Apphi Post is a social media tool that allowed users to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin. What made Apphi pretty unique was its Instagram features. Users could schedule Instagram stories straight from the app and they would auto-post to Instagram at the selected time. This feature is one that isn’t available on other schedulers, because that feature is not a part of the Instagram API.
The following is an opinion that I developed as an Apphi customer myself. The only reason I’m writing this is so that social media managers who are interested in Apphi can know some of the company’s history.
For a time, Apphi was an incredible tool that made the life of a social media manager very easy. But then, tragedy struck. Earlier this year, Apphi stopped working. Their website turned into a Google Form, and there was radio silence on Apphi’s part.
The fact that an app or website goes down is not strange. Anyone that spends any amount of time on the internet knows that sometimes, web services go offline and become interrupted. So when Apphi first went offline, I had high hopes that it would return. But slowly, it became clear that there was something going on besides a run of the mill technical issue. My intuition turned out to be right. Apphi was removed from the AppStore, their Facebook page was deleted (or maybe made private), and there was no communication from the Apphi team on what was going on, other than that there was maintenance.
Days turned to weeks, and still, there was no update from Apphi. For a social media manager, you cannot wait weeks or months for your scheduler to get its stuff together, that’s simply not an option. During the early days of Apphi’s hiatus, I took to Twitter to confirm I wasn’t the only one having issues and noticing all the weirdness. I wasn’t. There were many on Twitter with whom I conversed, and we shared suggestions on what other platforms we could use since Apphi had left us hanging. I ended up switching to Buffer, which is a great scheduling app, but misses some of the key features that Apphi had.
So after I switched to Buffer, I stopped thinking about Apphi altogether. But months after Apphi went dark, I got an email from “Liz from Apphi” that proclaimed “we’re coming back soon!” and promised to give 3 months of Apphi free to users. This email came as a joke to me. Instead of offering refunds, they offer a few months free. I think that is ridiculous. Apphi allowed users to pay for the year and deprived them of service for months, which means users should be able to receive a refund, but Apphi doesn’t care to do good business. They’d rather email you a picture of a dog in costume and offer you three months free for a service that no longer functions the way it did when users paid for it.
Overall, Apphi Post has proven to be an unreliable and untrustworthy business, and in my opinion, it should be avoided at all costs. They do not communicate well with their customers, and they do not care for their customers well. If Apphi wants to gain my trust back, they need to reach out to their customers and give refunds for the months that their service was unusable. That is the right thing to do.
If you’re looking for an alternative to Apphi, you may want to look into an app called Planoly. It supposedly does many of the things Apphi does. It is a bit too pricey for the number of accounts I’d need to use it with, so I have not given it a try, but I’ve heard good things about it. And if you’re looking for a reliable, no-frills social media scheduler, then you should check out Buffer.