Three minutes is not a marketing number. It is roughly how long the build takes once your account is connected, because the automation is five fields and four of them have an obvious answer.
This is the version for someone with a post going out this afternoon. It skips the reasoning. Where a decision genuinely matters, there is a link to the long explanation, and you can read it later without taking the automation down.
The three minutes
- Pick one post. The most recent one that reliably gets the same question. Not your whole feed.
- Type one keyword.
price, orlink, orguide. Just one, on the any setting. Case and punctuation are ignored, so you do not need variants. - Add one negative keyword.
not interested. This takes four seconds and prevents the reply that makes you wince. - Write the public reply. One line, under ten words. "Sent you a DM" is a complete and correct answer here.
- Write the private reply. The actual answer, typed the way you would type it on your phone. This is the only field worth a second draft.
- Leave capture to Leads on. It is on by default and you want it on.
That is the build. The preview panel on the right is already replaying your real comments against what you just typed, so if the keyword is wrong you will see it before anything is live.
Minute three: test it on yourself
Do not press Go live yet. Press Test on myself first, and give it the twenty seconds it takes.
The test runs the whole thing — keyword match, the ten pre-send checks, reply generation, delivery — and sends the result to your own account. Nothing is simulated, so what you receive is exactly what a stranger would have received.
If the test passes and the DM reads like something you would actually send, press Go live. You are done.
The takeover rule covers you from there. The moment you reply to a thread by hand, the automation stands down on that conversation, so you never have to pause anything before jumping into a chat yourself. Leave it on and a live automation is never really a commitment: answering one person yourself quietly overrides it, on that thread only, without touching anything you built.
What you deliberately did not do
The fast setup leaves things on the table on purpose. Here is what you postponed and roughly when to come back for it.
Live in three minutes
Worth twenty minutes next week
A narrow automation you shipped today teaches you more than a thorough one you are still configuring on Friday.
Four things that trip people in the first hour
Quick versions. Each of these is covered properly in the step-by-step reference.
- Nothing sent, and the comment is old. Comments can be replied to for 7 days, DMs only within 24 hours of the person's last message. An old post will simply not fire, and that is Instagram's rule rather than a fault.
- The keyword was a sentence.
how much does this costmatches almost nothing.costmatches nearly every comment you were thinking of. - The reply went to the wrong account. If one Facebook Page carries several Instagram accounts, check which one you connected. Everything applies silently to whichever you picked.
- A reply appears in Activity as blocked. That is the gate doing its job. Ten checks run in a fixed order before any send, the first failure stops it, and the reason is recorded on the row. Read the reason before changing anything.
What it costs to leave running
Templated replies — the ones you typed above — are free and unlimited. Credits are only consumed when the AI writes a new reply for a question no template covers, so the setup you just built costs nothing per send however far the post travels.
The free tier gives you 100 credits and asks for no card, which is enough to see whether generated replies are worth turning on at all. Credit packs start at ₹499 if they are.
Tomorrow, not today
Come back in a day and open Activity. Filter it to blocked. Ten minutes of reading that screen will tell you more about your own audience than any amount of planning did, because it shows you the comments that nearly matched and the ones your keyword missed entirely.
Then add the second automation, and only the second. If you would rather understand each field before touching it, the full walkthrough explains what every one of them controls. If you are mainly wondering whether any of this puts the account at risk, the checks are documented separately.