Entry-level paid plans across the 25 social media schedulers we checked in July 2026 range from $4.99/month (Radaar Basic) to $99/month (Hootsuite Standard and Sprout Social Essentials), with a median entry price of $20/month. But the advertised number rarely matches what you actually pay: many tools price per channel, per seat, or per brand, and several advertise the annual rate as if it were the monthly one. We read every official pricing page ourselves — here is the full index.
Full disclosure: Schedchie is our product — so check the numbers yourself; every competitor price below comes from their official pricing page as of July 2026.
How we built this index
Every price in this article was read directly from the tool's official pricing page in July 2026. No affiliate feeds, no third-party roundups, no cached data from 2024. Where a vendor's page was ambiguous, we recorded only what we could verify and marked the rest with a dash.
While collecting the data, we kept running into the same four pricing-page tricks. Knowing them is half the work of comparing tools:
- Annual price advertised as monthly. Hootsuite's $99, Agorapulse's $79, CoSchedule's $19, and Loomly's $49 are all "per month, billed annually." Loomly's actual month-to-month price is $65, not $49.
- Per-channel multiplication. Buffer's "$5/month" is per channel. Ten channels is $50/month, not $5.
- Per-seat pricing. Sprout Social's $99 and Hootsuite's $99 are per user. A three-person team on Sprout Essentials starts at $297/month.
- Hidden platform add-ons. X (Twitter) costs extra on several tools because of X's API fees: Metricool charges +$5 per X account, CoSchedule +$8/month per X profile. Schedchie handles it as an optional €4.99 add-on per 30 X posts — we'd rather disclose it here than surprise you at checkout.
If you want the deeper feature-by-feature breakdown behind these numbers, our verified alternatives comparison is kept current alongside this index.
The master table: 25 schedulers by entry price (July 2026)
Sorted by cheapest paid plan, ascending. All prices per month as advertised on official pricing pages in July 2026. A dash means the vendor doesn't publish that detail (or we couldn't verify it), so we won't guess.
| Tool | Entry paid plan | What's included | Post limits | Free plan? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Radaar | Basic — $4.99 | 3 profiles | 90 posts/mo | No (14-day trial) |
| Buffer | Essentials — $5/channel | 1 channel per $5; Team is $10/channel | Priced by channel, not posts | Yes |
| Publer | $5 | 1 account; drops to ~$4/account at 3+ | — | Yes (3 accounts, 10 pending posts each) |
| Schedchie | €7.99 flat | Unlimited accounts: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky (X is a €4.99 add-on per 30 posts) | Unlimited | No (14-day trial) |
| Sendible | Core — $9 | 6 profiles | 100 posts/day | — |
| Planoly | Starter — $14 | — | — | Mobile-app-only, 10 uploads |
| Zoho Social | Standard — $15 | 1 brand | — | Yes (6 channels) |
| Pallyy | Starter — $15 | — | 20 posts/mo (Pro $25 is unlimited) | Yes (1 account, 15 posts) |
| FeedHive | Creator — €15 | 4 accounts | Capped | — |
| Tailwind | Pro — $17.99 (promo pricing) | — | — | Yes (1 account, 5 posts) |
| Predis.ai | Core — $19 | — | — | — |
| CoSchedule | Social Calendar — $19/user (annual) | X profiles cost +$8/mo each | — | Yes (1 profile, 15 messages) |
| SocialPilot | Essentials — $20 | 5 accounts; +$4 per extra account | — | — |
| Later | Starter — $25 | 1 social set | 30 posts/profile/mo (Scale $110 is unlimited) | No (dropped it) |
| Metricool | Starter — $25 ($20 annual) | 5 brands; X accounts cost +$5 each | — | Yes (1 brand, 20 posts/mo, 30-day analytics) |
| SocialBee | Bootstrap — $29 | 5 profiles | — | — |
| Social Champ | Standard — $29 | 6 accounts; +$5 per extra profile | — | Yes (3 accounts, 15 posts) |
| MeetEdgar | Eddie — $29.99 | 5 accounts | — | — |
| Planable | Basic — $33/workspace | 4 pages | 60 posts/mo | First 50 posts total |
| Swat.io | Small — €39 | 3 channels | — | — |
| Loomly | Starter — $49 (annual; $65 monthly) | 12 accounts | — | — |
| Agorapulse | $79/user (annual) | Per-seat pricing | — | No (dropped it) |
| Vista Social | Professional — $79 | 15 profiles | — | — |
| Hootsuite | Standard — $99/user (annual) | 10 accounts (Professional $199 for the unlimited-ish tier) | — | No (14-day trial) |
| Sprout Social | Essentials — $99/seat | Per-seat pricing (Standard is $199/seat) | — | No (30-day trial) |
Freshness note: two names you'll still see in older roundups are gone. Crowdfire pivoted away from scheduling in 2026, and SocialOomph shut down entirely after 17 years. If a "best schedulers" list still recommends either, its prices are probably stale too.
What 10 social profiles actually costs
Entry prices only tell you what one profile (or one brand) costs. Most real users — a freelancer with several clients, a small brand on six platforms — need more. Here is the honest monthly math for 10 social profiles, computed from the same July 2026 pricing pages. We only include tools where the math is actually derivable from published pricing.
| Tool | Monthly cost for 10 profiles | How it's calculated |
|---|---|---|
| Schedchie | €7.99 | Flat plan, unlimited accounts and posts |
| Radaar | $9.99 | Standard plan, unlimited profiles |
| Sendible | $39 | Core caps at 6 profiles, so you need Plus at $39 |
| SocialPilot | $40 | $20 Essentials (5 accounts) + 5 × $4 extra accounts |
| Social Champ | $49 | $29 Standard (6 accounts) + 4 × $5 add-on profiles |
| Buffer | $50 | 10 channels × $5 (Essentials) |
| Vista Social | $79 | Professional covers 15 profiles |
| Hootsuite | $99 | Standard covers exactly 10 accounts, per user, billed annually |
| Sprout Social | $99+ | Essentials, per seat — multiply by team size |
The spread is 12x between the cheapest and the most expensive way to run the same 10 profiles. That gap is not about features scaling 12x — it's about which pricing model each vendor chose.
The four pricing models (and who each one punishes)
1. Per-channel (Buffer, Publer)
You pay a small unit price per connected account: $5/channel on Buffer, $5 dropping to roughly $4/account on Publer. This is genuinely the fairest model for someone with 1–3 accounts — you pay almost nothing. It punishes growth: the same Buffer plan that costs $10 for two channels costs $50 for ten, with no volume ceiling in sight.
2. Per-seat (Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse, CoSchedule)
You pay per human user: $99/user at Hootsuite, $99/seat at Sprout, $79/user at Agorapulse, $19/user at CoSchedule. This suits enterprises where approval chains and role permissions matter more than the subscription line item. It punishes small teams brutally — three people on Sprout Essentials is $297/month before you've posted anything.
3. Per-brand or per-workspace (Metricool, Zoho Social, Planable)
You pay per brand or client workspace: Metricool Starter covers 5 brands, Zoho Social Standard covers 1 brand, Planable is $33 per workspace. This maps well to agencies that bill per client and can pass the cost through. It punishes anyone managing many small brands — a freelancer with 8 client workspaces on Planable is looking at $264/month.
4. Flat unlimited (Schedchie, Radaar Standard)
One price, no meters: Schedchie at €7.99 flat and Radaar Standard at $9.99 both offer unlimited profiles. This suits multi-account users — creators on six platforms, freelancers with several clients — who would get multiplied by every other model. The honest caveat on our side: Schedchie has no team roles or approval workflows yet (it's on the roadmap; small teams share a login today, with no per-seat fees), analytics are essential-level rather than enterprise-depth, and X publishing is that €4.99 add-on. If you need enterprise approval chains, a per-seat tool is the right call, and we say so on our own reviews page.
Of the 25 tools in this dataset, only two offer both unlimited accounts and unlimited posts on a flat plan: Schedchie at €7.99 and Radaar Standard at $9.99, with Schedchie the cheaper of the two. Everything else meters you on at least one axis.
Key findings from the July 2026 index
- Entry-level paid plans run from $4.99 to $99/month across the 25 tools, with a median of $20/month.
- Free plans are disappearing: Later and Agorapulse both dropped theirs, leaving no free tier at either.
- Two long-running tools exited the market in 2026 — Crowdfire pivoted away from scheduling and SocialOomph shut down after 17 years.
- X (Twitter) publishing carries a separate fee on at least three tools (Metricool +$5/account, CoSchedule +$8/mo, Schedchie €4.99 per 30 posts) because of X's API pricing.
- At least four tools advertise the annual rate as the headline monthly price: Hootsuite, Agorapulse, CoSchedule, and Loomly ($49 advertised vs $65 month-to-month).
- Running 10 social profiles costs anywhere from €7.99 to $99+/month depending on the pricing model — a 12x spread for the same profile count.
- The cheapest paid plan of all (Radaar Basic, $4.99) caps you at 3 profiles and 90 posts/month; the cheapest genuinely unlimited option is Schedchie at €7.99.
If budget is the main constraint, we also maintain a ranked list of affordable Hootsuite alternatives and a roundup of the best free schedulers still standing in 2026.
FAQ: social media scheduler pricing in 2026
What is the cheapest social media scheduler in 2026?
Radaar Basic at $4.99/month is the cheapest paid plan we found in July 2026, but it caps you at 3 profiles and 90 posts/month. The cheapest plan with unlimited accounts and unlimited posts is Schedchie at €7.99/month; Radaar Standard at $9.99 also removes the profile cap.
How much does a social media scheduler cost for an agency?
It depends heavily on the pricing model. Per-seat tools like Sprout Social ($99/seat) and Agorapulse ($79/user, billed annually) scale with headcount, so a three-person agency team starts around $237–$297/month. Per-workspace tools like Planable ($33/workspace) scale with client count. Flat-rate tools (Schedchie €7.99, Radaar Standard $9.99) don't scale with either, though they lack the approval workflows larger agencies often need.
Which social media schedulers have unlimited posts?
From our July 2026 check: Schedchie (€7.99, also unlimited accounts), Radaar Standard ($9.99), Pallyy Pro ($25), and Later Scale ($110). Most entry plans are capped — Later Starter allows 30 posts per profile per month, Pallyy Starter 20 posts/month, Radaar Basic 90 posts/month, and Planable Basic 60 posts/month.
Is Buffer or Hootsuite cheaper?
For small setups, Buffer: at $5/channel, five channels cost $25/month versus Hootsuite's $99 minimum. The gap narrows as you grow — 10 channels on Buffer is $50 against Hootsuite Standard's $99 for 10 accounts — and Hootsuite's price is per user billed annually, so multi-seat teams pay more again. Buffer still has a free plan; Hootsuite does not.
Do schedulers charge extra for X (Twitter)?
Increasingly, yes, because X charges for API access. Metricool adds $5/month per connected X account, CoSchedule charges $8/month per X profile, and Schedchie sells X publishing as a €4.99 add-on covering 30 posts over 30 days. Check the fine print before assuming X is included in any advertised price.
Which schedulers still offer a free plan in 2026?
Buffer, Publer (3 accounts, 10 pending posts each), Metricool (1 brand, 20 posts/month), Pallyy (1 account, 15 posts), Zoho Social (6 channels), Social Champ (3 accounts, 15 posts), CoSchedule (1 profile, 15 messages), and Tailwind (1 account, 5 posts). Later and Agorapulse dropped their free plans; Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Radaar, and Schedchie never had one — all offer trials instead. Planoly's "free" tier is mobile-app-only with 10 uploads.
Why do advertised prices differ from what I'm charged?
Usually one of four reasons: the advertised price assumes annual billing (Hootsuite, Agorapulse, CoSchedule, Loomly), it's a per-channel unit price (Buffer, Publer), it's per seat (Sprout, Hootsuite), or platform add-ons like X fees apply at checkout. Multiply the unit price by your real account and team count before comparing.
Where Schedchie fits
We built Schedchie for the people the other models punish: creators and freelancers running many profiles who don't need enterprise approval chains. It's €7.99/month flat for unlimited accounts and unlimited posts across Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, and Bluesky, with an AI content assistant, a unified calendar, and Instagram first-comment scheduling included. There's a 14-day free trial — €7.99/month after that, and everything in this article stays true whether you sign up or not: the prices above are on the vendors' own pages, so verify them yourself.