Instagram channel

An Instagram DM shared inbox your whole team owns

Story replies, DMs and mentions in one shared queue — assigned like email, drafted by the agent, approved by a human. Not a founder’s phone at midnight.

Shipping soon
The short answer

An Instagram DM shared inbox puts story replies, DMs and mentions into one queue the whole team owns. In inrelay, every Instagram conversation gets an assignee, internal notes and collision detection like email does, the agent drafts replies in your voice, and a human approves each send. The channel is in development; the inbox is live today.

For most social-first shops, Instagram support has a single point of failure: whoever holds the account login. DMs live on that one phone, replies happen whenever that one person surfaces, and nobody else can see what was promised to whom. Handing out the password isn’t a team inbox — it’s a shared liability with no owner, no history and no way to tell who already answered.

inrelay treats Instagram the way a shared inbox treats email: a conversation is a thread with an owner, a status and a private back-channel — and it stops mattering whose phone it started on.

01 · From the inbox

What you can do from the inbox

The Instagram lane ships with the channel. The team machinery underneath it — assignment, notes, collision detection, drafts with approval — is live in the product today.

An Instagram DM assigned in the shared queue
  • One queue for every Instagram surface. DMs, story replies and mentions arrive as conversations in the shared inbox, next to your email and live chat — not as notifications on somebody’s lock screen.
  • Assign a DM like any thread. Every Instagram conversation gets an owner — claimed, assigned, transferred or escalated with the same routing rules that sort your email. “Who’s got this?” has an answer on the thread.
  • Never answer the same person twice. Collision detection shows who’s viewing and typing, so two teammates don’t send two different answers to one customer — the classic shared-login accident.
  • Let the agent draft, keep the send. The agent reads the DM and the customer’s history, tags the intent and drafts a reply that sounds like you — then a human approves it before anything reaches Instagram. The approve-before-send gate holds on every channel.
  • Talk privately inside the thread. Internal notes and @mentions live in the conversation and are structurally invisible to the customer — “she’s asking about the order from March, check before promising” stays between you.
  • Answer the repeats from one source. Sizing, shipping, restocks — the agent drafts from your knowledge base, so the tenth “when does this restock?” of the day gets the same right answer as the first.
02 · Setup

Setup & permissions

Connecting Instagram is an authorization, not an integration project. Here is what the platform requires and what you grant.

Use an Instagram professional account

Meta only opens its messaging APIs to professional accounts — business or creator. If you’re on a personal account, the switch is free and takes a minute in the Instagram app.

Authorize inrelay through Meta

You connect through Meta’s own authorization flow: log in, review the messaging permissions inrelay requests, and grant them explicitly. No passwords are shared with anyone — including us — and you can revoke the connection from your Meta settings at any time.

Pick the workspace and the rules

Choose which shared workspace Instagram conversations land in and how they route — the same triage rules your email already follows.

Retire the shared login

DMs, story replies and mentions start flowing into the queue with owners and history. The account password goes back to being an account password.

03 · The limits

Limits, stated plainly

Instagram is Meta’s platform, and its rules bind every tool that connects to it — including this one. Three things to know before you plan your support around it.

Messaging windows exist. Instagram limits how long after a customer’s last message a business can reply through the API. The inbox shows where each conversation stands against that window instead of letting a late reply silently fail — but the window is Meta’s rule, and no tool can extend it.

Not every surface is a two-way thread. Where Instagram exposes an interaction as read-only — something you can see but not reply to through the API — the inbox shows it as context on the customer, not as a thread pretending to accept a reply.

Instagram lands on the Team plan when it ships. The social channels — Instagram, Messenger, SMS — join the Team plan as they land. Conversations are never metered: plans are flat, and the only number in inrelay is the agent’s reply budget, which you set. Details on the pricing page.

04 · The other channels

With your other channels.

Instagram is one lane of the same inbox. Email and live chat ship today; the social channels are in development, and we won’t claim otherwise.

ALL CHANNELS

Every channel

The full list of what inrelay connects today — and what’s honestly still in development.

See all channels → EMAIL

Email

Gmail, Outlook or IMAP as one shared support@ — where most of your volume still arrives.

Email channel → LIVE CHAT

Live chat

A widget on your site with a human handoff that carries the whole story.

Live chat channel → COMMERCE

TikTok Shop

Buyer messages with the order beside them, and order actions from the thread.

Shipping soon →
MESSAGING

WhatsApp

The channel half your customers already prefer, when it’s ready.

In development
Start today

Get the DMs off your phone.

Start free with email today — Instagram opens in the same inbox. No card, never per seat.

Start freeSee pricing

Questions, answered.

When does this ship?
The Instagram channel is in development now. We don’t publish dates we might have to walk back; the changelog announces every launch the day it happens. If your DMs are drowning a phone today, tell us — early-access teams help us get the queue right.
Do I need a business account?
A professional account, yes — business or creator. Meta only exposes Instagram messaging to professional accounts, so every tool in this category has the same requirement. Switching from a personal account is free and takes about a minute in the Instagram app.
Can the AI answer DMs automatically?
No. The agent triages, tags and drafts in your voice — then a human approves every send. That gate is the product’s whole position, on Instagram as everywhere else, because a wrong DM in your brand’s voice is expensive in a way a slow one isn’t. The approve-before-send page has the mechanics.
Is Instagram on the Free plan?
No — when the channel ships, Instagram lands on the Team plan, alongside Messenger and SMS as they land. Free and Solo include email and live chat today, and the agent is on every plan, governed by the reply budget you set. The pricing page has the details.

Start running your DMs.

Give your customers faster answers and your team their evenings back.

Download formacOS Download on theApp Store Get it onGoogle Play

Desktop and mobile. Free for solo.