Inrō can't see your old DJ DMs. Here's why — and what to use instead.

Three years ago a booker pitched you for their festival. You replied “I’ll get back to you” and didn’t. Today you finally want to find that thread again.

You sign up for Inrō. You connect your Instagram. You open their inbox.

It’s not there.

This isn’t an Inrō bug. It’s a hard limit on Meta’s side that applies to every Instagram CRM built on the official Messaging API. I want to explain exactly what that limit is, why it matters specifically for DJs and indie artists, and what to do about it.

I’m writing this as the founder of Backline — so yes, I have skin in the game. But the technical claim is documented by Meta directly. Read on, check the source, decide for yourself.

What Inrō does well

Before I take it apart, let me give Inrō the credit it deserves. It’s a clean, well-built product for a specific use case :

• Real-time inbox for incoming DMs, comments, story mentions
• Tag contacts as Hot Lead / New Lead / Customer / etc.
• Auto-reply rules (comment-to-DM, keyword triggers)
• AI agent that qualifies leads in conversation
• Team inbox if you run a small agency

If you’re a coach selling 1-on-1 calls, an e-commerce brand handling product inquiries, or an agency managing campaigns — Inrō genuinely makes your inbox 3× more efficient. Their Smart Inbox & CRM built on Meta’s official API works exactly as advertised.

For that use case.

What Inrō literally cannot do

Now the part that matters if you’re a DJ, producer, or indie artist with years of Instagram DMs.

Inrō (like Kommo, ManyChat, SetSmart, and every other Instagram CRM) reads your DMs through Meta’s Instagram Messaging API. This API has limits that aren’t marketing-driven — they’re hard-coded by Meta and apply to every third-party tool equally.

Here’s the relevant section from Meta’s own documentation, verbatim :

“Queries to the <CONVERSATION_ID> endpoint will return all message IDs in a conversation. However, you can only get details about the 20 most recent messages in the conversation. If you query a message that is older than the last 20, you will see an error that the message has been deleted.”
— Meta Developer Documentation, Conversations API for Instagram

Twenty. Messages. Per. Thread.

That’s a problem for an inbox-style CRM, but it’s a catastrophe for someone trying to mine years of archived conversations.

The same docs add :

“Conversations that are within the Requests folder that have not been active for 30 days will not be returned in API calls.”

So all the DMs from people you don’t follow (= 80% of cold pitches from bookers, labels, journalists, fellow producers) that have been sitting in Requests for more than 30 days ? Invisible to Inrō. They exist on Instagram, you can see them if you scroll manually, but the API hides them from any third-party tool.

What that means in practice for a working DJ

Let me make this concrete with numbers from my own archive (DJ Don Low — I exported 3 years of DMs to build Backline in the first place).

I had 774 conversation threads over ~3 years. Among them :

• 591 qualified contacts after classification (bookers, labels, promoters, collabs, fans, press)
• 104 forgotten threads that mattered — bookings I never followed up on, A&R who’d shown interest, collabs that never happened
• Average thread length : 8 messages, but the strategically important threads (booking negotiations, deal discussions) regularly hit 30-50+ messages

What Inrō would have shown me if I’d connected my account today :

• The 20 most recent messages of each thread → fine for threads that were 20 messages or less (~70% of mine)
• For the 30% of threads longer than 20 messages — which by definition are the most strategically valuable (real conversations, not one-liners) — the early context is gone

The 47-message thread where a Sydney booker laid out their festival’s calendar, fee range, and what they were looking for in 2022 ? Inrō would show me the last 20 messages — which are the polite goodbyes and “let’s circle back” lines. The actual offer, the actual numbers, the actual reason that thread mattered — invisible.

And the 104 “forgotten” threads from people who’d written me once or twice and stopped — if those threads had moved to the Requests folder and sat dormant 30+ days, Inrō can’t surface them at all. Backline pulled them out of my archive by name. That’s where the 104 number comes from.

The math

Inrō’s pricing : $79/month for the base plan that includes Smart Inbox + CRM. Higher tiers for team / AI features.

• 1 year of Inrō = €948
• 2 years of Inrō = €1 896
• 3 years of Inrō (the period I exported) = €2 844

Backline : €99 once. No subscription. No renewal. No “your card expired”.

The price isn’t the only thing — what you can actually see in your archive is the other thing. But putting both side by side :

€948 to see the last 20 messages of each of your DMs, going forward.
€99 to see every message in your entire archive, sorted, classified, tagged by role, with AI-written summaries.

When Inrō is actually the right pick

I’m not going to pretend Backline replaces Inrō. We don’t do the same thing.

Pick Inrō if :

• You sell something through Instagram DMs right now (merch drops, beats, mixes-for-hire, residencies-for-sale)
• You get >30 new DMs / day from prospects and need triage at speed
• You want auto-replies, comment-to-DM, story-mention automation
• You have a team that shares the inbox
• Your business lives in the next 30 days, not the last 3 years

Pick Backline if :

• You have years of DMs and you’ve lost track of who said what
• You want to surface dormant opportunities — the booker who said “next year”, the label that A&R’d you in 2022, the collab that died
• You don’t want to connect your Instagram account to a third-party tool
• You’d rather pay once than rent your CRM forever
• You’re solo or run a small artist project — no shared inbox needed

These are different problems. Both legitimate. The mistake is assuming one tool solves the other.

”But couldn’t Inrō just add an ‘import DYI export’ feature?”

Maybe, in theory. In practice :

1. The whole product is built around the real-time API model. Adding a DYI parser is a different code path and a different UX flow.
2. The DYI parsing is hard — Meta changes the export format every few quarters and the JSON schemas have edge cases (group DMs, deleted accounts, media-only threads, reactions, replies, encryption hints).
3. Their target market is coaches and e-commerce, who don’t have years of archive that matter. The feature would benefit musicians — a niche they don’t serve.

Backline does one thing : DYI export → classified contact list. It’s the entire product surface. That focus is what lets us go deeper.

How to actually try this on your own data

1. Request your Instagram DM export from Meta — accountscenter.instagram.com. Format JSON. Pick “last 2 years” or “all time” depending on how far back you want to look. Meta emails you the zip within a few hours.

2. Drop the zip on backline.so/app. The first 20 contacts get full Claude summaries for free — same quality as the paid run.

3. See what’s actually in your archive. Then decide whether you want the full classification.

That’s it. No credit card, no subscription, no Instagram credentials to share.

TL;DR

Inrō for the next 30 days. Backline for the last 3 years.

Try Backline free on 20 of your real contacts →

Josh Torrent is the founder of Backline. He also DJs internationally as DJ Don Low across Bass Music and Baile Funk circuits. He exported 3 years of his own Instagram DMs to build Backline in the first place. Read the case study →