Category: C Rating

Our Grade – C-

A hybrid service that doesn’t pass most of our trust tests.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Gramiety is a hybrid growth service offering the typical bot-growth plan that they claim is provided by real people as well as an influencer giveaway component which may be more promising. There are still plenty of red flags that leave us leery about this operation.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Saas, Influencer Marketing
Quality of Service	Medium
Business Registry / Location	Los Angeles
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	Yes?
Longevity	2+ Years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False
Active Blog	Not since Nov 2020
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	No
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

The growth service costs $99 per month and the influencer marketing service costs $199 per month.

Service Details

Gramiety offers two different services. The first is “Organic Growth from $99/month Growth Powered By Real Humans.”

The second is “Influencer loop giveaways from $199/mo.”

The first service, obviously, is just a basic bot service that is most certainly not “Instagram compliant.” The branding and price points are so similar to some other services that we’re actively investigating whether there is some connection between this business and others in the same class.

The influencer giveaways generally work, but Gramiety doesn’t tell you that huge amounts of these followers will simply disappear. We purchased many of these services for our test accounts, and found that 50% follower loss within two weeks was the norm, not the exception.

Integrity & Reputation

This website has a marquee block on their website showing all the major places they’ve supposedly been featured. Why not link to the articles or features? Because … these features don’t exist. It’s a lie.

What about the review distribution?

This makes absolutely no sense. Even if this was the best service ever, where are the 4, 3, and 2 star reviews? This is just a classic example of Trustpilot allowing their platform to be abused.

All of the 5-star reviews are basically one-sentence reviews saying totally generic things. The saving grace that rips the mask off this service is the one user who chose to leave a critical review:

Now, is there a chance that this is a fake review template used by competitors? Absolutely. There isn’t enough detail here to convince us 100%. But Gramiety’s response is a bit lacking.

Okay … Well … how can you be using 100% manual labor to provide hundreds if not thousands of followers per month for $99? You can’t. If you have an offshore office in Bangladesh, identify your employees there. Otherwise, you’re lying and using bots.

Conclusion

Gramiety makes some of the most outrageous claims we have ever seen. They use some basic tricks to market their basic Instagram growth service but even while their hybrid product offering may be viable, they also don’t apprise users of the risks of giveaway marketing. Based on our experiences, we advise against using this service.

Our Grade – C

Beautiful website with plenty of red flags.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Flocksocial is a very new Instagram growth service based in Serbia with an impressive website. For a service that has only been operating for a few months, everything looks compelling to the unsuspecting customer.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of red flags.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Managed SaaS
Quality of Service	Unknown
Business Registry / Location	Serbia
Traceable Team	Yes, all in Serbia
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	3+ months
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	Yes
External Sites	Facebook
Dashboard / Account Management	Unknown
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Flocksocial offers a basic plan for $49 per month and a business plan for $99 per month.

The issue with these offerings, and what makes us highly suspicious, is that Flock makes explicit guarantees of follower numbers. They guarantee 600 followers per month for their cheapest plan and over 1000 followers on their business plan. These promises are ludicrous.

Service Details

They offer a basic follow/unfollow service. This service still works quite well, but not nearly well enough for how many followers they’re promising the average customer.

This obfuscates the question. A 90% reciprocal conversion rate is an flagrant lie. Even a 9% conversion rate would be suspicious. They’re trying to talk around the fact that they’re going to follow massive amounts of people (600 guaranteed followers and a “90% conversion rate” means 666 people followed).

Let’s get real, a 90% reciprocal conversion rate is impossible. You’re still going to follow a ton of random accounts. If your conversion rate is too good to be true, it means that some of the accounts following you back are controlled by this company (and thus are not organic).

Integrity & Reputation

We don’t think that this service is particularly trustworthy. Let’s look at their “Is it safe” statement first.

There are two issues with their safety statement. First of all, it’s obvious that they use a bot to grow accounts. There’s no mention of human activity anywhere. By definition, the service is only safe to a point. You don’t get explicitly banned for botting on Instagram, you get shadowbanned and action blocked.

Next, they don’t have a track record of 5000 managed accounts. They launched their website in late 2020 while claiming to have 5000 managed accounts. That’s really farfetched. There are dozens of services out there. It could take years for a new player in the space to hit 5000 customers.

On the topic of safety, it’s pretty weird that they don’t mention that they need your password, huh? This is another shady tactic service providers use. They make you think that the “login” on their website doesn’t hand over your password to them.

Next, our favorite, the Trustpilot reviews!

Wow, looks great! If it’s not fake, this is one of the best Trustpilot pages in this space that we’ve ever seen.

Just to help prove how new this service is, note how recently they claimed their profile:

Just go to the third page to start to uncover the deception. All the reviews are from users in Russia, which is bizarre. They commit the classic error of having their fake reviewers mention that they have been customers for “six months.”

Err, that would bring us to June 2020. Your website wasn’t live 6 months ago.

For the record, I know a few Russians. They DO NOT write English this way. A westerner is writing these reviews and paying shill accounts in Russia to write them.

The review distribution is highly suspicious. There’s roughly one extremely positive yet generic review almost every day. The reviews seldom overlap. This is a concerted effort to boost the company’s Trustpilot presence while not tipping off Trustpilot to abuse on the platform.

This said, they have a surprisingly large team for such a new service. It’s not that this service is a scam, just that they aren’t being straightforward about what they’re offering.

Conclusion

Here’s the thing. As much as this team is dishonest, there’s a good chance that the service actually works. They have too many people working on it for it to be some type of elaborate scam. They’re trying to pull the wool over your eyes but the quality of service is probably decent. We award our Serbian friends with a C rating.

Our Grade – C+

Though a unique offering that was useful at one time, we are suspicious of the continued viability of this service.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Mapiac is an Instagram growth service based in Sofia, Bulgaria and founded by two Belgian technologists. The company is unique in that they are offering a “story viewing” service which was one of the “quick fixes” to the original purge of Instagram bots circa 2018.

While I am doubtful that this service continues to be viable, or that it is worth the money even if viable, I do appreciate that there is some transparency behind this business.

As is traditional, however, the name is terrible. What’s a Mapiac? Maybe this would be a good name for a game built on top of Google Earth.

Why the Weird Name?

Since the team appears to have a good grasp on the English language, I dug deeper to try to understand why Mapiac had such a … geographically-forward name.

It turns out that the original, circa-2016 iteration of Mapiac was indeed a service to help people discover hidden wonders within Europe!

Does it make me sad to know that interesting-but-not-profitable businesses have been revamped to provide Instagram-Followers-as-a-Service (IFaaS)? Yes.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Story Viewing
Quality of Service	Unknown
Business Registry / Location	Bulgaria
Traceable Team	Yes
Functioning Phone	Yes
Longevity	3+ Years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	No
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	Yes
Offsite Testimonies	Only one
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Mapiac’s least expensive “story voting” service is $247 per month, while their “story viewing” service is $337 per month.

In all honesty, if you are willing to pay this amount of money to grow your Instagram followers, you’re nuts. These prices are simply too high even if this service works better than any competitor’s.

I also highly doubt that this service isn’t mainly executed using bots. It would be extremely labor-intensive to do this by hand, and the team only seems to employ 3-4 consultants in Bulgaria.

Service Details

The idea behind story viewing was that, for a brief time, the limits on story viewing activity were significantly higher than similar activity used for traditional automated follow-unfollow activity.

This tactic fell out of favor quickly as Instagram became aware of the shift and decreased the amount of “allowed” actions a user could take toward interacting with stories.

Mapiac is likely the only provider in this space because this method does not work well, even compared to traditional F/UF. The reason is because stories are temporary, so you have an even lower chance of receiving a reciprocal action there compared to liking someone’s photo. One action is permanent, the other is not. The person you interact with might not even see the activity you took.

Integrity & Reputation

Despite our criticisms, Mapiac maintains a clean reputation online. There are few outside reviews of the site, which is suspicious. However, this can be due to a low number of customers and few of them being willing to write reviews.

Conclusion

For a business in this category, we’d usually say give it a shot. At these prices, you could literally hire a full-service social media manager or run a full-fledged ad campaign. For that reason, we don’t see how this service is supposed to fit into the big picture.

There is enough transparency and the offering claims to be unique, but it is too expensive without any outside verification.

Our Grade – C-

The service does very little to inspire customer trust.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Socialrunner.net has a pretty website but fails most of our trustworthiness and transparency checks. Social Runner is an Instagram growth service offering a basic software bot plan for $79 per month. For this type of service with no obvious guarantees, you will be better off paying for a competitor

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	SaaS
Quality of Service	Unknown
Business Registry / Location	Australia
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	2+ years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	Last post 21 months ago
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	No
Offsite Testimonies	No
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Social Runner offers one plan for $79 per month. They reveal very little about this offering buy guarantee consistent growth, customer targeting, and real followers.

Since this is a basic software service, “custom targeting” is easy to offer. “100% real followers,” however, are not able to be guaranteed. The followers could be bots–you have no way of knowing when you sign up.

Service Details

The service is basic and expensive considering it’s an automation service with no special features.

Some other features that could be offered include geo-targeting, personalized targeting assistance, and blacklisting.

Integrity & Reputation

The business has no social media presence whatsoever, no live chat, and no reviews outside of their main website. The website contains curated reviews which cannot be trusted at all.

We see no reason to trust this business especially when there are more transparent, cheaper alternatives.

Conclusion

It’s a shame that they’ve put so much effort into creating a pretty website while doing nothing to prove that the business is trustworthy and the service actually works. Skip Social Runner!

Our Grade – C-

We don’t believe this service is reputable

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

AI Grow is A basic bot solution that rebranded as a “team of human experts.” There is a ton of deceiving activity surrounding this business, aside from blatant contradictions in the site promotional materials, there are an insanely high number of fake reviews on Trust Pilot.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	“Human Experts” — Basic SaaS
Quality of Service	Low
Business Registry / Location	Unknown
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	2 Year
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	True
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	Yes
Offsite Testimonies	Yes – Very Suspicious
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Frankly, the pricing page is overwhelming. It is difficult to understand what you’re actually buying or what the difference between the pricing plans are.

Service Details

Though the service provides many tools that may be helpful, we believe it is ultimately a software service. Reviews complain about awful customer service and a product that is ineffective. We are willing to side with those reviewers since AIGrow hasn’t responded to any of the reviews.

The signup process is very complicated and we received an alert that our password was sent in an unsafe manner when we attempted to sign up.

Even if this is a viable managed service, you should just use Ampfluence.

Integrity & Reputation

The business does very little to build trust. There is no registered business or LinkedIn presence whatsoever. They purchased what appears to be hundreds of fake reviews on Trustpilot. This is obvious because people in these foreign countries definitely can’t afford to pay $150 per month on Instagram growth.

They also claim implausible amounts of users and growth.

Conclusion

This is likely a scammy single-owner service. You can be assured that the customer support will be awful, and the service is most likely not what it claims to me. AiGrow hides way too much to have earned our trust.

Our Grade – C-

A site that may function but has plenty of red flags.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Mahergram is a web-based SaaS platform that will help you grow your Instagram for an inexpensive yearly fee.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Web SaaS
Quality of Service	Unknown
Business Registry / Location	India
Traceable Team	Single Owner
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	3+ years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False
Active Blog	No
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	Yes
Offsite Testimonies	All poor or fake
Forthcoming About Password Handling	N/A

Pricing

Confusingly, this pricing page gives the impression that it’s a one-time fee. However, the website states elsewhere that “Prices starts at $69 per year.” There is likely a hidden pay-for-credit system that is revealed after you sign up.

Service Details

Mahergram allows you to take things into your own hands at an entry-level price. However, even after years of operation, there’s no proof–anywhere on the internet–that it actually works.

With major competitors such as Jarvee having so many more features, it’s hard to seriously consider Mahergram. Since the team is either very small or is actually just one person, it’s likely you will experience service interruptions whenever Instagram puts out updates. The team probably cannot respond to changes or customer support requests quickly or effectively.

Integrity & Reputation

Mahergram is a classic single-owner foreign growth service site. Very little web presence or customer service provisions. Nearly every other module on the website contains a red flag, such as:

I see no reason to trust this growth provider.

Conclusion

There’s a chance that Mahergram has steadily been servicing a chunk of happy clients over the years, but the website is dishonest and misleading. We cannot recommend it.