Find real mid-tier creators in any niche, vet them by engagement, and send outreach the AI personalizes from each creator's actual posts — paced to stay safe. Your password never leaves your machine.
Type a niche and follower range. The companion searches the public web and reads each profile — inside your own browser.
Every creator gets a draft built from your offer and their content. Hundreds of phrasing variants — no two DMs read the same.
Randomized 1–3 minute gaps, a 30/day cap, closed DMs skipped with a substitute pulled in. You just watch the log fill.
Creator Scout runs discovery and outreach inside your browser through a lightweight companion extension — you stay in control the whole way.
Type a niche and a follower range. Creator Scout searches the public web — including the bio signals that surface small and mid-tier creators, not just famous accounts — and reads each public profile.
Each creator gets a message built from your brand, offer, and their niche — with hundreds of phrasing variations so no two DMs read the same. Review and edit any draft before it sends.
One click sends the queue one message at a time, spaced by randomized human-scale gaps under a daily cap. Already-messaged and closed-DM profiles are skipped automatically.
Hashtag sweeps and bio-signal search ("dm for collab", "ugc creator") dig up the 10k–200k creators who actually reply to performance deals — plus AI-suggested hashtags and niches to widen the net.
Every opener is written from the creator's real bio and recent posts — the AI even looks at their photos — and each find gets a fit grade against your offer. No template blasts, no invented flattery.
Every discovered creator gets an automatic engagement estimate from their recent posts — so 200k followers with dead comments never fools you. Sort by engagement or AI fit and work the top.
Randomized 1–3 minute gaps, conservative daily caps with account warm-up, a durable never-double-message log, and hundreds of phrasing variations — the things Instagram's spam detection keys on, handled.
Everything runs in the browser you're already logged into. No credentials, no cloud service, no datacenter IP — the setup that gets other tools' users banned.
A separate workspace per client — its own pipeline, brief and contact history — with client-ready reports, follow-up runs that reply from the right identity, and a guard so the same creator never gets pitched for two clients. Built for freelancers running outreach for clients.
An honest comparison. Enterprise platforms have deeper analytics, and doing it by hand is free — here's exactly where Creator Scout wins, and for whom.
| Creator Scout | Enterprise platforms Modash, Upfluence, Aspire… |
Cloud DM bots | Doing it by hand | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $0–129/mo | $99–600+/mo, annual contracts common | $30–100/mo | Free — except your hours |
| Your Instagram password | Never asked for | Not needed (discovery-only) | Required — stored on their servers | Stays with you |
| Where sending runs | Your browser, your IP | Mostly email outreach, not DMs | Datacenter IPs — the classic ban trigger | Your browser |
| Send safety | Hard 30/day caps, warm-up, pacing | N/A | Volume knobs users crank until banned | As safe as you are consistent |
| Personalization | AI-written from their real bio & posts | Templates + mail-merge fields | Same message, name swapped | Great — 10 minutes per creator |
| Vetting | Auto engagement estimates + AI fit grades | Deep audience demographics (their real strength) | None | Eyeballing profiles |
| Best for | Indie brands & freelance managers | Brands with $10k+/mo programs | Nobody we'd advise | Your first 10 DMs ever |
Fair is fair: if you need audience demographics, fraud detection, and contracted campaigns at enterprise scale, buy Modash or Aspire — they're excellent at that. Creator Scout is for the operator who needs to find, vet, and actually reach creators this week without a $500/month platform or handing a bot their password.
Three searches and five auto-DMs a month, free, no card — enough to see whether your niche is there. When you want it running properly, Pro and Scale both start with 14 days unlimited. Reading profiles counts toward Instagram's own limits, so discovery is paced and stops if Instagram pushes back.
or $468 / year — $39/mo, save 20%
or $1,188 / year — $99/mo, save 23%
Cancel anytime. Creator Scout is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Instagram or Meta. Automated messaging carries account risk; you are responsible for how you use your own account, and we recommend conservative sending volumes.
The honest answers — including what to do to your account first, and the risks worth knowing.
Yes — this matters more than anything else. Before automating, your account should look like a real person or business:
Empty, brand-new, or bot-looking accounts get flagged fastest. Don't run other aggressive automation at the same time.
If the account is brand new, use it like a human for 2–4 weeks before any outreach — post, follow, like, comment, and send a handful of manual DMs. An established account with real history can start sooner. Either way, begin at a low volume (around 10–15 DMs/day) and raise it only if delivery stays clean. There's no official Instagram number here — these are conservative best practices, not guarantees.
One Chrome profile per Instagram account. Extra Chrome windows don't help — every window in a profile shares the same Instagram session, so you'd be looking at one account several times.
You don't need a Google or Gmail account for this: when you add a profile, choose "Continue without an account". Profiles are local unless you sign in. The one cost of skipping sign-in is that Chrome extensions don't sync, so the companion has to be installed in each profile.
Each profile is a separate copy of the app with its own workspace and its own contact log, so turn on Share contacted creators across my devices in Settings → Workspace, or the same creator can be messaged from two profiles. And note the combined daily ceiling is counted per profile — the per-account limit of 30/day is the one that always holds, so grow by adding accounts rather than stacking profiles.
Creator Scout can also rotate between accounts signed into a single profile, but that relies on Instagram's own account switcher and isn't always reliable. One profile per account avoids switching altogether.
Automating any third-party platform carries risk, and we won't pretend otherwise. Instagram can warn, temporarily limit, or restrict accounts that look automated. Creator Scout's randomized pacing, per-account daily caps, and message variation are built to reduce that risk — but they cannot eliminate it. Use conservative volumes, warm up properly, and only proceed if you accept that risk. You're responsible for your own account.
The default cap is a deliberately conservative 30 cold DMs per day, per account. Instagram doesn't publish real limits — they're dynamic and depend on your account's age and history — so we bias toward safe. New accounts should send fewer.
We don't sell higher volume, and we'd rather you didn't chase it by stacking accounts. Instagram links accounts by IP and device, so running several from one browser makes them look like one operation — and if one gets flagged, the others are easy to find. If you need more reach than one healthy account gives you, contact the long tail by email instead: we pull the business email from a creator's bio wherever they publish one.
No. Creator Scout is local-first: it runs in your own browser, acts through the session you're already signed into, and never asks for or receives your password. Your workspace — discovered creators, drafts, history — lives in your browser's storage, and we hold no copy of it and run no account database. The one thing that does leave is AI input: when you use fit scoring, wording help or reply drafting, the specific creator details or draft text involved are sent to our function and on to OpenAI to generate the response. It isn't sold or used for training, and if you never touch an AI feature nothing leaves at all. Our Privacy Policy lists it field by field.
Enterprise platforms (Modash, Upfluence, Aspire) are discovery databases with deep audience analytics — excellent for brands running $10k+/month programs, but they cost $99–600+/month and mostly leave the actual outreach to you. Cloud DM bots automate sending but require your Instagram password and run from datacenter IPs — the two fastest ways to get an account banned. Creator Scout does discovery, AI-personalized outreach, and follow-ups in your own browser, with hard safety caps, from $49/month — no password, no datacenter, no contracts.
No. Creator Scout is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Instagram or Meta. Any interaction with Instagram is subject to Instagram's own terms.
Two things, both free: the Creator Scout web app (opens in your browser, nothing to download) and the Creator Scout Companion extension on the Chrome Web Store, which does the actual discovery and messaging inside your own browser. The app walks you through it in about a minute.
The free plan gives you 3 searches and 5 auto-DMs a month, no card, resetting on the 1st — enough to check whether your niche has the creators you need and to watch one full loop of send, reply and follow-up. Everything is metered rather than switched off, so nothing is hidden from you; you just can't run volume on it. Pro and Scale then start with 14 days unlimited — cold DMs take a few days to earn replies, so two weeks is the shortest window that can honestly show whether this works at scale. The trial takes a card and converts to the paid plan on day 15 — cancel any time before then in the billing portal and you're not charged. Pro ($49/month) unlocks unlimited auto-send with the anti-spam pacing and caps, plus up to 2 sending accounts. Scale ($129/month) is for running outreach across several clients: a separate workspace per client, client-ready reports, a guard against pitching the same creator for two clients, and unlimited sending accounts. If you're one brand, Pro is the right plan — Scale doesn't send more, it keeps more clients straight. Both are also available annually at a discount (Pro $468/yr, Scale $1,188/yr) if you'd rather pay once and forget about it.
It's a monthly subscription you can cancel anytime from the Billing & license page — you keep access until the end of the paid period, your license simply isn't renewed. Lost your key? The same page resends it to your subscribing email. All sales are final — but if something isn't working, report it and we'll fix it fast. See our Refund & Cancellation policy.
Install the free companion, run a niche, and watch the list build itself.
Creator Scout is not affiliated with, authorized, maintained, sponsored, or endorsed by Instagram or Meta Platforms, Inc. "Instagram" is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. Use of automation with any platform is subject to that platform's terms of service and may carry risk to your account; you use Creator Scout at your own discretion.