Competitor research used to mean copying captions and hashtags by hand into a doc. So I built a small tool that does it, with one rule above all others: it can read, and it can do nothing else.
What it does
- Takes a public Instagram or TikTok URL, or a file full of them.
- Extracts author, caption, hashtags, mentions, links, engagement and media references.
- Writes a Markdown report for people and a JSON file for agents.
The security design
- No logins and no API keys. Public content only.
- No state changes: it never likes, follows, comments or posts.
- Rate-limited with random delays between requests.
- Output stays on the local machine.
- Deterministic: the same URL produces the same report.
It tries a fast static fetch first and only falls back to a real browser when a page needs JavaScript. That keeps it fast and polite.
Extract without touching. Read without logging in. Report without leaking.
What it is for
It feeds research: what competitors post, which formats break out, what the comments ask for. It is the first step in my content pipeline, and a good example of the least complex tool that does the job.