This was a very expensive service considering how rudimentary the implementation was. Who would have paid for something like this? Your guess is as good as mine.
Service Details
This service had fairly meaningless premium offerings.
Integrity & Reputation
When an owner names his service after himself, you should at least look up the owner. In this case, the owner was a college kid studying finance. Does that give you confidence in him being able to grow your Instagram account or him knowing anything about how to integrate a software service with Instagram?
Thankfully, that is a question we no longer have to answer.
Conclusion
Edstagram was a service that only operated for about a year. Way back then, it was easy to get clients growth, even if you had no idea what you were doing. We hope that Ed has moved on to greener pastures and more honest business ventures.
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.
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.
Social Sensei is one of the best-known sources for influencer/giveaway marketing, a relatively new niche in the growth space. Unfortunately, it is very hard to assess the quality of followers that the service provides.
These services are more expensive than nearly all other Instagram growth services. However, the followers are guaranteed. If you have a large marketing budget, Social Sensei can be a great choice.
Service Details
Influencer/giveaway marketing is a new concept. In this space, your name will be supplied to a popular Instagram account who will then get paid a large amount to promote your account and others’.
While you’re guaranteed that you will get followers, you aren’t guaranteed that they will interact with you. You also aren’t guaranteed that they’ll stick. The follower loss rate over one month can be, and often is, worse than if you were to just buy fake followers.
The value proposition here is like many others in the high-end space. You should probably only wade in here if you’re confident that you have the rest of your social media strategy figured out. It also will stack with any other promotion you are running.
Integrity & Reputation
Frankly, the Trust Pilot reviews leave a lot to be desired. The wording in many of them is generic and obviously fake. Further, the negative reviews are very specific in their critiques and have recently gone unanswered:
This reveals a huge problem with services promising you followers, even high-end ones. They can charge you $300 and pay influencers $250 and maybe eek out a $50 profit, or they can buy fake followers for $10 and make $290.
Though I am suspicious of this service, I will try to gather more information before docking my rating more serverly.
Conclusion
The concept behind Social Sensei works. However, you can find yourself still receiving fake followers or receiving real followers who unfollow you after a few days. Approach it with caution. This may be worth trying out for those with large budgets.
Though Firing Table has been around for a long time, there is a complete lack of transparency around the business and the site hasn’t been updated in years. There are many complaints about the business in the Minneapolis Better Business Bureau page, which is actually quite rare for an Instagram growth service.
Yes, single owner, though he owner isn’t clearly associated
Functioning Phone
No
Longevity
3+ years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding
True
Active Blog
No
External Sites
None
Dashboard / Account Management
No
Offsite Testimonies
None
Forthcoming About Password Handling
No
Pricing
Firing Table’s prices are charged per-week. What type of business charges on a weekly basis? Those that are scammy and trying to trick you. These prices are quite expensive considering it’s just a basic SaaS service, at best.
Service Details
The website claims they’ll get you “real fans and followers” but, truthfully, there’s no way to guarantee that. They say you’ll get a “60% interaction rate” which I think means a 60% reciprocal interaction rate which is impossible to guarantee and is extremely high unless you are a model.
The rest of their offerings are run-of-the-mill and, even if they do work flawlessly, quite expensive.
Integrity & Reputation
The business has been around for a long time. This stands at odds with the complete lack of web presence outside of the main website.
There are, however, many complaints on the Better Business Bureau’s website. You can see a small clustering of fake reviews in the spring of 2018 and then an avalanche of truthful negative complaints between the two pages they’re listed on. The majority of complaints haven’t been responded to.
This business has always struck me as a bit of a scam and I’m surprised it’s so hard to find these negative reviews.
This is one of the few surviving “original” scammy services. It seems to be run in a dishonest way. The only reason it’s mentioned on so many blog sites is because it has a very distinctive (though awful) name that hasn’t been changed in years. Definitely skip this one.
SpectSocial is a new service shrouded in secrecy and painfully-obvious fake reviews. The pricing suggests that it is a human-touch growth service, but it’s highly likely that it’s a basic bot.
The owner’s name is “Chris” and the parent company is Bali Media, LLC, but there’s no records whatsoever.
Functioning Phone
No
Longevity
<1 year
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding
True
Active Blog
No
External Sites
No
Dashboard / Account Management
No
Offsite Testimonies
TrustPilot is filled with fake reviews
Forthcoming About Password Handling
Not really
Pricing
SpectSocial has very expensive plans which intend to indicate that there are humans working on your account. I highly doubt that humans will be working on your account.
Even compared to category-leader Ampfluence, this is a pretty awful deal and I’d be shocked if people are actually paying for this.
Service Details
The Elite and Pro plans provide whatever you’d expect to see from a service costing 1/3 or 1/2 the price. It’s unclear what the value proposition is here.
It’s very likely that this is a one-man operation that just happened to be really late to the game.
Integrity & Reputation
The header of the website contains an “As Seen on MSNBC” banner. This type of thing should be illegal because it’s incredibly misleading. This company didn’t pop up on MSNBC the minute the owner created the website, but the banner has been there forever.
Next, Trust Pilot. The reviews look good, but then you realize that all the good ones are clustered around May 2019 and that they’re all generic. Some of them even reference being customers for “years.” That’s not possible.
Obviously paid shill reviews
See how all these reviews are clustered around the same dates using the same extremely-generic American names? And how they all reference the length of subscription? Shills!Again, the website says it was created in 2019 and Wayback supports this too. Shill!I doubt that, since the website itself says it started in 2019…
Conclusion
If a service that has barely been around for a year offering services at the same price point as Ampfluence was actually worthwhile, maybe you’d actually have seen them appear on MSNBC.
This space really doesn’t need new players, especially ones that lie on their website and deceive customers. However, if the owner submits proof of having more than 100 active customers, I will upgrade this rating to the C range!
Jarvee is considered best-in-class desktop social media growth software. It is reasonably-priced. It is also known to be extremely complicated, but is essential to learn if you are trying to understand exactly what goes on within the Instagram growth space.
In other words, some growth providers probably charge you to run your account in their Jarvee instance.
Jarvee has three different plans. All of them include a 5-day free trial. These all provide excellent value, provided you are willing to learn how to use the software.
Service Details
Jarvee provides an overwhelming amount of control over your Instagram growth. It will take a new user hours before they can begin to grasp the feature set. Nearly everyone in the growth space has at least tried Jarvee. In fact, anyone who hasn’t should be regarded with extreme suspicion.
The problem with running your own software is that your computer needs to remain running. Sounds easy but, over time, you’ll see gaps in your results that other managed services wouldn’t allow to happen. You’ll also have to provide your own proxies, which is a huge hassle and added expense (depending on the number of accounts you’d like to grow).
Another problem with running widely-known software is that they usually take actions according to some type of pattern. This might not be obvious to you, but to a bot detection system analyzing billions of data points, you’ll really stick out. Somewhat frequently, an update will come out and Jarvee will lose pieces of functionality for extended periods of time.
These negatives aside–Jarvee is a great service and we highly recommend it for powerusers.
Integrity & Reputation
Jarvee is straightforward about their service offering. It is not a scam. There is nothing misleading about the business.
Jarvee has been known for great results and providing a high, if not the highest, quality of service. It is highly customizable and there are few, if any, true competitors at this time.
Conclusion
If you are a power-user or willing to invest serious time into learning the ins and outs of Instagram growth, Jarvee is probably the best option for you. However, there is a significant time cost, and there’s no guarantee that the service itself is flawless–much of that will fall into your own hands.
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:
How could this possibly be true?Absurd suggested guarantee of activityThe classic “as featured on” lie
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.
Ampfluence doesn’t use any type of automation. The company grows accounts by hand via their offshore team. This is the safest, most trusted service of all, but the prices are extremely high.
Ampfluence‘s prices are extremely high compared to other services. However, once you sign up, you have absolutely nothing to worry about. If you have a larger budget, they offer comprehensive creative agency services in their $999/mo plan.
We have a lot of respect for Ampfluence, but $249/mo or $349/mo just to get a human to implement a straightforward following, liking, and commenting strategy will seem exorbitant to the average Instagrammer. It’s hard to make the case that this is a good value compared to just running your own ad campaigns.
Service Details
For the two cheaper services, you are paying for a human to like, follow, and comment on your behalf based on targets you provide. This is similar to many other Instagram growth services, except you’re guaranteed that a human is doing it.
Unfortunately, just as bots have action limits, so too do humans with access to your account. Neither party can take too many actions, as Instagram’s activity blocks don’t discriminate.
Further, there are hybrid bot services that can get you better results by combining different methods. Of course, they’re more risky, but they’re usually cheaper as well.
Integrity & Reputation
Ampfluence has a visible, vocal owner who is an experienced entrepreneur. The company has nothing to hide. Various members of this team have worked with Ampfluence and everyone we speak to has positive things to say.
Ampfluence’s team actively fights against shadiness in this business and we respect them for that. Unfortunately, they have been on the losing end of many fake reviews.
If you see a review site that speaks badly of Ampfluence, you can be assured that it is not a legitimate review site.
Conclusion
If you have a large budget, Ampfluence is a stress-free, worry-free service. However, if your decision is between Ampfluence and improving your content, running some ads, and using some cheaper agencies, it’s not as clear of a decision. Put another way, we’ve never heard someone say they’ve gone to another service after being unhappy with Ampfluence, but there are also a lot of people who have been happy getting similar results while paying a fraction of the price.
