What are Instagram's API rate limits?
Meta publishes limits per Instagram professional account. These are the ones that matter for DM automation:
| What | Meta's limit |
|---|---|
| Private replies to post and reel comments | 750 calls per hour |
| Private replies to Live comments | 100 calls per second |
| Messages with text, links, reactions, stickers | 100 or 300 calls per second (Meta's pages disagree) |
| Messages with audio or video | 10 calls per second |
| Conversations API | 2 calls per second |
| Inbox volume | Above 72,000 messages sent and received, new messages pause until volume drops |
What happens to a rate limit on a viral post?
Say a reel draws 3,000 keyword comments in its first hour. At 750 private replies an hour, answering all of them takes about four hours. That is fine under Meta's rules, since a private reply can go out up to 7 days after the comment. The risk is a tool that drops anything over the limit, so commenter 3,000 never gets the DM commenter one got.
Why do rate limits exist?
They protect people from spam and Meta's systems from overload. Meta's Developer Policies ban bots acting at very high frequencies, and say messaging experiences with excessive negative feedback may be rate-limited, paused or removed.
How does ReplyRep handle rate limits?
On Lite and up, the Excess DM Queue holds everything over Meta's limit in order and drains as fast as Meta allows, and SendBack goes back for interactions that were skipped or delayed. See the viral post DM queue, how to handle a viral Instagram post and the full list of Instagram DM limits.
Be ready for the viral night
Every commenter gets their DM, in order, even when Meta's limit kicks in.
Related terms
- Private reply: the message type the 750 per hour limit applies to.
- Instagram Graph API: the API these limits govern.