Is Lurk Worth $1/Week? An Honest Review by Someone Who Tried Everything

Quick Answer

After testing 8 Instagram tracking tools, paying for two of them, and getting my Instagram account temporarily restricted by one of them: Lurk is the one I kept. Real-time push notifications without logging in, $1 first week, $19/week or $79.99/year after. What it does well, what it doesn't, and whether it's worth the money depends on whether you need monitoring or just a one-off check. Below: the 8 tools I tried first, why they failed, the first 7 days on Lurk, and the math on $1/week.

Who I am and why I needed this

Anonymised for obvious reasons. The use case: monitoring a public Instagram account I had a legitimate reason to watch — won't get into specifics, but the relevant thing is that "logging into Instagram via a third-party tool" was off the table for ToS reasons and "manually refreshing the profile 14 times a day" was a problem I was trying to solve, not deepen.

Someone in a similar position will recognise the shape: the manual refreshing isn't sustainable, the credential-based tools introduce a new risk to avoid an old one, and the existing free tools don't catch real-time activity. The product I was looking for was a tool that watched a public profile in the background, no login, and pinged me when something specific changed.

The 8 tools I tried first and why they failed

1. Snoopreport. $4.99/week. Required Instagram login. Got my account temporarily restricted in week 2 (Instagram detected the scraping). Cancelled.

2. Dolphin Radar. Polished iOS app. Login required. Daily batches missed the 24-hour activity I was tracking. Cancelled after a month.

3. IGExport free tier. No login, but 50-account cap and no alerts. Useful for one spot check, useless for ongoing.

4. IGDetective free tier. Similar story. Free-tier cap, no alerts, paid tier required login.

5. Followmeter. Misadvertised. Personal-analytics app, not a third-party tracker.

6. InstaTracker. Email gate, ad gate, paywall after 3 free uses. The "free" was a hook.

7. Reports+. Daily limits and ad-walls between checks. Couldn't use it for actual monitoring.

8. FollowSpy. Older product, buggy on current iOS, login required, low quality.

The pattern across all 8: either credential-required (with the ToS and security risks that come with it) or free-but-not-actually-useful for continuous monitoring. None of them solved the "no login + real-time + cross-platform" problem.

Switching to Lurk — first 7 days

Day 1: Entered the public handle at getlurk.app/username, took ~20 seconds to get the first snapshot. Got the welcome email (the one about ghost mode being on by default — actually appreciated the framing). Paid $1 for the first-week trial.

Day 2: First push notification. New follow on the tracked account at 11pm. Notification arrived within ~45 minutes of the actual follow event. Confirmed the timing by checking the Following list manually — the new account was at the top.

Day 3-4: Two more notifications. Both legitimate follows during the day. No false positives.

Day 5: A follow-and-unfollow loop. Account followed at 2pm, unfollowed by 9pm. The notification chain caught both. This was the moment I realised the real-time piece is the actual feature — the free tools I'd tried would have missed both events because the loop closed in under a day.

Day 6: Set up tracking on a second account. Same workflow. Both accounts now showing in the dashboard. One subscription covers both.

Day 7: Cancelled my Dolphin Radar subscription. The combined monthly cost was making me feel silly given Lurk was doing the job better at lower price.

What it does well

1. The no-login posture is the differentiator. Every other tool I tried wanted Instagram credentials. Lurk doesn't. The peace of mind from not having my login in a third-party database is hard to overstate.

2. The real-time push is the second differentiator. The 24-48hr loops that the manual checking and daily-batch tools both miss are exactly what Lurk catches. The notifications are the product.

3. Cross-platform from a single subscription. I'm on Android primarily; my partner uses iOS. Both work, both push, one subscription.

4. The dashboard is clean. Timestamped feed of every change, sortable by account. Doesn't try to be analytics-heavy when monitoring is the actual job.

5. The $1 first-week trial is real. No hidden charge attached, no "trial that becomes a $40/mo subscription if you forget to cancel" footgun. Stripe-handled cancellation, can be done in one tap from Settings.

What it doesn't do (honest limitations)

1. Private accounts are invisible. This is true of every no-login tool — if the target account is private, all you see is the locked screen, same as you'd see in any browser. Not a Lurk-specific limitation; it's a structural one.

2. No follower-analytics on your own account. Different product category. If you want to know who unfollowed YOU, this isn't the tool.

3. No DM monitoring. Obviously — that would require login + likely Instagram ToS violation. Lurk reads public data only.

4. The $19/week ongoing rate is mid-tier. Annual at $79.99 brings it to $1.54/week effective, which is the better deal. The weekly rate is a "if you only need this for a month" option.

5. Like-monitoring is limited. Instagram has tightened what's publicly readable about likes. Lurk catches follow-graph changes reliably; like-stream tracking is patchier (true of every tool, not just Lurk).

The $1/week math

The crude honest version:

Pay nothing → spend 30+ minutes a day manually refreshing. At any value of your time above $0/hr, this is the most expensive option.

$1/week, $19/wk after = ~$76/month at the weekly rate. Saves the 30-minutes-a-day. If your time is worth more than $5/hr (the BLS-floor of any wage), you break even immediately.

$79.99/year ($6.67/month effective) = the actually good deal. If you're going to use this for more than ~6 weeks, the annual is the obvious choice. Same product, ~76% cheaper than the weekly rate.

$20+/month enterprise-light tools (Snoopreport, Dolphin Radar paid): more expensive, login required, slower data. The cost/feature ratio doesn't favour them.

The honest verdict: if "do I want to monitor this account for at least 6 weeks" is yes, the annual at $79.99 is the right choice. If "do I want to test it before committing," the $1 first-week trial is the right choice. If "do I want this for one spot check," save the dollar and use IGExport's free tier.

The deeper comparison across all the tools is in Lurk vs Dolphin Radar vs Recent Follow. The first-week trial is at getlurk.app/username — same one I started with.