Hashtag counter
Paste a caption, get your hashtag and mention counts with duplicates flagged, checked against Instagram's hard 30 limit and the conventions everywhere else.
What the limits actually are
- Instagram is the only major network with a hard hashtag cap: 30 per caption or comment. Everything else bounds you by total characters, not tag count.
- A hashtag needs a letter in it: #2026 alone does not register as a tag on most networks, while #top10 does. This counter applies the same rule.
- Styled Unicode text breaks hashtags everywhere: #𝗹𝗮𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗵 and #launch are different strings and the styled one matches nothing. Keep tags plain.
- Mentions are counted separately above because they behave differently: a mention notifies a person, a hashtag categorizes a post. Mass mentions get posts flagged far faster than mass hashtags do.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags can I use on Instagram?
30 per caption or comment. It is a hard limit: go over and Instagram blocks the post or silently drops the caption. Instagram's own guidance for years has been that a handful of specific tags beats maxing out the 30, but 30 is the ceiling the platform enforces.
How many hashtags should I use on X?
X has no hashtag limit beyond the 280-character budget the tags themselves consume. Convention is one or two at most; posts stuffed with tags read as spam to humans, and every tag spends characters your actual sentence needs.
Do hashtags still matter?
Less than they used to, and unevenly by network. Discovery has shifted toward keyword and semantic search on most platforms, so the words in your caption do more work than the tags below it. Hashtags still help as categorization, especially for communities that live under a tag, but they are seasoning now, not strategy.
Do hashtags in the first comment work on Instagram?
Yes, hashtags in a comment count for categorization the same way caption hashtags do, and the 30 limit applies there too. Some people prefer the comment purely for looks, keeping the caption clean. posthell's first-comment feature exists for exactly this move.
Why does this tool flag duplicate hashtags?
Because a repeated tag adds nothing: the post is either categorized under it or not. Duplicates usually sneak in when a saved tag block is pasted onto a caption that already had some of the same tags, and they make the post look machine-assembled.
Right tags, right network, without the copy-paste
posthell publishes one post to 15 networks with per-network text, so the Instagram version carries its tags, the X version carries one, and LinkedIn gets its three. The first comment is built in too.