Is HookSend actually free?
Yes, permanently. The HookSend Free plan costs $0 (₹0 in India), sends 2,500 DMs a month on 1 Instagram account, runs up to 3 active campaigns, and has no end date. Every workspace lands on the Free plan when a trial or a paid month finishes, rather than being switched off. Figures read from HookSend's plan catalogue on 30 September 2026.
The Free plan is not a discount that lapses, and not a trial with the word free in front of it. In HookSend's billing code a Free workspace has no period left to expire: when a paid month or a trial ends, sending continues inside the Free allowance and the paid features switch themselves off, which is a downgrade rather than a shutdown. The 2,500 DMs reset on the workspace's own monthly anniversary — the day of the month its last period ended — rather than on the first of the calendar month, so two Free workspaces rarely reset on the same day.
What does the free plan not include?
8 paid features, named rather than implied. The Free plan does not include any of these: follow gate, product carousels in DMs, lead capture, follow-up sequences, AI copy assistant, build a campaign from an Instagram link, knowledge bases for AI DM answers, or DM flows with buttons and questions. The Free plan also carries no AI credits at all, so nothing on it is answered by AI. Read from the plan catalogue on 30 September 2026.
Each of those is refused rather than quietly half-delivered. A Free workspace that tries to save a story-reply campaign is turned down by the API, with the name of the plan that includes it. A campaign built on a larger plan and still running after the workspace drops to Free is treated the same way: the follow gate, lead capture and the delayed follow-up switch off and the plain link DM still goes out, while story replies and carousels have no smaller version and pause instead. Story replies and the follow gate start on Starter at $3.50 (₹99 in India) a month, carousels on Pro at $9 (₹249 in India).
What is the catch?
The catch is the feature list, not a countdown. 1 Instagram account, 3 active campaigns and 2,500 DMs a month is a real ceiling, and 8 paid features sit outside it. HookSend branding stays on messages too — on every plan, including Agency, not only on Free.
Put plainly, the Free plan buys time rather than capability. A creator running one account and one offer can stay on it indefinitely; an agency running client accounts cannot start on it at all, because 1 Instagram account is 1 Instagram account. Where the ceiling rather than the feature list is the problem, extra DMs are sold on the Free plan as well as on paid ones: 3,000 for $5 (₹100 in India), spent only after the month's own allowance is gone, and valid for 30 days.
What happens when the 2,500 free DMs run out?
Sending pauses until the month turns over. HookSend does not bill a Free workspace for going over and does not keep sending past the allowance — the limit is checked before every single DM. Two ways forward: wait for the reset on the workspace's own anniversary date, or add 3,000 DMs for $5 (₹100 in India).
A DM pack is a top-up rather than a plan change, so nothing else about the Free plan moves: still 1 Instagram account, still 3 campaigns, still no AI, knowledge bases or DM flows. Packs are spent only once the month's own 2,500 are gone, soonest to expire first, and each one lasts 30 days. If a single post is reliably eating the whole month's allowance, the honest advice is that the Free plan has stopped being the right plan rather than that it needs topping up every month.
Do I need a credit card to start?
No. Signing up takes a name, an email address, a password and a six-digit code sent to that address; a referral code and a mobile number are offered afterwards and both are optional. No card, no billing details and no payment step stand between a new account and its first campaign.
Checked in the sign-up code rather than assumed: the registration endpoints accept no payment field of any kind, and a new workspace's subscription is created with no payment method attached to it. Nothing is charged when the 15-day trial ends either, because HookSend's paid plans are monthly and never auto-renew — a plan ends on its date unless you choose to continue, so there is no stored card to fail and no renewal to remember to cancel.
How does this compare with other free Instagram DM tools?
HookSend is not the most generous. On the pricing pages we read on 30 September 2026, ReplyRush's free tier published 1,500 DMs a month against HookSend's 2,500, and LinkDM's published 1,000 DMs a month plus story and Facebook automations that the HookSend Free plan does not include.
Two of the four tools we checked published nothing we could verify: InstantDM's pricing page showed a 7-day free trial rather than a free plan, and every ManyChat pricing and help page we requested refused our fetch outright. Both rows stay in the table below saying so, because a survey that silently drops what it could not establish reads as complete and is not. What can be said about the HookSend Free plan, and not about anybody else's, is that it is written into our own billing code as the floor every workspace falls to. Neither LinkDM's nor ReplyRush's pricing page stated whether its free tier expires, so this page makes no claim about theirs either way.
Is the 15-day trial the same thing as the free plan?
No, and the two should not be confused. The 15-day trial is a separate offer that switches every feature on for 15 days — 50,000 DMs, 6 Instagram accounts, 500 AI credits, 2 knowledge bases and 2 DM flows — and then ends.
What happens at the end of it is the part that matters. The workspace moves onto the Free plan described above rather than stopping, so the comment-to-DM campaigns keep running inside 2,500 DMs a month while the paid features switch off. The trial is not a free plan and this page never calls it one; the Free plan is not a trial. Reading them in that order is the difference between trying everything and being cut off, and between a free plan and a countdown.
