How delivery works

Someone comments LINK on your reel. A few seconds later they have a DM. In between, Dartzo does five things — and writes down the result of every one of them. This page walks that journey, so when you look at your log you know exactly what you’re reading.

The five steps

1. 1
   The comment arrives

   Instagram sends us a webhook the moment someone comments. We acknowledge it and record it — that’s the received state. Nothing is sent yet; we’ve only promised not to lose it.
2. 2
   We match an automation

   We compare the comment text against the keywords on your active automations for that post. If two automations could both fire, the more specific one wins — the same way, every time. A match moves the job to matched. No match means no DM, and no job.
3. 3
   We queue a job

   Every matched comment becomes a job with a deadline — the last moment Instagram will still accept a reply to it. If we have capacity right now, the job goes out right now. If we don’t, it sits in queued and gets retried oldest-first until it sends or hits that deadline.
4. 4
   We send

   The job flips to sending, we call Instagram, and we wait for the answer. Sends are spaced out by a small random delay (50–250 ms) so a viral post doesn’t land as one wall of requests on Instagram’s door.
5. 5
   We record the outcome

   Every job ends in one of three terminal states: sent, expired, or failed. A failure always carries a reason. There is no fourth outcome where a DM quietly disappears.

What each state means

How long we actually have

Instagram decides how long a reply is allowed. We subtract a safety margin from every one of those windows so we’re never trying to squeeze a send through the closing door.

How fast we send

Instagram’s documented ceiling for comment private replies on posts and reels is 750 per hour per account. We deliberately do not start there.

• We start each account at 200 DMs per hour and pace against that, not against the ceiling.
• If Instagram signals any kind of throttling, we immediately cut the rate in half — down to a floor of 20 per hour — rather than pushing back and risking your account.
• After each clean day we recover 10% of the ceiling (75/hour) until we’re back up, never above 750 per hour.
• Live comments and messaging triggers run on a separate, much faster budget: up to 100 sends per second, because they aren’t competing for the comment-reply allowance.
• Anything over the current budget is queued, not dropped. Capacity frees up every hour and the queue drains oldest-first.

One comment, one DM

Instagram allows exactly one private reply per comment. Not one per hour, not one per automation — one, ever. That’s Instagram’s rule, not a Dartzo setting, and it can’t be raised.

So we enforce it in three places: one job per comment at the database level, a check before we send, and a check on the way back — if Instagram tells us that comment was already answered, we record the job as sent rather than trying again. If the same person comments five times, they still get one DM.

When a send fails

A failure is a result, not a gap. Each failed job carries a reason you can act on:

Temporary problems on Instagram’s side aren’t counted as failures. If we get a server error, we retry the job up to 5 times before we call it — enough to ride out a blip, few enough that a real outage is something you see instead of something we hammer at.

Common questions