Category: F Rating

Our Grade – F

A service that is almost certainly complete scam that does not provide a straightforward way to cancel your subscription.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Instato.io is an Instagram growth service that openly admits to being a bot. Oftentimes, services like these are fraught with contradictions, white lies, and dissatisfied customers. A cheap price usually isn’t enough to make up for this. Yet, people still fall for it.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Bot
Quality of Service	Medium
Business Registry / Location	Unknown
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	Since 2018
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False, uses “Insta
Active Blog	No
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	Unknown
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	False

Pricing

Instato is similar to Tree Frog Social as one of the overall cheapest Instagram growth services. $30 per month is a rare price point achieved by few services. Even the $50 per month price is quite good considering you can use multiple accounts.

Warning: A user has informed us that these displayed prices may only be reflected in annual-commitment plans. We generally advise against plans with annual commitments, as too much can go wrong.

Service Details

Instato’s How It Works page does a great job of explaining what you can expect from the service. They’ll take actions while logged into your account with the hope that others will reciprocate those actions. A tale as old as time. Though we generally don’t support bot services, they haven’t lied yet. We’re listening!

Integrity & Reputation

Instato is unique in that they admit to running bot. At some level, we respect that. However, the site fails all basic trust tests. There’s no identifiable team, live support, social media accounts, blog, company mentions, or company page on LinkedIn. This has all the makings of a single-owner service.

Where Instato falls apart is on Trustpilot. It’s common for the more conniving services to post ridiculous review responses or even to pay for fake reviews. Instato does none of that, it’s like the company has completely abandoned ship.

Folks, we’ve got 24 1-star reviews. All recounting specific customer complaints, none responded to by the owner.

Cancelation only performed by email, that’s bad! We could go on and on with these reviews. At the end of the day, Trustpilot is easily abused, but this is a clear example of a company simply not caring about customers. Also, what I’ve noticed in some cases is that the “single owner” won’t be fluent in English and the owner has actually paid for the site content and everything. Sometimes, this also discourages owners from responding on review sites.

Conclusion

There is no upside to trying out this service. The Trustpilot reviews reveal a clear pattern of abuse and violations of customer trust. Any website that recommends or links to Instato in a positive light should be viewed with a high degree of scrutiny.

Our Grade – F

A new, high-volume service that tells boldfaced lies while enraging customers.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Growthoid is a newer Instagram growth service designed to separate the uninformed masses from their money as quickly as possible. They claim to have real people working on your account, which, based on our experience, the price, and the onslaught of negative reviews, is a big ‘ol lie!

No fakes, no bots. Just real people working on your account.  The way it should be.

We’ll see about that!

While we can find dozens, if not hundreds, of dissatisfied customers, Growthoid remains a viable business because a lot of customers never write reviews or request refunds. There is also a chance that their basic growth methods are simply tolerated by some customers.

And, if we can be frank, there’s a new clueless businessperson who Google searches “Instagram growth service” every minute. We wish they all would read our website first!

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	“By hand” which is actually Managed SaaS
Quality of Service	Low
Business Registry / Location	Claims “New York, New York,” but contact info is an address in Dubai
Traceable Team	Of course not
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	Started August 2020, no record before then
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	Yes
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	No
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Growthoid offers two plans, one perpetually discounted at $49 and another priced at $99 per month. These are pretty common price points especially among the generic deceitful providers.

Service Details

Huh? If this service doesn’t use any automation and you just have people sitting in an office somewhere clicking, how could any customer possibly get 800 – 1500 followers per month?

Even if they were able to guarantee such insane follower growth, how could they afford to pay their employees? Dedicated account managers … everything done by hand … $50 per month plus technology fees? This is preposterous. They can’t possibly be running the service manually.

Growthoid also can’t possibly guarantee that no bots will interact with your account. They might not control the bots, but it’s inevitable that a few will see you and engage with you, for reasons outside your control.

Integrity & Reputation

The shill reviews that they buy try to claim that the service is based in the United States. However, a quick trip to their Terms of Service page suggests otherwise:

Any dispute will be handled in UAE

Growthoid, which claims to be a US-based service

Growthoid claims to do business as an LLC known as Growthoid, LLC. On their signup page, they claim to be based in New York, New York. So, we checked the New York State page for business registration.

We couldn’t find the Growthoid record anywhere.

What about the team? Does anyone anywhere on the internet identify themselves as a Growthoid employee? Again, no. We couldn’t locate a single team member, not even the owner.

Well, once you’re signed up and are within their 14 day “no questions asked” refund window, where’s the form on their website that allows you to request it? Again, you have to email them. You probably also have to email them to cancel your account, which is very dishonest. This doesn’t benefit the customer at all.

Let’s get back to the fake reviews that they purchase.

Seeing a review distribution like this is just hilarious. However, there’s no pattern. Just a ton of bad reviews. Most of them have weak responses, it’s not worth exploring in further detail.

Outside of the pretty website and the ugly Trustpilot page, this website’s name is plastered all over the internet on pay-to-play blog sites. It is a shame that it is so easy to manipulate search rankings.

Conclusion

Growthoid ticks nearly every box for dishonesty. We’re shocked that such a new service with so many red flags was able to so quickly rise in popularity. The service may work decently for some customers but every part of their business is based on pulling the wool over your eyes.

We strongly discourage use of this service until they implement more transparency and alter their branding.

Our Grade – F

Deceitful in all possible ways.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

IGClerk has all the makings of a scam service. We don’t think that this is a trustworthy Instagram growth service.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	“Manual” that is actually Managed SaaS
Quality of Service	Low
Business Registry / Location	Unknown
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	1+ Year
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False, misuses logo
Active Blog	No
External Sites	None
Dashboard / Account Management	Yes
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

These are decent prices for an automation service, but this is pitched as a manual service. How in the world could they afford to pay anyone in any country in which you can reliably operate a smart phone to service an account in the $29/month tier and still make a profit?

Easy answer: they can’t. They don’t. It’s a bot service.

Service Details

You have to pay $99 per month just to get live chat support which we all know is pseudo-live chat with the owner, at best. How is it that the $29/month plan doesn’t include an account manager if they’re managing your account by hand? Who is performing the actions, then?

The offering of a 10x “speed” boost for $299/mo is laughable. What are they boosting the speed of? There are still only so many actions you can take in one day. It doesn’t matter how fast you go.

Integrity & Reputation

Oh, right. Ray Dalio is a client of this cookie-cutter IG growth agency that nobody has ever heard of. These testimonies are fake.

This service is poorly known and has very few reviews elsewhere on the internet.

This review is consistent with what you’d expect.

Wait, there’s a team page!

All these generic pictures, names, and titles. None of these are real people. This is actually a single-owner agency trying to push the illusion of a fully-managed service. Bravo if you’ve managed to fool people with a team page like this.

Conclusion

When we created our rubric, we figured it’d be quite rare for a business to fail on all points. If you sign up for IGClerk, you’re a fool. It is not economically possible to offer manual growth at their lowest price point and there is no transparency behind the business whatsoever. Their offerings are nonsensical.

Our Grade – F

There is no compelling evidence proving that this service is still operational.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Gramista seems to have been an Instagress clone that was abandoned by its owners at some point in 2019. Unfortunately, they are still taking peoples’ money.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	Saas Dashboard
Quality of Service	Suspected shut down
Business Registry / Location	Unknown
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	3+ Years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False
Active Blog	No
External Sites	Inactive Twitter
Dashboard / Account Management	Yes
Offsite Testimonies	Awful Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Gramista offers 1-3-7 day trial plans in addition to extended subscriptions at slight discounts. While these prices are actually fairly reasonable, remember that you have to configure the service yourself and that support most definitely isn’t unlimited.

Service Details

Gramista provides a dashboard from which you can dispatch bots to grow your account. Think of it as a more limited version of Follow Liker, Jarvee, or the defunct Instagress.

For the price, this would have been a pretty good deal back in 2017 or so before Jarvee and other tools took over. Paying this much for a single account, if you’re doing most things yourself, is now considered quite expensive.

As I said above, I don’t think this service has been maintained or functions at all. It isn’t worth digging in deeper here.

Integrity & Reputation

The Trustpilot reviews for this service are awful. None of them have been responded to and they paint a grim picture of the service. All of the complaints are quite specific and I don’t believe they were sent by competitors. Usually, I don’t “F” an company just based on Trustpilot, but this is the most damning review onslaught that I’ve seen.

Take a look for yourself:

In addition to these reviews not being responded to, the company is radio silent everywhere. Blog hasn’t been updated in well over a year. Twitter account hasn’t tweeted. Website hasn’t been updated. Even if they were barely holding on, it wouldn’t take much for them to maintain the facade of a functioning, vibrant service.

There’s been no effort here, so I can’t recommend the service at all.

Conclusion

I’m sure this service was respectably at one time, but it seems they pulled the plug on the operation while continuing to collect money from subscribers. There is no proof anywhere that the service still works. Will gladly update this review if I obtain information to the contrary.