Live feature
The matching engine
When you open an exchange, PodSwap does not show you a feed. It runs a scoring query over every queue waiting for engagement and serves you the single highest-scoring one. These are the weights. Note what this is not: there is no model here and nothing is learned from you. The AI that runs PodSwap built and documented this query; it does not decide your matches. Arithmetic does, and it is published in full below.
- Exact bracket match
- +100,000
- Exact niche match
- +100
- Follower brackets
- 17
- Tie-break
- Oldest queue first
The weights, in full
An exact follower-bracket match adds 100,000. The nearest neighbouring bracket adds 90,000, and each bracket after that is worth 10,000 less, down to a floor of 10,000.
The ladder is not symmetrical, and the reason is worth knowing if you are checking the arithmetic. Brackets are awarded in order of distance, and where two are equally far away the smaller one is awarded first — so from the fifth rung, the fourth is worth 90,000 and the sixth 80,000. Accounts slightly smaller than you are marginally preferred to accounts slightly larger.
An exact niche match adds only 100, and a shared parent category adds 50. They are added together rather than chosen between, so a candidate in your niche and your category scores 150. The ratio to bracket is deliberate: bracket outranks niche by three orders of magnitude.
What a paid tier buys depends on the exchange. On comments the boost is 20 against a bracket term of 100,000, so it never outranks a closer bracket. On saves and shares it is 500,000, which does. On follows and stories there is no subscription term at all — position there is bought with unspent points and a completed profile.
The reason it differs is that each exchange sets its own priority independently, and two of them treat a paid tier as decisive while two do not weigh it at all. If you have read a single pair of numbers for this anywhere, including on an older version of this page, it was wrong for at least four of the five exchanges.
Why bracket beats niche
A 400-follower account commenting on a post from a 2-million-follower account is not an exchange. Nothing comes back. Weighting bracket a thousand times above niche is how the engine refuses that trade on your behalf.
The practical effect surprises people: an account in a completely unrelated niche but your exact bracket will outrank a perfect niche match one rung away. On comments that holds without exception, paid tier or not.
What you will never be shown
Your own accounts are excluded outright.
Any queue you have already engaged with is excluded permanently.
Any post you have already engaged with is excluded from that exchange, permanently. Not from the others: each exchange keeps its own history, so a post you commented on can still reach you in saves.
When those filters leave nothing, a fallback query runs with the bracket and niche terms stripped, so an exchange never dead-ends on an empty screen.
Common questions
How does PodSwap decide who sees my Instagram post?
A weighted query scores every waiting queue. An exact follower-bracket match is worth 100,000, a neighbouring bracket between 10,000 and 90,000, an exact niche match 100 and a shared category 50. The highest total wins, and ties go to the oldest queue.
Can I pay to be matched more often?
What a paid tier buys depends on the exchange. On comments the boost is 20 against a bracket term of 100,000, so it never outranks a closer bracket. On saves and shares it is 500,000, which does. On follows and stories there is no subscription term at all — position there is bought with unspent points and a completed profile. There is also no billing integration today, so paid tiers cannot be bought and are waitlist-only.
Will I see the same post twice?
Not within one exchange: every queue and every post you have engaged with there is excluded permanently. Between exchanges it can happen, because each exchange checks only its own history. Follows are deduped permanently and story views pairwise per calendar month.
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Every figure on this page comes from the running product. Where a number could not be verified it is not printed — see the methodology.
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