Dolphin Radar review: what it tracks, what it costs, and whether it's safe

Dolphin Radar is a paid web service that watches one public Instagram account for you and reports what changes: who it starts following, who it stops following, what it likes and comments on, and how its follower count moves. You don't log in with Instagram and the account you watch is never told.

That's the whole product in a sentence. The rest of this review is the detail that sentence leaves out: how long it takes before the reports say anything useful, what the following tracker can and can't see now that Instagram has changed how following lists are ordered, what it costs once you add a second account, and what people complain about.

What Dolphin Radar is

Dolphin Radar runs in the browser at dolphinradar.com. You create an account with an email address, Google or Apple, add the username of a public Instagram account, and the service starts checking that account on a schedule. Everything it reports comes from what the profile already shows the public, which is why it can't do anything with a private account.

Its tracking plans watch six kinds of change on the account you add:

• New follows, the accounts it starts following.
• Unfollows, the accounts it stops following.
• Likes on other people's posts.
• Comments it leaves.
• Story engagement.
• Changes in its follower count.

Around that core it sells a free anonymous viewer for stories, posts and highlights, a separate unfollower tracker for your own account, a mutual-follower checker, CSV export on the longer plans, and paid AI-written summaries of an account's activity.

How the Dolphin Radar following tracker works

This is the feature most people mean when they search for Dolphin Radar following: a list of who the account has started following recently.

It doesn't read that from the top of the account's following list, and it couldn't if it wanted to. Instagram removed the Following activity tab in October 2019, and on 9 September 2026 it stopped returning following lists in the order the follows happened. The account someone followed yesterday can now sit anywhere in their list. The full story is in how to see who someone recently followed on Instagram.

What Dolphin Radar does instead is take the account's whole following list as a baseline the day you add it, then compare each later check against that baseline. Anything that wasn't there before shows up under its follow updates, dated by the day Dolphin Radar first noticed it. Three things follow from that:

1. 1It can't see anything that happened before you added the account. The baseline is the starting line, and nothing behind it is visible.
2. 2The dates are detection dates, not follow dates. If a follow happens on Monday and the next check runs on Thursday, the report says Thursday. Instagram doesn't publish when a follow happened, so no outside tool knows the exact moment.
3. 3The first useful report takes time. Reports refresh weekly, so expect the picture to fill in over the first week or two rather than on day one.

None of that is a flaw peculiar to Dolphin Radar. Comparing snapshots is the only method that still works for another person's follows, and every honest tracker in this category now works the same way. We compare the ones that say so in our rundown of recent follow trackers.

What Dolphin Radar costs

There's a free preview, and the tracking itself is paid. The thing to understand before you look at the prices is that every subscription covers one tracked account. Watching a second profile means a second subscription.

The activity tracker and the unfollower tracker are billed separately, so someone who wants both for their own account and also wants to watch one other profile is looking at two or three subscriptions, not one.

Is Dolphin Radar free?

Partly. The anonymous story and post viewer is free, there's a free preview of non-followers and mutual followers, and Dolphin Radar publishes a sample report so you can see the format before paying. The tracking reports, which are the reason most people sign up, are paid. Reviewers who went looking for a free trial of the tracking plans didn't find one.

If all you wanted was to watch someone's stories without them knowing, you don't need an account anywhere: our free story viewer does that for public accounts, and so does the highlights viewer for the stories they've pinned.

Is Dolphin Radar safe and legit?

On the question that sinks most Instagram trackers, yes. Dolphin Radar never asks for your Instagram username and password, never connects to your account, and doesn't need you to have an Instagram account at all. Instagram's own help pages warn that an app holding your login can gain complete access to your account. Dolphin Radar never holds it, so that risk doesn't exist here.

The real questions are about the business, and they're fair ones to ask:

• Billing and cancellation. Its Trustpilot page is small, fewer than two dozen reviews when we checked, and most are one star. The complaints cluster around cancelling, unexpected charges and slow support replies. The company's public response is that subscriptions are only ever created through a Stripe checkout.
• Refunds. Its terms make reports non-refundable once delivered, with exceptions for repeated failed deliveries or a product that doesn't match its description, and a refund has to be requested in writing within seven days.
• Who runs it. The domain's registration is behind a privacy service and we couldn't find the legal entity on the site. That's common for small software companies, but worth knowing before you hand over a card.
• Instagram's terms. Instagram prohibits collecting data by automated means without permission. That's a risk the service carries, not you, since your own account is never involved.

Does the person you're tracking find out? No. Dolphin Radar only reads public data, so nothing reaches the account and no notification is sent. That cuts both ways, and the same is true of anyone tracking you. For more on judging trackers generally, see what to check before trusting any Instagram tracker.

What Dolphin Radar can't do

• Anything with a private account. No public data means nothing to read, for Dolphin Radar or anyone else.
• Show follows from before you started. The baseline is day one, and history behind it isn't visible.
• Give exact times. Dates are when a check first noticed a change, which can be days after it happened.
• Answer instantly. It's built to accumulate, so the first week is the thinnest the report will ever be.
• Watch many accounts cheaply. Each account is its own subscription, so the cost scales with the list.

Dolphin Radar alternatives, by what you're actually after

Most people land on Dolphin Radar with one of a few questions, and for the most common one, who unfollowed me, it's the wrong tool. Here's the right one for each.

If you were using Dolphin Radar to watch your own follower count, the two products are compared feature by feature in lastfollower vs Dolphin Radar. Short version: Dolphin Radar is the better tool for watching someone else over months, and the wrong one for finding out who left you this week.