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Instacart website screenshot

Instacart

Instacart (Maplebear Inc.) is a North American grocery technology company that operates the Instacart Marketplace and sells its underlying commerce, fulfillment, catalog, advertising and storefront technology to retailers and brands. Its published API surface splits cleanly in two. The Instacart Developer Platform API is open to app and website developers, costs nothing, and exposes two shoppable-page operations plus a nearby-retailers lookup at connect.instacart.com/idp/v1 -- and, unusually, Instacart pays the developer, commissioning attributed orders through an Impact affiliate programme. Instacart Connect is the enterprise half: OAuth 2.0, partner-gated Fulfillment, Post-checkout, Transaction and Sandbox APIs, the Catalog API, Carrot Ads and Shopping Widgets, all bundled into a retailer or brand partner agreement. Instacart also runs a first-party remote Model Context Protocol server at https://mcp.instacart.com/mcp whose tools/list is served anonymously, making it one of the few grocery-sector providers with a directly reachable agent surface.

agent ready

Reference-quality API operations across every facet — a rich contract, published governance, transparent operations, and machine-readable commercial terms.

Kin Score

API Evangelist profiles Instacart the way a machine reads it — 76 machine-readable artifacts across 5 APIs, pulled from the provider's own public surface and indexed so a developer, an analyst, or an AI agent can evaluate it against every other provider on the network.

Every provider in the network is reduced to the same set of machine-readable artifacts — OpenAPI contracts, event specifications, GraphQL schemas, runnable collections, pricing and rate-limit signals, security posture, OAuth scopes, and the agent surfaces (MCP servers and skills) that let software drive the API on its own. We profile them because the interface is the part of a company you can actually inspect: it is a truer signal of what a provider does than any marketing page. From those artifacts we compute the Kin Score — Instacart scores 70.5/100 (exemplar), with a separate agent-readiness read of 33/100 (agent ready). The full breakdown is below, followed by every artifact we hold — each card links through to its machine-readable definition on apis.io.

Kin Score

This is the API Evangelist rating — a single, repeatable read computed from the artifacts on this page. Green fill is points earned; the red track is points possible, so every bar shows earned-versus-possible at a glance. Every facet and dimension name is a link: it opens that measurement's page on APIs.io, where the rating runs across the whole catalog — the exact checks that feed it, how every profiled provider distributes on it, and who is at the top of it.

Kin Score Kin Score How this is scored →
scored 2026-09-08 · rubric v0.20.0
Composite quality — 70.5/100 · exemplar
Contract Quality 18.2 / 25
Access Clarity 14.7 / 20
Discoverability 8.2 / 10
Instacart Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist

Put this on your own site. The badge is drawn live from Instacart's current Kin Score — paste it once and it updates itself every time the score is recomputed. It follows your visitor's light or dark setting, and it links back here so anyone who sees it can read the full breakdown.

<!-- Kin Score · API Evangelist -->
<a href="https://providers.apievangelist.com/providers/instacart/"
   title="Instacart on API Evangelist — API profile and Kin Score">
  <img src="https://apis.io/badge/instacart.svg"
       alt="Instacart Kin Score — API readiness rating by API Evangelist" width="150" height="150" loading="lazy">
</a>

More shapes, themes and sizes → · Score as JSON · How badges work

How we profile Instacart

Each block below is one kind of artifact we hold for Instacart. For each we say what it is and why it earns a place in the profile, then list every one we've indexed — capped at two rows, scroll within the panel for the rest.

APIs 12

Each API is captured as its own OpenAPI definition — every operation, parameter, and response. This is the single most useful machine-readable description of what an API does, and it's what lets us score, lint, mock, and generate against it without asking the provider for anything.

Individual APIs this provider publishes, each with its own machine-readable definition.

Instacart Shopping Widgets

Instacart Shopping Widgets are front-end web components that retailers can embed into their websites to add e-commerce functionalities powered by Instacart without interacting w...

instacart Authentication API

Endpoints for obtaining and managing OAuth 2.0 access tokens used to authenticate API requests.

instacart Chat API

Endpoints for shopper-customer communication including sending and retrieving chat messages.

instacart Delivery API

Endpoints for finding delivery stores, previewing time slots, reserving time slots, and creating delivery orders.

instacart Items API

Endpoints for updating item-level attributes such as pricing and availability at specific store locations. Items contain information that can vary from one store to another.

instacart Last Mile Delivery API

Endpoints for last mile delivery where items are pre-packed and only require delivery from the store to the customer.

instacart Orders API

Endpoints for retrieving order status, handling details, and item information after checkout.

instacart Pickup API

Endpoints for finding pickup stores, previewing time slots, reserving time slots, and creating pickup orders.

instacart Products API

Endpoints for creating and updating products in the retailer's catalog on Instacart. Products are the same across all of a retailer's stores.

instacart Replacements API

Endpoints for managing item replacements suggested by shoppers during order fulfillment.

Instacart Developer Platform MCP Server

Instacart's first-party remote Model Context Protocol server. Production endpoint https://mcp.instacart.com/mcp over Streamable HTTP, authenticated with a Developer Platform API...

instacart Rest API

The Rest API from instacart — 1 operation(s) for rest.

Scroll within the panel for all 12 ·

Open Collections 14

Open, tool-agnostic collections carry the same runnable value as Postman without locking you to one client — the portable, forkable form of the same exercise.

Open, tool-agnostic API collections (OpenAPI-derived and Bruno).

Scroll within the panel for all 14 ·

MCP Servers 1

Model Context Protocol servers expose these APIs directly to AI agents. We profile them because agent-native access is the fastest-growing way this provider's capabilities actually get used.

Model Context Protocol servers that expose these APIs to AI agents.

Instacart Developer Platform MCP Server

Instacart publishes a first-party, remote Model Context Protocol server that exposes the Instacart Developer Platform's two shoppable-page operations as MCP tools. The productio...

MCP SERVER

GraphQL 1

Where a provider ships GraphQL, the schema is the contract. We profile it alongside the REST surface so the whole interface is legible in one place.

GraphQL schemas published by this provider.

Instacart GraphQL Schema

This conceptual GraphQL schema models the Instacart grocery delivery and retail platform. Instacart provides APIs for retailers, brands, and developers to integrate grocery shop...

GRAPHQL

Pricing Plans 1

Pricing is part of the interface. Machine-readable plans tell you what a tier costs and includes before you commit — one of the things the Kin Score reads for access clarity — renamed from commercial clarity in rubric 0.12, because a free statutory interface has access terms and no commercial ones.

Published pricing tiers and plan structures.

Rate Limits 1

Rate limits are the difference between a demo that works and a production integration that doesn't fall over. Publishing them is an operational-transparency signal — and a hard requirement for any agent that plans its own throughput.

Documented rate limits and quota policies.

Instacart Rate Limits

2 limits

RATE LIMITS

FinOps 1

Cost, billing, and metering signals let a buyer model the financial operations of an API before it's live. We profile them for the same reason we profile pricing: the money is part of the contract.

Cost, billing, and metering signals for API financial operations.

Event Specifications 1

Not every API is request/response. AsyncAPI describes the event-driven and streaming side — the webhooks and channels — so the asynchronous half of the interface is documented the same way the synchronous half is.

AsyncAPI definitions for this provider's event-driven and streaming APIs.

Instacart Connect Event Callbacks

Instacart Connect notifies retailers of order status changes and fulfillment events through webhook callbacks. Retailers configure callback endpoints to receive real-time notifi...

ASYNCAPI

Semantic Vocabularies 1

JSON-LD contexts give the data shared meaning across APIs. We profile them because semantics are what let a machine reconcile 'customer' here with 'customer' somewhere else.

JSON-LD contexts and semantic vocabularies used across these APIs.

Instacart Context

0 classes · 8 properties

JSON-LD

Spectral Rules 2

Governance rulesets we run against this provider's specs — the automated checks behind parts of the score. Profiling them makes the quality bar explicit and re-runnable, not a matter of opinion.

Instacart API Rules

8 rules · 1 errors · 7 warnings

SPECTRAL

Instacart API Rules

6 rules · 5 warnings

SPECTRAL

JSON Schema 35

Standalone JSON Schema definitions describe the data models behind the API. We profile them so the shapes are validatable on their own — useful long after a single request is forgotten.

Standalone JSON Schema definitions for this provider's data models.

CartItem

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ChatMessage

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ChatMessagesResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

CreateOrderRequest

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Error

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

FindStoresRequest

7 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Ingredient

6 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Item

10 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ItemSubmissionRequest

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

LineItem

8 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Instacart Order

12 properties

JSON SCHEMA

OrderHandlingResponse

6 properties

JSON SCHEMA

OrderItem

5 properties

JSON SCHEMA

OrderItemsResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

OrderResponse

7 properties

JSON SCHEMA

PostCheckoutOrderItem

6 properties

JSON SCHEMA

PreviewServiceOptionsRequest

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Instacart Product

12 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ProductsLinkResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ProductSubmissionRequest

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

RecipeRequest

10 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Replacement

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReplacementDecisionRequest

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReplacementResponse

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ReserveTimeSlotRequest

2 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SendMessageRequest

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ServiceOption

5 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ServiceOptionHoldResponse

3 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ServiceOptionsResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

ShoppingListRequest

7 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Store

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

StoresResponse

1 properties

JSON SCHEMA

SubmissionResponse

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

TokenRequest

4 properties

JSON SCHEMA

TokenResponse

5 properties

JSON SCHEMA

Scroll within the panel for all 35 ·

JSON Structure 1

JSON Structure captures the data shapes in a form built for tooling — a complement to JSON Schema that keeps the model machine-legible.

JSON Structure definitions describing this provider's data shapes.

Instacart Structure

0 properties

JSON STRUCTURE

Security Posture 3

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals — the evidence that a provider takes security seriously enough to document it. We profile it because you can't govern what you can't see.

Authentication, domain security, vulnerability disclosure, and trust-center signals.

Instacart Authentication

http · 1 scheme

SECURITY

Instacart Domain Security

TLSv1.2 · DMARC

SECURITY

Instacart Vulnerability Disclosure

Hackerone · security.txt · contact published

SECURITY

Scopes 1

OAuth scopes are the vocabulary of least-privilege access. Profiling them shows exactly what an integration — or an agent acting on a user's behalf — is allowed to do.

OAuth scopes governing access to this provider's APIs.

Instacart Scopes

OAuth 2.0 · no documented scopes

0 scopes

SCOPES

Agentic Access 1

An x-agentic-access contract marks which operations are safe for an agent to run on its own and which need a human in the loop. It is the difference between an API an agent can use and one it can use safely.

Recommended x-agentic-access execution contracts for AI agents.

Instacart Agentic Access

23 operations · 19 acting

23 operations · 19 acting

AGENTIC

Resources

Every other property we hold for Instacart — documentation, portals, status pages, policies, and corporate surface — grouped by the job it does, following the integrator's arc from getting started to running in production.

Build 3

SDKs, sample code, and the tooling you integrate with

Company 3

The organization behind the API

Other 2

Properties that don't map to a standard resource type

← All providers · Data indexed from github.com/api-evangelist/instacart · machine-readable index on apis.io

Where this information came from

This is an independent, third-party profile of Instacart, published by API Evangelist. We do not operate, host, resell, or support these APIs, and we are not affiliated with or endorsed by the company unless stated above. Everything here is built from publicly available information — the company's own site, developer portal, documentation, public repositories, and the specifications it publishes for public use. Nothing is obtained by breaching a system, defeating an access control, or using credentials.

The Kin Score and Agent Readiness rating are independently calculated assessments of a company's public API artifacts, scored against a published rubric. They are not certifications, endorsements, security assessments, or audits.

Corrections, re-scores, and removal are free — no partnership or purchase required, and you do not need to justify the request. A removed company is recorded as unrated, never scored zero for having asked. Acknowledgement within one business day; removal within two.

info@apievangelist.com · Read the full data-sourcing policy →
On a security or compliance team? Put security in the subject line and you will get a person, not a form — we will tell you exactly which public URLs this profile was built from.