Category: instagram

Our Grade – D+

A masterful job in deceit.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Socialmeep is in the big leagues! At least, the big leagues of lying to naive Instagram users in order to get them to pay for a basic botting service. Socialmeep pulls out all the stops, including having the most saturated Trustpilot page filled with what appears to be 1000 fake reviews.

This service is relatively new, and has permeated search rankings by aggressively running Google ads.

One thing we found especially intriguing was that this service used to claim to have been “Founded by Ex-Instagressers.” Due to the legal ramifications, I highly doubt that anyone affiliated with Instagress (considered the forefather of Instagram growth) would use this affiliation to market a brand new service. Also, the name of this company is awful and is an insult to the intelligence of the Instagress folks.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	“Advanced” botting
Quality of Service	Unknown
Business Registry / Location	USA
Traceable Team	Likely single owner
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	1+ year
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	Yes
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	N/A
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	N/A

Pricing

Socialmeep has reasonable prices. $49 per month is pretty consistent and they’ll turn the knob a little bit in your favor if you double that and give them $99.

Service Details

This service openly admits to using software to grow your account. Though this is against Instagram’s terms, this causes us to have a higher baseline of trust for this provider. At least they’re honest… well… kind of.

I found this statement in one of their paid blog placements. Some of us here at Pretty Good Reviews have computer science backgrounds. This statement is laughable.

First of all, all Instagram bots use “artificial intelligence.” That’s the logic that allows them to run without human interaction. This term is completely overloaded and is absolutely meaningless. General rule of thumb: whenever you read “Artificial Intelligence,” there’s a high chance that someone is trying to sell you something that doesn’t strictly use AI.

Next “Computer Vision.” Tesla does computer vision. On Instagram, by definition, this isn’t possible, and would roughly translate to image processing. This usually just isn’t worthwhile to do and to conflate “computer vision” with “image processing” is just ridiculous.

We also have “Advanced machine learning.” Do I believe that any successful bot service extracts some insights about accounts and then tunes their bots? Sure. Do I think they have advanced machine learning models? No. Customers wouldn’t really benefit from this anyway.

If you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. This is a basic botting service that might have a few bells and whistles, but, in the best case scenario, your results won’t differ much from other services.

Integrity & Reputation

This business throws up so many red flags that we doubt we’ve identified them all.

First of all, the Trustpilot reviews. This is the most insane abuse of the platform that we’ve ever seen.

So, this company has been around for less than a year and they’ve miraculously gained thousands of gleaming reviews? This distribution is crazy! People should study this at an academic level. How can Trustpilot be allowing this to happen.

Looking at the reviews, it’s a pattern of like 1 4-star review for every 8 5-star ones. This is a nice touch, but it’s not fooling me. None of these reviews are specific, in fact, some of them contain conflicting reviews. They’re mostly just spouting completely vague stuff for 1-2 sentences, never providing any specifics.

Some more silly claims:

4500 NEW FOLLOWERS PER MONTH ON AVERAGE! Sign me up. Most services would struggle to get you 450 followers per month and that’s if you had decent content. Advertising nearly 5000 per month is insane. You can’t do 15x better than an Instagram bot. You are an Instagram bot!

Also, 55,000 users? Your service hasn’t been around for long at all. You mean to tell me you’ve generated over $300,000 (at least) and yet we still can’t find any more information about this company anywhere? If you had even 5000 customers, you’d have way more negative reviews. Not implying that the service must be awful, but I know how these things go. People complain for no reason.

Every negative review is specific and, obviously, not responded to. This business seems to be doing a surprisingly high-volume business, but it’s 100% due to the fact that they run ads.

Next, the company doesn’t exist anywhere on the internet outside of their website. It claims to be a part of “LKR Social Holding Group” yet we couldn’t find any records of that company either. We searched so deeply that we actually determined that this domain was previously used by some guys in Ghana for a totally different purpose back in 2012.

Were we able to track down the owner? Well, kind of. There’s this guy named Bryson Edgar who writes their blog posts and also features prominently in their fake blog placement articles:

I’ll give it to him, Mr. Edgar has one of the most complete LinkedIn profiles we’ve ever seen, and we’ve done almost 100 of these reviews now. What’s hilarious is that he doesn’t list his involvement with Socialmeep anywhere on his profile despite purportedly being authorized to speak to the media by his boss…

Hey wait, is there a chance that Bryson is the boss?

Having a background in eCommerce and marketing while now working as a programmer while getting your online STEM masters degree is a likely profile of someone more deeply involved with an Instagram growth service.

On the company’s Betalist entry, two other names appear:

We can see here that Bryson appears to be the head honcho. Alexandra, interstingly, links to Combin, another Instagram growth service, in her Twitter bio:

And Corey is actually a woman who seems to be some marketing “expert.” Definitely not a master coder behind the scenes.

At the tail end of this review, it’s hopefully clear why the owner doesn’t clearly identify himself. This service doesn’t seem to be well-liked by users and there is no way the team is able to accurately handle all of the complaints they get.

Conclusion

Socialmeep is a new Instagram growth service that makes bold claims but doesn’t deliver for customers. They company tricks people by paying for ads, fake blog placements, and hundreds of fake 5-star reviews. While we’re not against bot platforms, we are against ones that deceive customers.

Our Grade – D

This service pedals lies and deceit to such an extent that we feel it is necessary to brand it as professional bullshit.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Simplygram is an Instagram growth service that you’ll see mentioned in many places. Though the service claims to be US-based, they fall short on nearly every one of their claims and have spent a lot of time and effort trying to make themselves look good on review platforms.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	“Mother/Child”
Quality of Service	Low
Business Registry / Location	Delaware?
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	3+ years
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	False
Active Blog	Yes
External Sites	No
Dashboard / Account Management	No
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Simplygram offers three pricing plans, for $69, $99, and $199 per week. This is one of the most expensive services on the market–their cheapest plan will cost you over $3500 per year!!

The weekly charge is clearly a tactic used to collect money from unsuspecting customers as quickly as possible before they cancel. We simply do not agree or support this type of pricing structure. It makes no sense for the consumer.

Service Details

We grow your account using the Mother/Child method. Depending on the package you choose, we will setup 25-100 Instagram accounts on your behalf. These accounts DM hundreds of people per day, sending a message along the lines of “Hi! Thanks for checking out my page. For more great content, please visit my other page @Your_Username”.

5000 followers per month gets you in the door … then 25-100 spam accounts set up on your behalf actually get you the results?

Mother and child was popular a few years ago, but it never was scalable for service providers. Think about it, even if Simplygram only had 100 customers, do you really think they’re creating and provisioning thousands of accounts to help their customers?

Hmm… if only there was an explanation for how this actually worked.

Integrity & Reputation

There’s the answer. Rather than having some elite implementation of Mother/Child, they’re just running a follow/unfollow bot! If they were actually running some different method, Simplygram wouldn’t need your password, now would they?

With this information in mind, what are some of the ridiculous claims?

That’s a strong start. No Instagram growth service can get you anywhere near this amount of followers per month. It’s technically feasible using giveaways, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. I also don’t recommend giveaways.

I doubt there’s a human aspect at all. Even if this was true and even if all the positive reviews on Trustpilot were real, why don’t any of the positive reviews mention this specifically?

This website has the highest concentration of fake reviews that I’ve yet seen on Trustpilot!

Simplygram’s strategy is to completely ignore negative reviews–they haven’t responded to a single one–while flooding their page with generic fake ones.

No customer, even a satisfied one, would write a review this way. This reads like marketing copy, not a real review. Hello, Trustpilot moderators?

This is so fake! It provides no detail at all, and also uses a random emoji. Note that there is a cluster of reviews that all use similar single emojis.

Here’s an absurd fake-featured bar. Do you want to guess how many of these news articles mentioning Simplygram I could locate?

Conclusion

Simplygram gets positive mentions by some bloggers, but we don’t understand how. It’s a deceitful service pushing so much conflicting information that we question why anyone would even bother buying it. The weekly-recurring pricing scheme is nothing more than predatory, all of the good reviews appear to be fake, and the company does nothing to build consumer trust. Please look elsewhere.

Our Grade – D

This service fails nearly all of our trustworthiness checks.

View our grading methodology.

At a Glance

Pathsocial.co is a new Instagram growth service that fails all of our trustworthiness checks. They primarily get new customers from Google ads and they make outrageous claims on their site about how the service works and what results a typical customer can expect.

Business Analysis

Item	Result
Growth Type	SaaS
Quality of Service	Low
Business Registry / Location	Los Angeles
Traceable Team	No
Functioning Phone	No
Longevity	Roughly 1 Year
Doesn’t Misuse IG Branding	True
Active Blog	No
External Sites	None
Dashboard / Account Management	No
Offsite Testimonies	Trustpilot
Forthcoming About Password Handling	No

Pricing

Path Social offers two plans which are priced somewhat competitively amongst bot services.

Service Details

Path Social tries to win you over with an impressive website. All of their claims are generic and they don’t tell you anything specific about how the service works. Each plan offering involves running your account on their botting software. You will be eligible for action blocks and the results will probably suck. Also, there’s a high chance that your password won’t be stored securely.

Integrity & Reputation

Path Social claims to have “24,000+” individuals and brands as customers. This is plausible for services with huge numbers of clients and deep histories, but it is a boldfaced lie coming from a service that is relatively new.

The website has only been around since 2020. Before then, it was the website for “Trail Track Club” which I’d imagine had nothing to do with social media growth. You can probably guess where I’m going with this, the website launched claiming to have the trust of 24,000+ people. That’s not cool.

They also guarantee large amounts of followers and run Google ads. Not to say that running ads is awful, but if you run ads and make outrageous claims on your website, that’s a bad combination.

Path Social has terrible Trustpilot reviews. They have not responded to any of the negative reviews, all of which provide specific testimony to bad customer experiences.

These are some of the worst reviews we’ve seen. Also, they claim to have “Los Angeles Support” which hilariously sounds like the entire city of Los Angeles will support angry customers. In reality, we can’t identify anybody involved with this service, it’s likely a single owner ordeal. All these things combined — this is a very bad service.

Conclusion

This service impressed us by how unconvincing it is. It is becoming more clear that any service running Google ads should be trusted less, since these services most likely are preying on customers who may not read reviews before they sign up.