I was spending 30+ min/day screenshotting competitor Instagram stories. So I built StoryVault.
Quick context: I run a small marketing agency, and one of my clients wanted daily competitor monitoring. Sounds simple, right?
The problem was Instagram stories. They vanish after 24 hours. So every morning I'd manually screenshot 8-10 competitor accounts before their stories disappeared.
It was miserable.
After doing this for 2 weeks, I decided to scratch my own itch and build something.
What StoryVault does:
- You add Instagram accounts you want to monitor
- It automatically checks for new stories and saves them to your Google Drive
- Stories are organized by account and date
- No more manual screenshotting
The tech stack (if anyone cares):
- Next.js 15 with App Router
- Supabase for auth and database
- Python cloud functions for the actual story fetching
- Rotating proxies to avoid rate limits
Where I'm at:
- Just launched this week
- Have a few early users testing it
- Free tier available (limited accounts)
- Looking for feedback from anyone who deals with this problem
https://story-vault-seven.vercel.app
Honestly not sure if this is a "real" business or just a useful tool for people like me. But I figured I'd share it here and see if others have the same pain point.
Would love to hear:
- Does anyone else deal with this story monitoring problem?
- What would make this more useful for you?
- Am I crazy for thinking people would pay for this?
Thanks for reading 🙏
Stories are where people test the hooks they don't want on their main feed. Since the data vanishes in 24 hours, you’ve built a permanent record of their actual experiments.
I saw a LinkedIn scraper pull 500 leads in a week because it captured unique data. People don't care about TOS if the competitive edge is sharp enough.
To make this actually useful for business, you need OCR and keyword indexing. If I can search 50 competitors for terms like 'discount', 'launch', or specific pricing, it stops being a gallery and becomes a research database.
If you add 'keyword alerts' – notifying a user the second a competitor mentions a specific term in a story – you’ve moved from a niche utility to a monitoring tool people will put on a company card.