If you are managing multiple accounts then you would have to use bot. I have tried with followlikers in the past with the following setting. 1 proxy to 3 account. But the issue is that eventually you would be ask for sms verification. That is where the cost starts to kick in. It is not cheap for SMS verification if you are talking about large volume of accounts. In your case it is cheap since it is only 20 accounts. I have managed 900 instagram accounts previously. Getting my proxies at $0.75 per dedi proxy with random subnet. Each IG account verified I am getting at $0.10 per account.
Thus my cost breakdown is as below.
IG account= 900 x $0.10 = $90 one time cost
Proxies= $0.75 x 300 (1 proxy to 3 IG account) = $225 monthly
SMS Verification = $0.05 per verification x 900 (each IG account would face min of 1 time reverification monthly based upon my experience) = $45
Dedicated Server (Windows - Self installation as I sell Windows key so I can buy original OEM at $9 per pcs) - $30 from Hetzner monthly
Total cost monthly = $45 + $225 +$30 = $300 (monthly recurring) + $90 (one off) = $390
Monthly revenue = $36
Net loss = ($354)
My setup:
500 IG accounts following big major IG account (I use social bakers and look at those big twitter accounts as a guide)
400 IG accounts on trending hashtag -
http://top-hashtags.com/instagram/ using this as a guide
Images I use scrapper to scrape based upon keywords and batch resize them to convert into other format (if original is jpg,I would convert to png)
Grouping images and saving them into different folders
Following at 15min interval and each interval follow about 1 - 6
Unfollow at 35 min interval and each interval unfollow about 1 - 3
Prepare comments in bulk and convert them into spinner format. I prepare about 1,000 unique comments handwritten by myself not scrapped. This is very time consuming.
Like picture at 40 min interval. Each interval would like between 1 - 6 images
Duration of running this setup: 6 months
Total Net loss = $2,800 - some months I lose more than $354. Think about this I am not even counting the cost of software to run the bot.
Reason for loss = Some CPA offers just dont appeal to public. So you need a lot of testing. Whatever the result of your test you monthly overhead is still there.
Potential of bot: Yes possible to make money with bot but it boils down to what offers you are promoting and what is the profit margin per conversion
Why I don't believe in bot for newbies?
Newbies don't have much money to burn in the beginning. And it is not so much about the setup alone. But your choice of offer to promote will affect your profits and loss. Newbies cannot spend so much money for testing without any positive results. This is why I started this guide for newbie so that cost of investment is lower for them.
For others who think this guide is simple, think again. We all begin somewhere. Without a simple guide to make our first batch of money do you think we would invest larger money for bot?
Why I term paid ads as better alternative to bot and much more advance method?
For bot I have to spend more than $10 upfront to promote offers that I do not know if conversion will happen. If I use paid ads, I can control my spending and test which crowd response best to my offers. Once I identify this niche I can either scale up my advertising campaign or use bot as my targeting will be better with all the results from the paid ads.