Fake Friends
See who unfollowed you. Never your password.
Fake Friends
First commit to live in two days
0
Instagram passwords, ever
70
Screens designed in Figma
$29.99
Once, or $4.99 a month
2 days
First commit to live
The product
Fake Friends shows you who unfollowed you on Instagram and who never followed back, using Instagram's own official data export instead of your login. No password, no stranger's server logging in as you, no scraping of your account. You get the file from Instagram, drop it in, and the names are there. Designed and built by Kanopy Labs as a mobile-first web app, live at fakefriends.io in 2026.
The challenge
Every "who unfollowed me" app works the same way: hand over your Instagram password, let someone else's server log in as you, and hope your account doesn't get flagged. People know it's a bad deal, and the curiosity wins anyway. Instagram already gives everyone an official export of their followers and following, but the request is buried five taps deep in Accounts Center, the file arrives hours later, and it comes as chunked JSON that nobody wants to open. Fake Friends had to turn that export into the answer people actually want — who left, and who never followed back — inside a product that feels calm and trustworthy instead of sketchy, and that could charge for the answer without any of the dark patterns the category runs on.
How we tackled it
01
Designed the whole product around one rule taken from the brand render: a single glass object glowing softly on a near-white page, navy text, blue used as light rather than paint, one surface per screen and nothing else — 70 screens in Figma covering every state from "wrong file" to "refunded"
02
Replaced the password prompt with a handle: the user types their public @, the server pulls their public profile and top commenters through Scrape Creators, and the app shows their "day ones" and a fake-friends estimate before any file is uploaded — if someone pastes a password into any field, it's discarded with "We'll never need that"
03
Built a browser-side parser (JSZip in a Web Worker) that reads Instagram's export as a ZIP or loose JSON, merges the chunked follower files, handles both follower schemas Instagram ships, and keeps pending requests and the user's own unfollows out of the counts so the numbers are right
04
Stored each upload as a snapshot on the user's account in MongoDB and computed the diff against the last one, which is what turns "not following back" into a real unfollowers list with the date each person left and how long they followed
05
Priced it honestly: $29.99 once or $4.99 a month, no weekly plan, no free trial, no countdown timers, Fans and the free counts never behind the paywall, and a one-tap refund in Profile that calls the Stripe refund API directly
06
Wired email-code sign-in with Clerk so there is no password anywhere in the product, Resend reminders timed to when Instagram's export usually lands, chunked uploads that stay under Vercel's request limits for large accounts, and a 1080x1920 share card rendered on the server
What we built
Fake Friends shipped as a Next.js 15 App Router web app with React 19, Tailwind v4 and Framer Motion on the front, MongoDB Atlas for accounts and snapshots, Clerk for email-code sign-in, Stripe Embedded Checkout for the one-time and monthly plans, Resend for reminders and receipts, and Scrape Creators for the public-profile step, all deployed on Vercel. The app went from first commit to production on fakefriends.io in two days, with live payments, the custom domain, and the reminder cron running. It installs to the home screen as a PWA and every screen holds to the same rule: white page, two soft glows, one glass surface.
A closer look
