Social Buddy is one of the oldest Instagram growth services and has been consistently operating for more than 4 years. The company is 100% US-based and has a a great web presence.
Socialbuddy charges a simple $99 per month for their service. Compared to Kicksta or other competitors, this is a pretty high price.
Service Details
Socialbuddy appears to be an advanced software program using well-established follow-unfollow techniques.
Integrity & Reputation
Social Buddy’s Trustpilot page is one of the best that we’ve seen. The reviews don’t seem fake and all negative reviews have responses that make sense.
There is no part of Social Buddy’s website copy or web presence that is suspicious or dishonest. We think this service is worth a try just for that reason.
Conclusion
Social Buddy is a simple, honest, straightforward automation service. Of course, these services are now actively being inconvenienced by Instagram’s restrictions. Ultimately, these services are not compliant with Instagram’s terms, but many people still use them with some success. It’s up to you to decide whether this risk may be worth $100 per month.
Anyone who has read any of our 100+ other Instagram growth service reviews has definitely heard of Kicksta. While the business used to be known as Kickstagram, they likely changed their name due to rumors that Facebook/Instagram was shutting down sites that improperly used the “insta” or “gram” trademarks.
Since starting up many years ago, Kicksta has been well established as a frontrunner in the Instagram growth space. They use “Artificial Intelligence technology,” which means they’re still using the classic follow-unfollow method, but this doesn’t mean Kicksta has an awful product.
Being involved with other smaller services, we often see customers arrive after trying out Kicksta. The branding can inflate users’ expectations and some end up dissatisfied. Make no mistake, this is a high-volume service that is absolutely not a scam.
However, software-based growth services are under a lot of pressure, so there’s a pretty high chance that it won’t meet your expectations.
Kicksta provides a competitive pricing tier at $49 per month. They offer even more features at $99 per month. Both of these are good deals and these are the standards that most other firms in the space use when setting up their services.
Service Details
For the most part, Kicksta sets the standard for bot services. They offer a nice video to onboard you and have some advanced features present in their bot which can help improve the efficacy of the actions that they take on your behalf.
Unfortunately, it appears that Kicksta has been hit pretty badly by Instagram’s most recent round of bot cleanup. Many, many users are facing action blocks and forced password resets. It’s likely that the end may be near for software services like this one.
Integrity & Reputation
Kicksta has a respectable Trustpilot page. Though they have plenty of bad reviews, they offer many plausible explanations. Compared to how many customers they likely have, I don’t think the 3.3 average review means this is an awful service.
However, recently, customers have been complaining about prolonged action blocks and Kicksta not honoring their refund policy. If this continues without explanation, or we hear from more of their customers, we will update this review.
Conclusion
Kicksta has had a really good run as one of the most popular bot organic engagement services. With Instagram’s latest round of changes, it seems that dissatisfied users are running to other service providers who can actually guarantee compliance with Instagram.
It will be interesting to see what happens over summer 2021 with this service. Its fate will likely be the barometer for the final stage of Instagram growth software. We have nothing particularly bad to say about Kicksta but siding with a large provider is risky whenever there is a chance that they might have to suddenly lay off some of their employees or get a cease and desist from Instagram.
While we see no reason not to trust this business, this strikes us as an add-on service from a full-service agency and there’s just no way the results or customer service will justify the price tag.
NR Media Agency is a US-based social media marketing agency that happens to offer an Instagram growth service. Since this product seems to be a minor offering of theirs, the company as a whole should not be judged based on this brief overview.
This service costs $97/mo, which is on the expensive side. The going rate for automation services is about $50, which is still not cheap considering you can run one yourself practically for free.
Service Details
This is a run-of-the-mill growth service offering from a marketing agency. The agency only has two employees, so it’s obvious that the 24/7 aspect is performed while nobody is watching.
Integrity & Reputation
We see absolutely no reason not to trust this business! From what we can tell, this is an honest agency supported by full-time staff. Of course, the only dishonest part is not telling potential customers that this type of thing is against Instagram’s rules–this is why we suspect larger agencies just don’t bother. It’s not worth having to explain why a client’s account was blocked while charging them $100 per month.
Conclusion
Though this service isn’t doing anything wrong, we can’t recommend paying $100 per month from such an unknown, localized provider. I’m happy to see smaller agencies wading into the software space, but there’s no evidence supporting why a purchase here would be worth the time or money.
Emiiko.io is a new Instagram growth service that claims to offer growth by hand.
Their prices are reasonable and the information provided on the website suggests that this is a legitimate product offering. Upon further inspection, we noticed some oddities as in the original website that were similar to another provider. After speaking with the owner, we more fully understand what the temporary situation was and retract these claims.
Emiiko, while still new and without tons of customer reviews, has proved to our team that they are indeed growing accounts by hand. We believe them.
Emiiko costs $97 per month. A fair price if your Instagram is actually being grown by hand. There are no other pricing options or confusing descriptions, which we can appreciate.
The Emiiko team has shown us proof both of the phones they use to offer the service and their employees who are growing accounts. It is a legitimate offering at a price that is not too good to be true.
Service Details
Growth by hand means that somebody somewhere logs in to your account and engages with targeted accounts as if they were you. How do they do this, specifically?
We have a team of real people that will sign into your Instagram account on a phone and start interacting with your target audience by liking their pictures, following/unfollowing, and viewing their Stories.
Emiiko.io
The benefit of using a growth-by-hand service is that it’s Instagram compliant. You won’t be risking a shadowban. But, how much better can the targeting be? Truthfully, it’ll be a little better in that it’s easier for humans to exclude sexually explicit and offensive pictures. Beyond that, the main benefit is that you won’t be risking an action block. In 2021, most automation providers can’t go a single day without having a client blocked. So, the fact that you won’t face blocks on this service is pretty significant.
There are two big risks when it comes to using a growth by hand service. First, these individuals, if they exist, are real people who could do malicious things on your account like sending DMs or simply reading your DMs. Next, there’s no guarantee that your growth manager is actually sitting there clicking all day. This is why we’re initially suspicious of growth-by-hand services.
Integrity & Reputation
This seems like one of the most legitimate sites out there. Super sleek with great branding and all the right words. Things are evolving!
The business also has a physical address, which is rare:
That leads me to restaurant called NOHO in the meatpacking district of Denmark. I asked the owner about this, and he replied with a picture taken from his office, directly above the restaurant named NOHO. He tells me that it’s a pretty good restaurant, though has been closed due to the pandemic.
Conclusion
While we were initially suspicious of Emiiko, we believe that it’s a legitimate growth-by-hand provider. We caught them in the very early stages of developing their website, and the owner politely contacted us and set the record straight. We are happy to update this review.
Beardsocial is a Sri Lankan Instagram growth service purported to use real people to grow your account by hand.
The service’s sole owner, Nimesh, wrote a detailed blog post about his experience running the business over a period of several years. For that, we have a high level of respect for this service. This is a true rarity in this space, especially for someone growing accounts by hand.
Yes, a manual growth service that actually seems to be a manual growth service with all three of its pricing plans under $100 per month.
If there wasn’t a blog post where the owner detailed the team he’s assembled and the issues he’s had running his own thing versus using UpWork, I simply would not believe that this was a legitimate offering. I guess it is possible to run a profitable business at such price points in certain countries outside the United States.
Service Details
I believe that Beardsocial runs a basic follow/unfollow and liking scheme using real people. This is a service that utilizes human beings to grow your Instagram account.
While most people describe services like this as “safer,” the truth is nearly the opposite. If someone, somewhere, is having to manually log into your account, your password–at some point–will be stored in plaintext. Further, a real person could, say, view your DMs, at any time.
Most of these growth specialists will be quite busy and probably too busy to interfere with your account, but you never know.
Integrity & Reputation
Based on Nimesh’s blog post, we find this business to be highly trustworthy. However, The site has no reputation to be spoken of. It still could be a fraud. There are no customer reviews anywhere and no presence on other social media sites.
However, we are giving Beardsocial the benefit of the doubt. If you know you want to pay for growth by hand, this might be one of the best choices.
Conclusion
Well, we’ve written over 50 reviews already and this is one of the few that has surprised us for a positive reason. This service seems like a viable pick, but needs many more independent reviews before we’d be comfortable giving it an A rating.
In this review, we have a rare occurrence where a site owner reaches out to us and provides proof contradicting our suspicions and postulation. While most of the proof, such as screenshots, would be inappropriate to share here, we believe we have everyone’s best interests in mind as we verify it and incorporate it into an updated review.
We were not compensated for this re-write.
At a Glance
Instaforce has a unique website and isn’t affiliated with any of the obvious scam sites. At first glance, we suspected it was a basic bot site. After corresponding directly with the owner, we were presented with a significant amount of evidence suggesting that this is indeed a legitimate growth-by-hand service.
This means that Instaforce is one of the cheapest growth-by-hand services.
$97/mo for “fully manual work.” It’s worth mentioning that there are automation services charging the same amount. However, the owner of this company provided proof of both the full extent of his team and the country in which his growth team operates. To us, it seems totally legitimate and a very good value for a service not using automation.
Service Details
“No Bots or Automation”
While many services make this claim and can’t back it up, we viewed proof from Instaforce and are confident in saying that it seems this is a legitimate growth-by-hand business. Over the years, they’ve morphed as Instagram’s rules have changed, and we can appreciate that.
Integrity & Reputation
There are only a few negative Trustpilot reviews from roughly one year ago. While it’s a bad look, the company has quite a few plausible positive reviews. What sticks out to us is that the CEO took the time to message us and explain everything in great detail.
Let’s be honest, he could have sent us a nasty email and, with how carelessly this original review was written. It would have been justified! Instead, he contacted us and offered to talk it out.
To give you an idea of how rare this is, we’ve only corresponded with about a handful of service owners (after having written 100+ reviews in this iteration of the site), and this was easily our most polite and productive exchange.
Also, Instaforce provided us proof of providing customers with refunds! While we don’t have permission to post the screenshot, we were really impressed by this.
Conclusion
As far as we can tell, this is a good choice for a manual growth service, coming in as significantly cheaper than Ampfluence. Please let us know below if you’ve had a different experience!
The $99 per month plan, if it’s actually serviced by humans, is an incredible deal. However, the price is so low that it’s hard to believe it’s a legitimate offering. See more in the Services section.
The price triples to $299 per month and you get better targeting, machine learning optimization (?), and some other features. At this price, I can believe that a human is able to do the job.
Service Details
The service claims to offer outsourced manual growth. This means that there’s someone sitting in a foreign country logging on to your Instagram and liking/following as if they’re you.
This business model does not scale particularly well, so it’s highly doubtful that for $99 per month you could fund a part-time consultant and still get anything resembling decent results. For this reason, if customers are satisfied with their cheapest plan, it’s probably because the results are bolstered using an engagement group.
While this service may just be 100% Instagram compliant, there are inherent risks to having real people access your Instagram. Your DMs could be read and certain scams could be carried out using your account if the growth consultant is not trustworthy. Also, the results can only be as good as a botting service in the best case, since both are governed by the same action limits.
Integrity & Reputation
Though the team isn’t displayed on the website, they are easy enough to track down. The company is US-based. However, it is concerning that all aspects of the services may be outsourced to those in different timezones and who may not speak English as their first languages.
We respect that the company provides very reasonable, realistic claims on their website. For example, they say they have 500+ clients. That strikes me as a trustworthy claim.
The story on Trustpilot is, well, the same old story. There are a few great reviews, but they tend to sound rather scripted. I don’t think that this business paid for fake reviews, but it’s likely that they enticed clients and friends to post them. There isn’t enough volume to fully understand what’s going on here.
Conclusion
This business is one we’ve known for many years but haven’t personally purchased. There is enough transparency that we think it’d be worth trying out.
However, the value proposition is dubious. At the more expensive price points, you should probably just be running ads. It isn’t clear how they could offer a better quality service than Ampfluence at a lower price point unless they are employing some software-based tactics, which defeats the purpose.
Socivy is a Turkish Instagram growth service provider that has been around since mid-2018. They provide a dashboard from which you can run a bot on your account.
While their website is generic and their web presence is minimal, there are very few red flags. Further, their pricing is very competitive.
This service is competitively priced. These rates are among the cheapest we’ve seen. This service hasn’t raised their prices very much since opening (the basic plan used to be $30 per month).
Service Details
Socivy gives you access to a dashboard from which you can trigger automated activities for your account. Services like this aren’t the safest and you can be subject to interruptions with platform updates. For the price, it’s really hard to beat.
Integrity & Reputation
The only thing this business doesn’t have going for it is great reviews on an outside review site. It also doesn’t have any reviews claiming it’s a scam. The website is also somewhat generic (but, to be honest, they all start to look the same after a while).
One thing that probably causes this business to be overlooked is the name, which just isn’t memorable and looks childish, almost as if it was a typo. This is a minor nitpick.
It appears to be a two-person operation located in a time zone very far outside of the United States, so customer support most likely does not measure up to US-based services.
Conclusion
This service is absolutely worth a try. If it works well, there are very few that can compete at this price point.
Polished Agency only roused my suspicions because the name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It struck me as an obvious case of a business created by a shady overseas provider.
However, in reviewing the website and dispelling the common “red flags,” this seems like a totally legitimate marketing agency built around a human-managed Instagram growth service. Since there’s no subscription model and they don’t post pricing on the website, it’s definitely not a scam.
For the record, services like this don’t fit well into our review criteria, but I think it’s useful to highlight a service that is conducting business in an honest way.
Pricing is by request only and this is a no-commitment non-subscription service. This significantly builds trust because you must correspond with a human in order to sign up. There is no chance you’d just be tossing your money into a black hole here.
Service Details
Sounds great! The only bad news here is that their claims may be a little inflated. Guaranteeing “loyal fans” is outrageous. It just doesn’t happen even if you’re customizing every interaction.
Further, there’s no guarantee that the growth/engagement aspects of this aren’t simply outsourced to a SaaS service. Because this offering is bespoke, it’s impossible to tell. But you can be guaranteed that they don’t have a person sitting there clicking all day like Ampfluence does.
Integrity & Reputation
This is a full-service agency. The team is verifiable and the business has an office location and a phone that works. Due to the way the website is structured, you can rest assured that this isn’t a high-volume scam business.
The business provides believable case studies and on-site testimonials (which I usually ignore).
Conclusion
If you have a large budget, a service like this can be great for you. You should always prioritize content quality over raw follower numbers. You’ll just never truly have the peace of mind in knowing exactly how they’re growing your account.
A1 Republic, though it sounds like the name was conceived in a fraternity basement, the company is a unique fully-featured social media agency that specializes in software solutions.
See Service Details section for pricing. Our opinion is that the offerings are diverse enough for there not to be much of a benchmark for the price.
Service Details
Am I ever going to look at an ugly Squarespace website like this one and then turn around and hire you to design a website for me? Hell no.
Other than that, there are a ton of services here: Instagram Growth, Youtube Growth, Tiktok Growth, Facebook Ads, and Google Ranking.
We care most about Instagram so that’s what we’ll focus on.
This is different from the traditional SaaS offering. Do Loop Giveaways work? Yes–but they’re not being forthcoming about how many followers you’ll lose, so that’s a red flag.
Instagram Ad service, that’s actually a great idea and since you see the product, there’s a very low chance of getting scammed.
Real Auto Likes / Real Auto Comments for $80/$100 per month? It’s an oxymoron through and through. If they’re real, they can’t be auto. Engagement groups, generally, are not “real,” they’re super spammy and the actions don’t stick.
Manual IG Growth can be tricky, and at $250 per month, I’d prefer Ampfluence. But you never know.
MSV — we’ve asked around and we actually don’t know what this is. Regardless, it’s for verified accounts only.
This is a diverse enough offering that something might work. We’re willing to give them the benefit of the doubt here and say that some of these services might be worth a try.
Integrity & Reputation
The business doesn’t have any active content or independent reviews. The team is identifiable which builds trust significantly. They might be a good choice, but they’re unproven at this point. A single bad review would bring this service to the C tier.
Conclusion
A1 Republic is a unique service with an awful name and website that just might have one of the most diverse service offerings in the industry. I’d recommend contacting this business before buying any services.
