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