Frequently asked questions

Instamaker is an AI-powered Instagram carousel generator. You set up a profile for your niche — what you post about, your handle, your colors and image themes — and one click produces a complete carousel: a hook slide, content slides, a call-to-action slide, plus the caption and hashtags to paste when you post. The slides are rendered as PNG images you download directly. It's in early access: to request access, email sales@instamaker.ai.

A chat model gives you text you still have to design, lay out, and proof. Instamaker is carousel-specific end to end:

• Every generation follows a real carousel structure — hook, content, CTA — with a caption and hashtags in each language.
• Slides are rendered as HTML/CSS to PNG by headless Chromium, so text is crisp, real text — not AI-generated image text with typos baked in.
• Your profile's themes (gradient + image query pairs) keep every carousel on-brand.
• Per-profile history stops it from repeating the same topics week after week.
• One generation can be mirrored into several languages at once, with a single caption set per language.

Generation runs as a background job — it takes about 30–90 seconds, and you can keep browsing while it works. Your dashboard shows the job's status (pending → processing → completed, or failed with the reason). Under the hood:

1. An LLM plans the carousel: one topic, a hook slide, content slides, a CTA slide, a caption, and hashtags. Its output is validated against a strict schema — invalid output is retried automatically (up to 3 attempts) instead of being shown to you.
2. Your profile's recent topics (the last 50) are included in the prompt so the model doesn't repeat itself.
3. Seven themes are picked from your profile's theme pool, seeded deterministically by the topic slug — the same topic always renders the same look, and re-renders are consistent.
4. Each theme's image query pulls a photo from Unsplash (cached after the first fetch, and the photographer is credited).
5. The slides are composed as HTML/CSS and rendered to PNG files with headless Chromium (Playwright), then stored on our infrastructure for download.
6. Each requested language adds one more LLM pass to translate the content — the images are shared, and it all counts as a single generation in your history.

A theme is a pair: a gradient (your color look) and an image query (what kind of photo each slide shows). Each profile keeps its own theme pool, which you manage on the profile page. The theme pick is deterministic — seeded by the topic's slug — so the same topic always comes out looking the same, whether you regenerate or re-render it.

History is kept per profile, not per conversation. Every generation registers its topic with the profile, the next generation is explicitly told the recent topics not to repeat, and even when two generations race to produce the same topic, a unique slug is enforced so duplicates never land in your history. Different profiles stay independent — each one has its own no-repeat ledger.

Square is available on every plan; portrait and landscape are available on paid plans. A profile has one source language plus target languages — each target language is generated in the same run, with its own caption and hashtags. There are 20 languages to choose from. The free plan allows a single language, Starter allows three, and Pro and above allow all 20.

Instamaker is free to start: 3 credits per month, one profile, square format, single language. One credit produces one language of one carousel, so a single-language carousel costs 1 and a three-language one costs 3. Paid plans lift those limits — 10 credits a month, three profiles, three languages and all three formats on Starter ($9/mo); 40 credits, ten profiles, every language and API access on Pro ($19/mo). For heavier publishing there is Growth ($99/mo, 300 credits a month), which you buy the same way. Enterprise is the only plan you have to talk to us about — its volume, overage rate and support terms are agreed per contract, so there is no price to publish. The credits included with a plan reset at the start of each billing period and do not roll over. Run out before the period does? Credit packs top you up — $5 for 10, $20 for 50 — and purchased credits never expire. See the full breakdown on the pricing section of our homepage. Payments are processed by Stripe — your card details never touch our servers.

Yes. Instamaker has a REST API at /api/v1, authenticated with an API key you create in the dashboard: enqueue a generation, poll it to completion, and download the slides — the same pipeline the web app runs on. The API documentation covers authentication, the endpoints and the error codes.

API access is a Pro-and-above entitlement: Pro, Growth and Enterprise accounts can create keys and generate through them; Free and Starter accounts cannot, and are told which plan they need. Generations made through the API draw on the same monthly allowance as the dashboard, and credit packs top it up when you go past it.

One caveat about availability, stated plainly: the v1 endpoints are behind a feature flag that is currently off, so the reference documentation is published ahead of the rollout and keys will not authenticate against it until we switch it on. Tell us what you are building and we will let you know the day it goes live.

That is what the publishing section is for. You connect an account through the platform's own OAuth consent screen — no copy-pasting tokens — and then publish or schedule a finished carousel straight from the dashboard. Instagram Business, Facebook Pages, TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest and X all share that connect flow. Bluesky instead takes a handle and app password inline (no OAuth), and a Webhook option posts a JSON payload to a URL you configure — the integration point for Zapier, n8n, or Slack.

You can send one carousel to any mix of connected accounts in a single action, with an optional shared schedule and per-channel caption tweaks. Each niche profile can also remember a default set of channels, so posting for that profile targets them automatically. Platform limits are surfaced honestly in the UI — Instagram publishing requires a Business or Creator account (a platform restriction, not ours); LinkedIn's organic API delivers multi-image posts rather than carousel cards; X caps a post at four images and is a paid API (~$0.01/post). Meta, TikTok, and Pinterest each require their app to pass a permissions review before public posting works.

One caveat about availability, stated plainly: publishing is built but the feature flag that exposes it is currently off, so the Publish section of the dashboard will tell you the same thing. Until it is switched on, the workflow is the one everything else on this page describes — download the PNGs and post them yourself.

We store what your account needs to work: your account details, your profiles (niche, handle, themes, layouts), your generation history, and usage data for billing and plan limits. Generated PNGs are stored on our infrastructure and available for you to download. Deleting a profile removes its themes, history, and stored files. Payments go through Stripe, so we never see or store your card number.

AI can make mistakes. Topics can miss the mark for your niche, facts in slides can be wrong or outdated, translations can be imperfect, and Unsplash photos are a starting point, not a guarantee. Always review a carousel before you post it — you're responsible for what you publish. If a generation misses, regenerate: each attempt is tracked in your history so you can keep the good ones and skip the rest.