Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Every feature available today, including unfollower, mutual, and fan detection, possible-username-change reconciliation, and export insights, is free. There is no purchasable paid plan and no checkout screen.

While we prepare for the AdSense re-review, no live ad requests are sent anywhere, including the results, tools, demo, and blog. ads.txt and the publisher meta tag are kept only to verify site ownership.

No. Only the ZIP or JSON file you download from Instagram yourself is used; we never ask for your account password or a session connection.

The original ZIP, username lists, DM contents, the other party's account names, and detailed results are processed only in your browser's memory. General page-usage analytics and hosting logs are separate and are never combined with Instagram analysis data.

Refreshing or closing the page clears the analysis results from memory. The original file and detailed results are not stored on CheckMate's servers.

No. A universal 365-day limit cannot be assumed. Because it varies by account and by the requested range, CheckMate calculates the actual observed period from the minimum and maximum timestamps in the file.

They can differ because of the period and items you requested, when the export was generated, deactivated or deleted accounts, or omissions on the platform's side. If you know the actual figures from the app, read the results together with the incompleteness notice on the results screen.

If the latest format includes a stable account ID, username mismatches can be reconciled. Older-format URLs are username-based and a timestamp match is only a candidate estimate, so final confirmation is required.

The three states cannot always be distinguished from the export file alone. Instead of definitive wording, CheckMate shows a boundary indicating that the results may be incomplete.

Not in the operator's own account export from 2026-08-18 (requested for the full period). Of the 543 entries in followers_1.json, 469 (86.4%) were older than the last 365 days, and the oldest entry was dated 2018-11-02. However, the sample is a single account and Meta has not officially defined the range, so we do not conclude that the same holds for other accounts or other request dates. If you received a short file, in most cases the period was not set to "All time" when requesting.

Because the followers and following files contain no unique account ID (fbid). The other 8 files in the same ZIP (close friends, blocked, recently unfollowed, and so on) had an fbid on every entry, but only followers_1.json and following.json were in the older format and contained nothing but a username and a profile URL. Since both come from the same username, comparing them against each other cannot reveal a change. With this structure, no tool can confirm a username change from the files alone.

No. That file is the list of accounts you recently unfollowed (8 entries in the measured file, all with an fbid). Instagram does not separately record who unfollowed you; it can only be estimated by comparing your follower lists from two points in time.

Four numbers (I follow, follow me, mutual, not following me back), three lists (accounts not following you back, your fans, mutuals), and the period observed in the file. Percentages such as a mutual-follow ratio and a total count of username changes are not shown. If you need a ratio, you can calculate it yourself from the four numbers; username changes are provided only as a per-item "possible" marker, because the file contains no evidence to confirm them.

Yes, if the file covers the full period. In the operator's own file, splitting the 52 accounts not following back by the date I followed them gave 1 in 2020, 2 in 2021, 4 in 2022, 5 in 2023, 16 in 2024, 15 in 2025, and 9 in 2026. More than half were one-way follows that had lasted over two years, and with a short-period file these older entries would have been missing entirely. That is why choosing "All time" as the period when requesting matters.

It is the span between the earliest and latest follow timestamps contained in the uploaded file. For example, 2,842 days means the file holds about 8 years of history. If this value comes out short, as if the account were newly created, the file is most likely not a full-period export, and unfollower judgments in that state may wrongly flag people who are simply absent from the file.

In the Instagram Accounts Center, under Download your information, include followers and following and choose the JSON format. Depending on the analysis you need, you must select the full period yourself.

Check that the format is JSON rather than HTML, that the ZIP downloaded completely, and that followers_1.json and following.json are included. Please do not attach the original file to a support email.