How to use Growbot safely: pacing, daily limits, and warming up

Why

Instagram limits how many follows, unfollows, likes, and comments an account can make, but it does not publish the numbers. The limits depend on things like the account's age, how active it has been, and how it has behaved recently. There is no single safe number, and anyone who promises one is guessing.

What you can control is how your activity looks. Accounts get restricted when they do a lot very quickly, at odd hours, or with a sudden jump from their normal level. Growbot is designed around avoiding those patterns: it runs in your own browser on your own connection, it waits between actions with random variation, and the Actions Queue spreads work across the hours you choose.

No tool can make automation risk free. The goal is to keep your activity close to what a busy person could plausibly do by hand, and this guide shows you how.

How to use it

Check these settings before your first run

1. Open Settings and find Delays. The default of Wait 180 seconds after follow/unfollow/like is a good starting point. Leave Randomize wait time by up to 50% checked, so each gap falls somewhere between 90 and 270 seconds instead of being identical.
2. Open Active hours, check Only run actions during active hours, and set Start and End to the hours you are normally awake (your computer's clock). Active hours are off by default, which lets actions run at any hour.
3. Under Instagram behavior, leave Keep Instagram tabs running in the background checked so the browser does not pause your queue.
4. Leave Rate limits at the defaults for now. Growbot uses them to decide how long to wait when Instagram pushes back.

Choose a starting volume

Instagram's limits are not public, so treat these as cautious starting points, not rules:

• New account, or one that has been inactive for months: about 20 to 30 actions per day for the first week. The scheduling wizard's default of 30 Actions per day fits here.
• Established account you use regularly: start around 30 to 50 per day and build from there.
• Any account that was restricted recently: half of whatever you were doing when it happened.

Count everything together. A day with 30 follows and 30 unfollows is 60 actions, not 30.

Build up slowly

1. Run your starting volume for about a week with Process Queue → Schedule Actions rather than Run Now.
2. Read the Log tab once a day. If there are no rate limit lines and no restriction messages, raise Actions per day by about 10 for the following week.
3. Keep Minimum seconds between actions at 300 or higher in the scheduling wizard. More volume should come from using more of the day, not from shorter gaps.
4. At the first warning sign, drop back to the last volume that ran cleanly and stay there for at least a week.

Know the warning signs

• Log lines that mention a 403 soft limit or a rate limit from instagram. One now and then is normal. Several in one day means slow down.
• A Log line saying Instagram restricted follow actions on this account (or likes, comments, and so on). Growbot reschedules the pending actions for you, but treat it as a clear signal to reduce volume.
• An Instagram popup asking you to try again later, or a notice that some of your activity is restricted. Follow Instagram blocked an action: what to do next.

Tips

• Keep using Instagram by hand as well: post, reply to comments, browse your feed. An account that only follows and unfollows looks less like a person than one that also takes part.
• Run one job per account at a time. Starting a Run Now follow pass while a scheduled unfollow campaign is running on the same account doubles your hourly activity.
• Applying filters to a very large queue loads extra profile data for every account, and that counts as Instagram traffic too. Filter a few hundred accounts at a time, or turn on Apply Filters Automatically While Following so data loads one account at a time as Growbot works.
• Each Instagram account has its own limits. If you run several, pace each one separately. See the multi-account guide in Related guides.
• Growbot never asks for your Instagram password. It works through the Instagram session that is already open in your browser.