Delivery controls
Drip-feed
Last updated by The PanelCompare editorial team
Why does drip-feed matter to a buyer?
Drip-feed exists because a step change in a metric is the most visible artefact of a purchase. Spreading 10,000 followers over ten days produces a curve that is harder for a viewer, a brand or a platform heuristic to read as anomalous than the same 10,000 arriving in an hour.
It is also the most expensive misunderstanding on any panel. The quantity field on a drip-feed order is the amount delivered per run, so entering 1,000 with 10 runs orders 10,000 units and charges for 10,000. Buyers who read the field as a total routinely order ten times what they intended, and the cancel window on a running drip-feed is usually already gone.
How does drip-feed show up in a price list?
The catalogue marks eligible rows, sometimes with an explicit drip-feed flag in the API services response, and the order form adds two fields: runs, and interval in minutes.
Through the API it is the same add action with runs and interval parameters. Setting runs to 10 and interval to 60 means ten batches an hour apart. Panel platforms count a drip-feed order as one order regardless of how many runs it contains.
| Quantity entered | Runs | Interval | Total delivered | Delivery span |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 1 | — | 1,000 | One batch |
| 1,000 | 10 | 60 min | 10,000 | 10 hours |
| 500 | 24 | 60 min | 12,000 | 24 hours |
| 250 | 30 | 1,440 min | 7,500 | 30 days |
Source: Derived from the SMM Panel API v2 add-order parameters (justanotherpanel.com/api, verified 2026-09-06).
Think this definition is wrong?
Terminology in this market is set by the panels that use it, and it moves. If a panel uses drip-feed to mean something other than what is written here, send us the listing and we will either correct the definition or record the variant. The process is on the about page.