Instagram comment and DM automation
Instagram DM automation and comment-to-DM replies.
- Someone comments
- Keyword matches
- Public reply
- Private DM
- Thread in your inbox
Three things a rule can react to
A rule belongs to one connected account and starts with a trigger. Everything else — keywords, scope, what it sends — hangs off that.
Comment
Someone comments on a post. The rule can answer in the thread, send them a DM, or do both — the “comment LINK and I’ll send it” loop, running without anyone watching the notifications.
DM
Someone messages the account. Match a keyword in the message and reply automatically, with everything landing in the inbox so you can take over mid-conversation.
Post
When this app publishes an Instagram post, the rule drops your comment on it seconds later — so the link or the CTA is sitting there as the first comment before anyone reads the caption.
Auto reply to Instagram comments, publicly and privately
A comment rule can do two things at once, and they are separately optional.
The public reply
Answers in the comment thread, where everyone else scrolling the post can see it. Good for social proof, and for telling the commenter to check their DMs.
The private reply
Sends the person a DM off the back of their comment — the link, the code, the freebie. Instagram allows one private reply per comment, within seven days of it being posted.
DM text is capped at 1,000 characters and comment replies at 2,200 — Instagram's limits, shown on the rule form so a reply can't be written that the platform will later reject.
Keyword matching that stays predictable
An automation that fires on the wrong comment is worse than no automation. The matching rules are deliberately boring.
Contains or exact
Keyword matching is case-insensitive. CONTAINS catches the keyword anywhere in the message; EXACT fires only on the whole word, for when a common word would over-trigger.
One post, or the whole account
Scope a comment rule to a single post, or leave it account-wide so it covers everything you publish. When both could fire, the post-scoped rule wins.
Once per user
Switch it on and a person gets your reply once, no matter how many times they comment the keyword. Switch it off for rules that should answer every time.
Followers-only, and the caveat that comes with it
Comment and DM rules can require that the person already follows the account before the rule fires. It works — but not for everyone, and that is worth understanding before you build a campaign on it.
How the gate behaves
Follow status is checked before anything is sent. On a comment rule the gate holds back the public reply as well, so the thread never promises a DM that isn't going to arrive. Someone skipped today can still be replied to later if they follow — the skip doesn't burn their “once per user” slot.
Where it can't see
Meta only releases a person's profile to a business they have already messaged. DM senders always resolve. A commenter who has never DM'd the account resolves to unknown, and an unknown is skipped rather than assumed — so a followers-only comment rule will genuinely miss some real followers. The reason is spelled out in that rule's run history.
If reach matters more than the follow, leave the gate off. If the follow is the whole point of the campaign, turn it on and read the skipped runs for a week to see which way your traffic falls.
One inbox for every conversation the rules start
Automation that hands off badly is just a faster way to annoy people. Every thread a rule touches is a thread you can pick up yourself.
Every thread in one place
Direct messages and group threads, live-updating, with read receipts and reactions. Recent history is pulled in when an account connects, so the inbox is not empty on day one.
The 24-hour window, shown
Instagram only lets a business reply within 24 hours of the person's last message. The reply box disables itself when the window closes rather than letting you write into a void.
Told when something lands
Every inbound DM raises a notification with a click-through to the thread, plus a short chime in any open tab. Both can be switched off in settings.
Duplicates can't happen
Meta delivers webhooks at least once — meaning the same comment can arrive twice, or five times, for reasons entirely outside anyone's control.
The gate is in the database, not the code path
Every rule firing claims a unique row before a single call is made to Instagram. A redelivered event finds the row already taken and stops there. Inbound messages dedupe on Instagram's own message id the same way. Your followers will not receive the same automated reply twice.
Stats per rule
Each rule shows how many times it has triggered, when it last fired, and a run history you can read line by line — including the runs that were skipped and why. Rate limits from Meta are retried with backoff; permanent errors are marked failed rather than silently dropped.
What it doesn't do
The limits are real ones, and most of them are Meta's rather than ours.
Your accounts today — client accounts not yet
Comment and DM automation runs on the Instagram accounts you connect yourself and hold a role on. Running it on someone else's account — a client's — needs Meta App Review of the messaging and comment permissions, and that review is still pending. So it is not available today: buy this for your own accounts, not for a client's. This page gets updated the day that changes.
No pinning a comment
Instagram's API allows hiding, unhiding and deleting comments — not pinning them. An auto-comment on a new post lands first, but pinning it stays a manual tap in the Instagram app. Nothing here pretends otherwise.
Instagram only
A Professional (Business or Creator) Instagram account is required, plus a one-time connect that grants the messaging and comment permissions. There is no TikTok or YouTube equivalent — those platforms are for publishing here, not automation.
No flow builder
Rules are single-step: trigger, keywords, reply. There are no branching conversation trees, no drip sequences and no chatbot canvas — it's the comment-to-DM loop, done properly, inside the tool you already plan and publish in.
Put the comment-to-DM loop on autopilot.
$29/month or $290/year, USD. One plan, no free tier and no trial — cancel any time.