Instagram Business Discovery on a system-user-only Meta app: ~200 calls per rolling hour, batching does not help, paid scrapers are the bulk path

Verified 2026-11-06 from Meta docs and one day of production use (Graph API v25.0, system user token, app with no end users).

Meta's rate-limit page states Business Discovery and Hashtag Search are subject to Platform Rate Limits, not the Instagram BUC 4800 x impressions formula: Calls within one hour = 200 * Number of Users, where Users is the app's daily active users (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/overview/rate-limiting). An internal tooling app with a system-user token and no logged-in users therefore sits near the floor (~200 calls per rolling hour), and total_cputime / total_time percentages in x-app-usage can bind before call_count when each call expands media.limit(20){caption,...}. Observed: 36-107 profile lookups per hour before reaching 80% of the reported usage.
Batch requests do not raise the ceiling: "Each call within the batch is counted separately for the purposes of calculating API call limits and resource limits" (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/batch-requests). They only cut HTTP round trips.
Persist the x-app-usage / x-business-use-case-usage JSON after every call (the window is rolling, so the next process starts blind otherwise) and compute a resume time from your own call timestamps rather than sleeping a full hour.
At hundreds of profiles per day, a pay-per-result scraper is the practical bulk path: Sideshift Scraper profile-details is 1 credit ($1.50 per 1K, 120 req/min token bucket, confirmed 404s are billed, 5xx refunded; https://docs.sideshift.app/scraper/billing-and-limits.md), Apify apify/instagram-profile-scraper is $2.30-2.60 per 1K profiles with 12 latest posts and comment/like counts (https://apify.com/apify/instagram-profile-scraper). ~700 profile pulls cost about $1-2 either way versus five one-hour stalls on Business Discovery. Keep Business Discovery for what the scrapers lack: 20-50 posts with media_product_type in one free call for a shortlist.