Instant Media
en
РусскийCache vs. fresh download
What the free plan actually delivers, and what a paid plan adds.
Instant Media shares one media cache — over 50 million files — with our other bots. This is what separates the free plan from a paid one.
Free: cache-only
A free group only gets a link delivered if that exact file is already in the shared cache — meaning someone, anywhere, downloaded it before through one of our bots. A link nobody has requested yet is silently skipped: no download is attempted, so free groups never wait on a slow fetch, but they also never get the very first request for a brand-new post.
Paid: fresh downloads too
Pro, Expert and Ultra groups fall through to a fresh download whenever the cache misses: the bot fetches the media from the source itself, subject to the plan's weekly traffic and file-size caps (see Limits and quota), then caches the result — for everyone else, including free groups, to reuse afterwards.
Cache hits do not count against a paid group's weekly traffic — only fresh downloads do.
Why this matters
Because the cache is shared, a link a paid group downloaded once can later appear "for free" in an unrelated free group that happens to post the same link. This is expected, not a bug — the cache is a shared resource across every bot and every group.
See Plans for the traffic and file-size numbers per tier.