A leaderboard for Instagram egos
instabid.lol is a public ranking board. Drop in an Instagram handle, we pull the real profile, and it lands on the board. Want to be higher? Outbid whoever's above you.
The idea
Every creator, brand and founder quietly wants to know where they stand. Follower counts answer that badly — they're a number nobody competes over in real time. So we built the dumbest, most honest version of a ranking: the board is ordered by how much you're willing to bid for your spot, not by how many followers you have.
Nike sits at 291M followers. If someone with 400 followers bids higher, they rank above Nike. That's the whole joke, and the whole point.
How it works
- Enter a handle. Any public Instagram username. No sign up, no login, no email.
- We fetch the real profile. Display name, avatar, follower count, verified badge — pulled once and stored.
- You land on the board. Your opening bid is $5 and you're ranked against everyone else.
- Outbid to climb. Every time a handle is re-added, its bid goes up and it moves toward the top.
Real data, fetched once
Profile data is real, not mocked. We pull it a single time when a handle first appears and then serve it from our own database — so the board loads instantly and we're not hammering Instagram on every page view. Avatars are re-hosted on our side, which means they keep working even after Instagram's image links expire.
What this isn't
There's no real money involved and nothing is for sale. Bids are a scoreboard mechanic, not a transaction. We don't ask for your password, we never touch private accounts, and we only ever read what Instagram already shows publicly.
On privacy: we store only public profile fields — username, display name, avatar, follower and post counts, bio, and verified status. If your handle is on the board and you'd rather it wasn't, we'll remove it. No questions, no form.
Where this started
instabid.lol exists because of a tweet. On August 19, 2026, Jonathan Wilke shipped outbid.lol — a public ranking where you pay to outrank whoever is above you. No ads. No API keys. No revenue sharing. The idea was too good not to try on Instagram.
Aaaaaaand we're live! outbid.lol — No ads. No API keys. No revenue sharing. Just outbid your competitors to rank #1 and consider marketing done for today 🚀
Who made this
instabid.lol is a small side project — built fast, deployed on Cloudflare's edge, and intentionally kept to one screen. The mechanic is Jonathan's. The Instagram board is ours. It's the kind of thing that exists because it was funny enough to ship.