How it works

Every automated reply follows the same path. Knowing it makes the rest of this documentation, and anything that goes wrong, much easier to reason about.

From their comment to your reply

1. Someone interacts with your account. They comment on a post or reel, send a direct message, reply to a story, or mention you in their story.
2. Instagram notifies dmrabbit within a second or two.
3. The message is saved to your inbox immediately. This happens whether or not any automation matches it, so your inbox always reflects reality.
4. The work is queued. dmrabbit does not make Instagram wait while it decides what to do.
5. Your automations are checked - the ones that are live and switched on.
6. Matching runs: does the trigger fit what happened, is it one of the posts this automation watches, and do the keywords match.
7. One automation is chosen. If several match, exactly one answers. This surprises people, so it has its own explanation.
8. The reply is sent - a public comment reply, a DM, or both.
9. The result is recorded as sent, failed, or skipped, and appears in your analytics.

What this means in practice

Replies are fast, but not instant by guarantee

Most replies go out within a few seconds. dmrabbit deliberately does not hold Instagram waiting while it works, which is what keeps things reliable when a post takes off and hundreds of comments arrive at once.

A message appears in your inbox even when nothing replies

Saving the message and deciding what to do about it are separate steps. If you see a comment in your inbox with no reply against it, the message arrived correctly and an automation chose not to answer, or could not.

Nothing is lost if something fails

If a reply cannot be sent, the attempt is recorded with the reason. Failures are visible rather than silent, which is why the analytics page separates the ones you can fix yourself from the ones you cannot.

Where the limits come from

Two different things limit what dmrabbit can do, and telling them apart saves a lot of confusion.

• Instagram's limits apply to everyone and cannot be changed by upgrading. The main one is that you can only send someone a DM within 24 hours of their last message to you.
• Plan limits are ours, and they reset every month. See Usage and limits.