}
# Cost: 25 credits + 2 per creator returned = 75 credits ($0.75)A few details worth building around:
- Put location in the brief. Ask for “UK home cooks” and creators known to be elsewhere are left out. Each result also tells you, through
location_unverified, whether its location is confirmed, so your UI can show confirmed matches first. - Re-reading is free. Each search returns an ID, and
GET /v1/search/{id}re-reads saved results at no cost for an hour, which suits paging in a UI. - Start small. A search at
limit: 5costs at most 35 credits ($0.35), and one atlimit: 100costs 225 ($2.25).
Modash and influencers.club have also added AI search on top of their filters. At Modash it costs 0.025 credits a result.
Lookalikes
Lookalikes are the fastest way to grow a creator programme that already works. Instead of describing what you want, you point at creators who delivered and ask for more like them. Modash and influencers.club both offer lookalike search; influencers.club’s similar-creators endpoint costs 0.01 credits per creator.
Influship’s version takes up to 10 seed creators, each with a weight from 0 to 1, so your best performer can pull harder than the others. It accepts the same follower, engagement and verified filters as search, and costs 1.5 credits per creator returned, $15 per 1,000.
POST https://api.influship.com/v1/creators/lookalike
X-API-Key: <your key>
Content-Type: application/json
{
"seeds": [
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<your best performer>", "weight": 1 },
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<a solid second>", "weight": 0.5 },
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<a third>", "weight": 0.5 }
],
"filters": { "followers": { "min": 25000 } },
"limit": 50
}
# Cost: 1.5 credits per creator returned, so 75 credits ($0.75) for 50Pick seeds for one reason at a time. Three creators who converted well for a skincare launch make a better seed set than your ten biggest names.
Vetting what you find
Search gets you a long list. Two different checks turn it into a shortlist.
Brief fit
Does this creator suit this campaign? Influship’s /v1/creators/match scores up to 100 creators against a brief and returns good, neutral or avoid for each, with a score, reasons and quotes from their content. You pass creators by handle or Influship ID, so you can check a list a client sends you as well as your own search results. It costs 1 credit per creator, $10 per 1,000.
POST https://api.influship.com/v1/creators/match
X-API-Key: <your key>
Content-Type: application/json
{
"creators": [
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<creator one>" },
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<creator two>" }
],
"intent": {
"query": "Launch our new plant-based protein powder",
"context": "Audience is health-conscious people in their twenties and thirties"
}
}
# Each creator comes back good, neutral or avoid, with a score,
# reasons and quoted evidence. 1 credit per creator scored.Fraud
Are the followers real? That’s a different job, and two vendors do it. Modash’s reports carry a credibility score, the share of followers it judges to be real, and a full report costs 1 credit. HypeAuditor started as a fake-follower checker and its reports carry an Audience Quality Score; its reports are built on request, so calls can return 202 and you’ll need to poll. Influship has no fake-follower score, so if fraud checks matter, pair it with one of those two. Our guide to spotting fake followers covers what to look for.
Enrichment and emails
Once you have a shortlist, you need a way to reach people. This is where vendors differ most in price and in what “email” means.
- influencers.club is built around enrichment. By handle, a profile with a validated email costs 0.2 credits and a full enrichment 1 credit; you can also enrich by email for 0.05. Batch enrichment and webhooks are available, and credits are only charged when data comes back.
- Influship has an email lookup that takes creator IDs or handles, up to 100 at a time. It returns a validation status, a confidence score and when each email was first and last seen, and it only charges when it finds one: $50 per 1,000 creators with an email, misses free.
- Modash returns the emails creators list publicly.
POST https://api.influship.com/v1/creator-emails/lookup
X-API-Key: <your key>
Content-Type: application/json
{
"creators": [
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<creator one>" },
{ "platform": "instagram", "username": "<creator two>" }
]
}
# 5 credits per creator with at least one email found. Misses are free.
# Each email carries a validation status, a confidence score
# and when it was first and last seen.Storing contact details brings data protection duties with it, especially in the EU and UK. Read our guide to GDPR and creator data before you build outreach on top.
Putting it together
A typical discovery flow on Influship looks like this, with published prices:
- Search with a brief and a follower band,
limit: 100: 225 credits ($2.25). - Expand from your three favourites with a weighted lookalike, 50 results: 75 credits ($0.75).
- Score the best 100 against the campaign brief with
/creators/match: 100 credits ($1). - Look up emails for the 30 marked good: 5 credits for each one found, nothing for misses.
All in, that’s at most $5.50 to go from a brief to 30 scored creators with contact details, and less if some emails aren’t found.
You’re billed after use, like the rest of your infrastructure, with no minimum. Every successful response carries an X-Credits-Charged header and RateLimit-* headers, so you can track spend per call. There’s a TypeScript SDK and an MCP server, so the same flow works from an AI agent without custom glue code, and every customer gets a direct line to Influship’s founders and solutions engineers, whatever they spend.
On Modash, the same job looks like filter search at 0.01 credits a result, then full reports at 1 credit each for the shortlist. On influencers.club, discovery at 0.01 a creator, then profile enrichment with email at 0.2. Both work; they just need you to know the filters up front.
Which API to choose
Choose Influship if plain-language search, explainable results or an AI agent is at the centre of what you’re building; you can start this week with 500 free credits and no card. Choose Modash if deep filters, audience estimates and fraud scores matter most and the annual contract fits your budget. Choose influencers.club for self-serve, multi-platform discovery with contact enrichment. HypeAuditor is worth the sales call if fraud checks across many platforms are the job.
- 1InflushipSemantic creator search for apps and AI agents8.6
- 2ModashDeepest filters and fraud data, if you can fund the minimum8.3
- 3influencers.clubSelf-serve access with contact enrichment7.7
Questions
What’s the difference between filter search and semantic search?
Filter search matches fields the vendor has already built, such as follower range, engagement or audience country. Semantic search reads your brief and matches it against what creators actually post and say, so you can search for things no filter covers.
Can I combine a plain-language brief with hard limits?
Yes, at Influship. Its search takes a brief of up to 500 characters plus follower, engagement-rate and verified filters, and can exclude theme pages.
How many seed creators should a lookalike search use?
Enough to describe what you liked about them. Influship takes up to 10 seeds, each with a weight from 0 to 1, so your best performer can count for more than the rest.
Which API is cheapest to try?
Influship: no minimum, 500 free credits with no card, and failed calls aren’t billed. influencers.club gives trial accounts 30 API requests. Modash offers free test calls, but its Discovery API starts at $16,200 a year.
Do these APIs return contact emails?
Most do, in different ways. influencers.club’s enrichment returns a validated email, Influship’s email lookup returns a validation status and only charges when it finds one, and Modash returns emails creators list publicly.