Why do bought followers drop — and what does a refill actually cover?
Some drop-off is normal and unavoidable: platforms continuously remove inactive and automated accounts, and any account you bought engagement from can be caught in that. A healthy order holds most of its delivered count after the first week. pufferboost monitors delivered counts for 30 days and automatically tops up followers and likes that fall below what you paid for.
Last updated: 3 August 2026
Why drops happen at all
Every social platform runs continuous cleanup against inactive, spam and automated accounts. That process does not care where a follower came from — organic follows get swept up in it too. When you buy followers, you are buying real accounts' follow actions, and some fraction of those accounts will eventually be removed or go dormant.
A second, more mundane cause: people unfollow. That happens to organic growth at a similar rate and is not specific to purchased engagement.
What a normal curve looks like
As a rule of thumb used across this industry: holding roughly 90% or more of a delivered count after the first week is healthy. Losing a fifth of it within a couple of weeks suggests the underlying accounts were low-quality or automated. A slow drift of a percent or so over several months is ordinary audience behaviour, not a delivery failure.
We publish this benchmark rather than a flattering number of our own, because we have not yet run a long enough retention study to report one honestly. When we have, it will appear here with the sample size and the date attached.
What the 30-day refill covers
- Which services: those marked with a refill guarantee at purchase — in practice followers and likes. Views are consumption events and cannot drop, so they are not covered.
- What triggers it: the delivered count falling below the quantity you paid for, measured against the count recorded at delivery.
- How it runs: automatically, on a schedule, for 30 days after delivery. You can also trigger it yourself from the order page, or by asking your AI assistant if you use the MCP connection.
- What voids it: deleting the post, making the account private, or changing the @handle — in each case the original target no longer exists to refill.
A refill restores the count you paid for. It is not a cash refund. If an order cannot be delivered at all, that is a different case and is refunded automatically — see the refund policy.