inWidget proxified: Free Instagram widget for your website, in 2021

For one of my projects, I needed a widget which would render posts from an Instagram hashtag. It turned out to be very cumbersome to implement nowadays, because Instagram shut down its legacy API in 2020 and now the developer needs to go through a real nightmare to get approved for Instagram Official API, which still may not allow hashtag parsing.  

Another way would be to go for paid solutions, like elfsight widget ( https://elfsight.com/instagram-feed-instashow/ ) but their artificial restriction on amount of views on the free and $5 plan is just crazy.

So, I've found a nice alternative, which is much cheaper (literally, free for fair use), does not require Instagram developer account, has open source code, and is very customizable: https://github.com/restyler/inwidget

The demo website with sample widgets: https://inwidget.apiroad.net/

This library still requires subscription for a cloud proxy (the same RapidAPI solution I told you about on previous post),  but for the end user, this is not an issue - just cache the result on the PHP side, refresh the cache every 24 hours, and  easily stay under the free plan of the API!

The best part of the inWidget proxified library, besides its stable work, is that the template of a widget is just plain html and php, so it is easy to customize the output, even if for a newbie in programming.