When you finish this page, big will be authorized to read comments on your posts and send DMs from your account.

What you need

• A professional Instagram account — Business or Creator (not Personal).

That's it — big connects with Instagram Login, so you sign in with Instagram directly. You do not need a linked Facebook Page.

If your account is still Personal, switch it in the Instagram app under Settings → Account type and tools → Switch to professional account before continuing.

Connect

1. Open big and click Connect Instagram.
2. You'll be sent to Instagram to approve access. Sign in with the account you want to automate.
3. Approve the permissions big asks for — reading your profile and posts, reading and replying to comments, and sending messages. big can't post to your feed, follow accounts, or change your profile.
4. You'll land back in big with your account showing as Connected.

How many accounts can I connect?

Your workspace can hold several Instagram connections, up to the limit of your plan. See Limits & plans for the per-plan caps. If you're already at your plan's cap, the connect step is blocked until you upgrade or remove an existing connection.

If the connection fails

• Make sure the account is professional (Business or Creator), not Personal.
• Make sure you're signing in as the owner of the account you want to automate.
• Confirm you're not already at your plan's connection cap.
• Finish in the same browser you started in, within about 10 minutes. A connect link only works once and only in the browser that clicked Connect Instagram, so you can't send the Instagram approval link to someone else to approve on their device. Ask them to join your workspace as an admin and connect it themselves instead.
• If you see "already connected to another workspace", that Instagram account is active in a different big workspace. Disconnect it there first.
• Re-run Connect Instagram — re-approving the permissions usually clears a stuck connection.

Reconnect, disconnect and the connection cap

All three need the admin role. Connecting and reconnecting happen only on the Connect page (/connect), because each is a sign-in with Instagram in a browser. Disconnecting can also be done from the big CLI (big connection:disconnect <id>, which asks before it acts) or its local MCP server (big_connection_disconnect, which needs confirm: true), with a token that has connections:write. big connections, big connection:health and the connection_health tool report the state.

• Expired, deauthorized or erroring — when the token expires, or Instagram or Facebook revokes big's access, the account stops replying. Open the Connect page and choose Reconnect on that account, then approve the permissions again. The workspace owner is told in the bell and by email when this happens.
• Disconnect removes the account from this workspace and stops every automation running on it, and drops the DMs it still had queued. Its contacts, messages and automations are kept for 30 days: reconnect the same account within that time and they come back as they were. After that they are deleted.
• Over the connection cap — after a downgrade, say. big checks the cap once a day: the first check that finds you over it starts a 24-hour grace period, and if a later check still finds you over, the newest connections keep replying, up to the cap, while automated replies on the older ones are suspended (auto_reply_suspended: true). Disconnect an account or upgrade, and the next daily check resumes them.

Next step

You're connected. Now build your first automation.