Terms & refunds
Short, and written to be read before you spend money rather than after. This is a summary of the operator's position, not legal advice — have a lawyer in your jurisdiction review it before you launch commercially.
What a bid buys
A position in a ranked list, held for as long as nobody exceeds your standing bid. Minimum first bid $1, which is also what puts a listing on the board at all — an approved account with no bid is not displayed. Bids are cumulative per account and denominated in USD.
What a bid does not buy
Any number of clicks, followers, likes, reach or revenue. It does not buy editorial endorsement, it does not affect your standing on Instagram itself, and it does not buy protection from being outbid five minutes later.
Refunds
Bids are non-refundable once settled, including when you are outbid, when you pause your listing, and when the traffic disappoints you. We will refund in exactly two situations: a duplicate charge, and a listing we remove for a reason that is our fault rather than yours. Chargebacks are reversed against your standing bid, so disputing a payment costs you the position it bought.
Verification and honesty
Listing requires proving control of the account by placing a short code in its bio. Follower counts are checked by a human before approval and corrected where they are wrong. Inflated counts, bought followers, faked verification badges and misleading taglines get the listing removed without a refund.
Removal
We can remove any listing at any time, and will do so without a refund for fraud, impersonation, illegal content, or misrepresentation. If we remove a listing for our own reasons — a category we retire, a policy we change — the standing bid is refunded pro rata at our discretion.
Publicity of bids
Your display name, every amount you pay, and the rank each bid bought are public on the account's ledger. That transparency is the product. Do not bid if you need the spend to be private.
Tax
Prices are exclusive of tax unless stated at checkout. Where tax applies it is calculated and collected by Paddle at checkout. Paddle is the merchant of record for every bid, so Paddle — not the operator — is the seller on your receipt and the party that remits the tax. Business buyers should provide a VAT/tax id at checkout where prompted.
Data
We store salted hashes of visitor IPs, never the addresses themselves, and keep raw click and follow rows for 24 months for dispute resolution. Aggregate click and follow counts for a listing are public; the underlying rows are visible only to the account's owner and the operator. We never ask for your Instagram password or session, and we do not scrape Instagram.
Relationship to Instagram
followers.bid is an independent advertising marketplace with no affiliation to Instagram or Meta Platforms, Inc. Handles, display names, avatars and follower counts are supplied by the account owners who list them. “Instagram” is a trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc.
Last updated when this deployment was built. Substantive changes will be announced on the front page before they take effect.