Straight answers about scheduling Instagram from an automation: what it costs, what it can and cannot do, and where it is honestly not the right tool.
Yes, with an HTTP Request node calling the Rubinyun API. n8n does ship an Instagram node, but it is a trigger only: it reacts to comments, mentions and expiring stories, it does not publish anything. The Facebook Graph API node can technically post, but then you build Meta's two-step container flow yourself, and Instagram's API publishes immediately: there is no "post it at 6pm" parameter. Rubinyun holds the post in a queue and publishes it at the chosen time from its own server, so your n8n instance does not need to be awake. There is a ready-made n8n workflow you can import.
No. The Instagram Graph API publishes a post when you call it: there is no "publish at 6pm tomorrow" parameter. To schedule, something has to stay awake, wait for the right moment and then make the call. That is the job Rubinyun does for you, and it is the reason a scheduler exists at all.
10 posts per month are free. Beyond that you buy tokens: Pack S, €5 for 25 posts (about €0.20 each), Pack M €10 for 60, Pack L €25 for 180. If you post consistently there is an optional subscription: €9/month for 150 posts, or €19/month for unlimited. All prices include VAT. Tokens bought in a pack (S, M, L) never expire. The 150 tokens of the subscription are a monthly allowance instead: they start again at each renewal and do not carry over, like the 10 free ones. The Unlimited plan has no token count at all.
One published post costs one token, whatever it contains: a single photo and a ten-slide carousel both cost 1. And a token is charged only when the post is actually published: if Instagram rejects it, you are not charged.
No. Rubinyun charges per published post, not per connected channel: ten channels cost the same as one. A channel is one Instagram profile, and you connect as many as you like under a single account, each with its own queue and keys, and they all draw on one shared token balance.
Most alternatives meter connected channels instead, so their bill grows with the number of accounts whether they post or not. On Rubinyun, ten channels publishing four times each per month (40 posts) fit in the €9/month plan, or in a one-off €10 pack of 60 posts that never expires. The full arithmetic, with sources, is in the comparison.
Rubinyun computes the best posting time by analysing the profile's own history, not generic averages. It reads your own account's recent posts through the Instagram Graph API and measures the engagement they got, broken down by weekday and by hour. The suggested time is the hour that historically worked best on that specific weekday for your audience, not a "best time to post on Instagram" taken from an industry chart.
Ask for it with action=besttime. If you already picked a day, add keep_day=1: your day is kept and only the hour is chosen. Details in the API docs.
Yes, and this is the honest limitation of the current version: you connect Instagram by pasting a Meta Page token, following a guided page that walks you through it. One-click OAuth is planned but is not there yet. You also need an Instagram business or creator account, which is a requirement of Instagram's own API, not something Rubinyun invented.
Single image, carousel (2 to 10 images), reel (mp4 or mov video) and story (image or video). Video is processed asynchronously by Instagram: Rubinyun waits for the processing to finish, then publishes.
Yes, that is the whole point. The queue lives on the server and an engine checks it every few minutes, publishing whatever is due. Your computer, your n8n instance and your workflow can all be off.
Yes. There is a web console: you upload the media, write the caption, pick the time (or let Rubinyun pick it) and watch the queue. The API is for people who automate; the console is for everyone else.
Yes. One account can hold several Instagram profiles, called channels, each with its own queue and its own keys. Tokens are a single shared balance across all your channels.
It is deleted from the server once the post is online. Instagram requires media to be reachable at a public URL at publish time, so the file is hosted for exactly as long as that takes, and then it is removed.
Instagram only, today. Facebook Pages and TikTok are planned, with no promised date: when they are ready, they ship. Tokens you buy now will work on the platforms that arrive later.
No. Instagram only, and it is vertical on purpose. That is also what makes the pricing work: you pay per published post, not per connected channel, so ten profiles that post now and then cost the same as one that posts often. If you need one tool for five networks, a general scheduler is the honest answer. A few more limits worth knowing before you sign up: it takes jpg, png, mp4 and mov, not PDF, so to publish a PDF as a carousel you render the pages to images first; there is no Google Drive or Canva integration, because for files there is the media parking; and you choose the time, since the best-time call only suggests one.
If you need several platforms right now, Rubinyun is not your tool yet, and I would rather tell you than sell you. There is an honest comparison with the alternatives, including the cases where they win.