Data vs Plugin Widget

On refreshing: where the job runs, and which accounts it covers

Smash Balloon does not make you refresh a Personal account's token by hand. Its free plugin ships a token refresher that runs on a twice-daily WordPress cron hook and renews that token once it is inside 40 days of its 60-day expiry. The difference is where that job runs. Ours is a hosted hourly job that renews anything with less than 7 days left. Theirs is WP-Cron on the site it serves, and WP-Cron only fires when someone requests a page — which is the failure their own docs troubleshoot.

One exception matters more than any of that, because an Instagram Business or Creator account is the only kind Feedframer connects. Smash Balloon's own connect screen offers two routes, Personal and Business, and its automatic renewal covers the first. Every place the free plugin renews a token tests for a Personal source first — the twice-daily cron, the fail-safe during a feed render, and the renewal when you connect. A Business source, connected through Facebook, is stored with an expiry of 2037 — eleven years out, from a hardcoded default — so none of the three ever select it.

What a Business source holds is a Facebook user token, not a Page token — the plugin reads the Page token while you connect and does not keep it. Those two expire differently. Meta's long-lived Page tokens "do not have an expiration date", while long-lived user tokens last about 60 days and are renewed automatically only by Facebook's own client SDKs, when a person uses the app — never by a server making API calls. We are not telling you your feed stops on day 60: we have not watched a Business source past that point on a live install, and the Pro plugin's source is not published. This is what the free plugin's code does.

Post content is a separate schedule, and here Smash Balloon is the more configurable of the two. Its background check defaults to every 12 hours and can be set to 30 minutes, 1 hour, 12 hours or 24 hours — all four in the free plugin, none of them Pro-only. Feedframer fetches hourly on Premium and daily on Free. If polling frequency on a WordPress site is the thing you are optimising, that is a point for them.

Verified 7 and 9 October 2026 against Smash Balloon Social Photo Feed 6.14.0, the free plugin published on WordPress.org. Token lifetimes are Meta's own, from the access-token documentation linked above.

On price: $49 is Smash Balloon's first year, not its price

Smash Balloon Basic is listed at $49/year for one website. Next to that figure their pricing page prints “Normally $98” and footnotes it: “Special introductory pricing, all renewals are at full price.” So Basic costs $49 in year one and $98 a year after that. Plus is $99 then $198, Elite $149 then $298.

Feedframer Premium is $6/month, or $60/year, and there is no introductory rate to come off. Year one that is $60 against their $49. Every year after it is $60 against $98, which is about 39% less.

The two licences do not cover the same thing, so compare them on what you need. Basic is one WordPress site and includes the widget, which you would otherwise build. Feedframer Premium is 5 Instagram accounts and 100 posts per account, served to as many sites and apps as you like, and you build the display. Smash Balloon also publishes a free plugin on WordPress.org; our free plan is 1 account and 6 posts with unlimited API views.

Prices read on smashballoon.com/instagram-feed/pricing on 9 October 2026. Theirs may have changed since; check before you buy.