OpenReply

OpenReply is an open-source ManyChat: someone comments a keyword on an Instagram post and gets a DM with the link. It is self-hosted, and the reference setup fits inside free tiers.

I started it on July 17, 2026 as a fork of an MIT project by im-anishraj, excised billing and plan limits, and added public replies, a DM inbox, follow-ups and follower tracking. Twenty-two people have contributed since. I launched it with one reel asking people to comment "open", and OpenReply sent the DMs itself. The reel reached 169,486 views and 8,801 comments.

The repo passed 1,000 stars in three weeks and now has more than 2,200, with 850 forks. Since September, Zernio has sponsored it.

At least 18 other creators made videos about it, unbidden and unpaid.

The hard parts were Meta's. Webhooks drop comments, so a reconciler polls the last 72 hours of each post in small batches. Meta allows 750 private replies an hour and one per comment, so every send reserves a slot through a Lua script in Redis. The DMs go out from a BullMQ worker decoupled from the Next.js app, because serverless functions are ephemeral.