Own Your DMs
When someone comments a keyword on your reel, they get the link in their DMs — the automation you have seen a hundred creators use. Normally you rent that from a SaaS platform every month. This runs the same thing on hardware you control, so there is no subscription and nobody else holds your audience.
Below is the honest version: every account you need, both hosting routes, the real monthly cost, and the limits nobody mentions. Four minutes to read, and it will save you an evening.
First decision
Answer this before anything else — it changes the rest of the setup. Both routes are self-hosted, so you own the data either way.
Before you start
Create these and stay logged in on the browser your agent will drive. Doing this first is the single biggest difference between a 30-minute install and a three-hour one.
One is the account that sends DMs — it must be a Business or Creator account, not personal. The second is only used to post the test comment; a friend's account works fine.
At business.facebook.com, linked to that Instagram account. This is what lets you create your own Instagram app and grant it permission to read comments and send DMs. Going through Meta properly is what keeps your account safe — this is a supported use, not a workaround.
You sign in to your dashboard through it. You need access to wherever its DNS records live, which is not always where you bought it. An unused domain from an abandoned project is perfect, and a subdomain of one you already own works too.
resend.com — there is no password on your dashboard. You log in with a magic link, and Resend is what sends it.
healthchecks.io — emails you if the whole thing silently dies. Skippable, genuinely unwise to skip: without it you find out your automation has been down when someone tells you they never got the link.
A free account for the secure tunnel. If you already have a zone there, setup will reuse it rather than moving any nameservers.
Any provider with Ubuntu or Debian, root access and SSH. Some providers have an integration that lets the agent provision the machine for you; others it drives through the dashboard.
Claude Code or Codex running on your own machine, plus the browser extension so it can drive the consoles. A browser-only chat can advise you but physically cannot deploy anything.
Worth knowing
This is normal and is not a sign something is broken. A brand-new domain has no sending reputation. Move the message to your inbox, add the sender as a contact, and it stops happening. Do not go re-diagnosing your DNS over it.
The installer opens a private local file for credentials and reads them from there. Anything you paste into a conversation lives in that conversation's history. This matters more than usual here, because these keys can send messages as you.
Meta allows roughly 750 private replies per hour, per account. Overflow is retried a few times and then dropped. On a genuinely viral post, late commenters may never receive the DM. This is Meta's ceiling, not a limitation of this tool — every paid platform lives under it too.
Your app starts in development mode, which is fine for your own accounts. Reaching the public is a review process with Meta. Budget time for it and do not treat it as a formality.
Straight answer
Get it
Own Your DMs is one of 29 skills in the Lead Gen OS bundle — lead scraping, cold email, DM automation, follow-up and nurture sequences. It is not sold on its own, so you are getting the whole lead-generation stack, not a single tool.
Please read the checklist above first. This skill installs real infrastructure on a computer you own — if you do not have an always-on machine or a VPS and a domain you control, it will not work for you, and we would rather you knew that now than after checkout.