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Someone watches a reel, taps your profile, and sends a DM instead of finding your support email. That message isn’t a lesser version of a support ticket — Tied treats it exactly like one, with the same contact record, conversation history and AI agent as any other channel.
2 billion+ monthly active users. Instagram Direct is one of the largest inboxes on the internet that most support tooling still treats as an afterthought.

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What it takes

Connecting is an OAuth grant against your Instagram professional account. Once it’s authorized, Tied subscribes to three things on your account’s behalf — messages, message reactions and “seen” receipts — and nothing else.
Tokens refresh on use, provided the inbox stays active. Instagram access tokens expire; Tied refreshes one the next time something reads it, but only when it’s within 10 days of expiring and at least 24 hours old — there’s no scheduled job checking on its own. An inbox that goes quiet for a while won’t get refreshed in the background, so a genuinely dormant inbox can still turn up with a lapsed token. Send it a message, or open it in the dashboard, before that gap gets too long.

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What you can send

Standard DM surfaces: text, images, video, voice notes and Instagram’s own reactions — no rich cards, carousels or native pickers the way Apple Messages or Google RCS support. If a flow needs a genuine multiple-choice UI with a dependable answer back, build it for a channel that has one and let Instagram carry the plain-text version.
Meta’s 24-hour messaging window applies. Once a customer’s last message is more than 24 hours old, Tied disables the reply composer in the dashboard so a fresh human-agent reply can’t be typed. That block is enforced in the dashboard UI only — there’s no server-side block on this channel, so anything sent through an automation or a flow outside the composer isn’t stopped by Tied itself. (Meta’s Human Agent tag extends the window to 7 days, but it’s an installation-level setting that defaults to off and needs Meta’s approval to enable — not a per-account toggle.) Resolve inside your window, and treat a lapsed thread as a new conversation the next time they write in.

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No channel fee

Instagram carries no carrier cost and no Tied channel fee — you pay for resolutions, not delivery. See Channel fees.

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Next

Facebook Messenger

The other Meta inbox — same account family, same connection model.

Channel fees

Why Instagram costs nothing to deliver on, and what does.