The honest version takes three sentences, not one, so it goes here rather than at the bottom.
Comment replies are free and unlimited, on every plan, forever — that one has no asterisk. DMs on Free are capped at 1,000 every rolling 30 days, whether you wrote the message yourself or the AI did. AI-written replies are a third, separate thing again: one credit buys one reply the model writes, on any plan, for either a comment or a DM.
Three limits, three different shapes. Conflating them is how "free forever" pages end up overselling. If your automations are all comment replies, none of this ever touches you. If they are DMs, the 1,000-a-month line is the one that matters, not credits.
The 1,000-DM cap on Free
This is the newest of the three lines, and the one this page used to leave
out. On Free, DMs — private_reply and send_message, templated or
AI-written, it makes no difference — are capped at 1,000 every rolling 30
days. The window rolls: it is always "the last 30 days," not a calendar
month that resets on the 1st.
Hit it, and DMs pause until enough of the window ages out to free up room again. Nothing is deleted, no automation is turned off, and comment replies on the same account keep answering at full volume the entire time — this cap only touches DMs.
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, comment or DM. One credit, one reply. Not per contact, not per conversation, not per follower, not per month, and not the same thing as the DM cap above — a templated DM spends no credit and still counts toward the 1,000; an AI-written comment reply spends a credit and never counts toward anything, because comment replies have no cap.
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, up to
whichever limit applies to them — unlimited for comment replies, 1,000 a
month for DMs on Free. AI generation stops. The gate refuses at the credits
check 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.
Why DMs are metered and comment replies are not
Comment replies and templated DMs cost us close to nothing to send. AI-written replies cost us money per generation, which is why they are the thing credits measure, on every plan, with no exception.
The 1,000-DM cap on Free is a different kind of line — not a cost control, a plan boundary. DM automation at any real volume is the thing Lite and above exist to sell; comment automation, by contrast, costs us so little that capping it would be a made-up meter, so it never has one, anywhere.
The free tier is not the bottom of a funnel. Comment replies are the shape of the product with volume switched off as a concern. DMs are not, past 1,000 a month.
Credit packs, when you want them, are Starter: 1,000 AI replies for $3.99, Growth: 4,500 for $14.99, and Scale: 12,000 for $39.99. They do not expire monthly and there is no subscription behind them, and buying one does nothing to the separate 1,000-DM cap on Free — only a plan does that. 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. Every check runs in the same fixed order, with a readable reason on every refusal. The same takeover behaviour, where the automation stands down the moment you click Take over on a thread in the Inbox.
There is no feature-gated safety, no watermark on your replies, and no cap on how many automations you build — only on how many DMs they can send in a rolling month, once you are on Free.
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 — paying removes the DM cap and adds AI capacity and the inbox, nothing else changes underneath.
Start with one rule
Pick the question you answer most often, write the reply yourself, and put it live on a single post. If it is a comment rule, it costs nothing and never pauses, forever. If it is a DM rule on Free, it is free up to 1,000 sends a month, and that will tell you more in three days than any pricing page will.
The DM automation guide is the build, with the 24-hour clock and the 1,000-a-month cap explained properly. The comment side is the other half, and it is the one most people actually start with, because it has no cap to explain. 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.