I have been an active user on Instagram for several years and a few months ago started looking at options to help me grow my reach without compromising my account or upsetting my loyal followers.

I discovered Get River from being marketed to on Instagram by them and then did some research on Google and thoroughly read their website, I have tried a few apps that make quite bold claims but did nothing except get you to download a couple of apps you don't want, and after reading a pretty comprehensive review of their trial on Reddit (a site I trust) by supposedly someone who is not affliated with them in the least I decided to sign up for the free trial myself and see what happened.

The way the company say Get River works is based on the hashtags on photos you post. Their software goes out and likes pictures on your behalf engaging with new people i.e. Potential customers. It also follows people on your behalf (based on hashtags) in the hope they like your content and comeback and return the compliment.

We started with the free 7 day trial and we were very impressed to begin with, our likes catapulted from 50 or 60 per picture to 400 - 500 very quickly and our engagement was dramatically improved. Get River started following accounts and although many were not appropriate (porn or spam) so our feed became impossible to manage for real the followers did start going up.

We did have a small problem in the beginning accessing our account and had to change our Instagram password but in the Get River marketing blurb they promote never getting any account blocked (although it does say in the fine print terms and conditions they accept no responsibility for blocked accounts or lost content) fortunately neither happened to us permanently,

I elected to sign up for the Managed program at $99 per month and at first it was great and seemed to be working well although we had to fight tooth and nail to get invoices for our payments and then we discovered only about 10% of the people followed actually follow back (loads of spam accounts) and Instagram doesn't like unfollowing AT ALL. So Get River cannot unfollow at the rate they can follow and within a short period of time you reach critical mass and the whole thing stops working.

It took us a while to figure out exactly what was happening. We started manually unfollowing which was extremely time consuming and got us temporarily blocked by Instagram twice. (Fortunately it was only temporary)

The customer service and support is one way, put your query in and get it answered with no way or having a continuous dialogue which is very convenient for them and very frustrating for you when they refuse to answer direct questions about problems or difficulties.

The final straw came when we expressed all these issues to Get River in an email and asked to cancel our subscription.

The response that came back was we had not followed the correct cancellation procedure, that Get River had taken an additional payment and if we wanted to cancel we must read the terms and conditions.

It took about 6 further emails and watching a video to learn how to cancel this service and no money has been refunded.

This is a real buyer beware situation. They do have a pretty clever business model that looks like it's really brilliant in the beginning. We paid for 2 months before realising it was actually money for old rope then an additional month because we couldn't figure out how to cancel, great for Get River but not so great for the customer. in three months of using we saw no increase in traffic to our website although our instagram engagement increased significantly in the beginning.