The honest version fits in two sentences, so it goes here rather than at the bottom.
Templated replies — the ones you write yourself — are free and unlimited, forever, including after your credits reach zero. AI-written replies are not free: one credit buys one reply the model writes for a specific message.
So "free forever" is true of templates and it is not true of AI. Anybody selling you the first half without the second half is selling you something. If your automations are all templates you wrote, you will never pay us anything, and that is a normal way to use this rather than a loophole in it.
What a credit is actually spent on
A credit is consumed at one moment: when the model writes a new reply for a specific incoming message. One credit, one reply. Not per contact, not per conversation, not per follower, not per month.
Everything else costs nothing. The trigger matching, the public comment reply, the private reply if it is your template, capturing the person to Leads, Activity, the inbox, takeover, CSV export, the ten gate checks, Test on myself and the Try It panel. None of those touch the meter.
The free tier is 100 credits and no card. That is a hundred AI-written
replies, and it is a genuinely useful amount if you spend it on the messages
that deserve a written answer rather than on the forty a week that say price.
What happens on the day the credits run out
Nothing dramatic, which is the point.
Your templated automations carry on sending, at the same volume, indefinitely.
AI generation stops. The gate refuses at the credits check — ninth of the ten
— and writes that reason into Activity beside the message it would have
answered, so you find out by reading rather than by noticing silence a week
later.
Nothing is deleted. Nothing is disconnected. No card is requested and no countdown starts. If you never buy a pack, the account keeps working in exactly the shape it was working in the day before.
Why it is priced this way rather than per contact
Per-contact pricing punishes the thing you are trying to cause. A post that travels further than usual arrives as a bigger bill, which means the good week and the expensive week are the same week. Plenty of tools in this category are built that way and it is a defensible model; it is just not one that fits an Instagram account where reach is the variable you least control.
Counting AI-written replies is narrower and duller and easier to predict. Templates are free because they cost us nothing beyond a send, and pretending otherwise would be a made-up meter.
The free tier is not the bottom of a funnel. It is the shape of the product with the model switched off.
Credit packs, when you want them, are ₹499 for 500 credits, ₹1,699 for 2,000 and ₹4,499 for 6,000 — or $6.99, $22.99 and $59.99. They do not expire monthly and there is no subscription behind them. The credits page is the line-by-line accounting, and the refund policy says why every purchase is final.
What free does not quietly exclude
Free-tier accounts get the official Instagram Graph API, not a lesser connection. The same seven-day comment window and 24-hour DM window. The same ten checks in the same fixed order, with a readable reason on every refusal. The same takeover behaviour, where the automation stands down the moment you answer a thread by hand.
There is no feature-gated safety, no watermark on your replies, no cap on how many automations you build and no "upgrade to see why this was blocked".
What is not here at all, free or paid
We reply to people. We do not create posts — no caption generator, no scheduling, no hashtag tool, no analytics product, no follower growth. There is no WhatsApp, Messenger or Telegram. There is no flow-builder canvas, no broadcast and no multi-step nurture sequence, and that last one is the 24-hour window rather than a missing feature: a message on day three has nowhere to go. Leads leave as CSV rather than through one-click integrations.
None of that changes when you pay, which is worth saying on a page about free tiers, because "the paid plan has the real product" is the usual shape of this and it is not the shape here.
Start with one rule
Pick the question you answer most often, write the reply yourself, and put it live on a single post. That automation costs nothing, forever, and it will tell you more in three days than any pricing page will.
The DM automation guide is the build, with the 24-hour clock explained properly. The comment side is the other half, and it is the one most people actually start with. When you get to the messages a template cannot answer, what the AI does differently is where the credits go — and what the free tier gets you in practice is the longer version of this page written from the other direction.