Buffer Pricing and Buffer Cost 2026 at $6 a Channel

How much does Buffer cost?

Read off buffer.com/pricing in October 2026, Buffer has a permanent free plan and then charges per channel. Free covers 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel and 1 user. Essentials is $6 per channel a month on monthly billing, or $5 a channel billed yearly ($60 a year). Team is $12 per channel a month, or $10 billed yearly ($120 a year). The AI Assistant is included on every plan, including free. Channels 1 to 10 are billed at that full rate; channels 11 to 25 cost $4 each on both paid plans, 26 to 50 cost $3, and anything past 50 costs $1 on Essentials or $2 on Team.

A correction, because we got this wrong before. An earlier version of this article gave $5 and $10 as the monthly rates. Those are the yearly-billing rates. Buffer's own pricing file in the Internet Archive shows $6 and $12 monthly as far back as May 2026, so this is our misread, not a price rise.

The word doing all the work in that answer is "channel." A channel is one connected social account: one Instagram profile, one Facebook page, one LinkedIn page, one TikTok account. Most pricing articles quote $5 and stop there, which is the yearly rate for a single channel and understates the bill for anyone running a normal multi-platform presence.

Buffer pricing in plain terms

The free plan is unusually generous for this category and it refills: those 10 scheduled slots per channel free up again as posts publish, so a light poster on three networks can run on $0 indefinitely. That is a real free plan, not a demo, and it is the reason Buffer keeps showing up on lists of tools people never cancel.

Buffer's volume pricing by channel count

These are Buffer's own example totals from its pricing file, per month. The yearly column is what each month works out to when you pay for the year up front.

Two things in that table are worth knowing before you buy. First, Team is double Essentials only up to ten channels. From the eleventh channel both plans charge the same $4, so a 25-channel team pays $60 more a month for unlimited users and approvals, not twice the bill. Second, the yearly saving is two months free, which is 16.7 percent. Buffer's FAQ calls it a 20% discount, and its own numbers do not support that.

What does Buffer actually cost for a real setup?

Run the arithmetic on a normal account list rather than the headline. A solo creator on LinkedIn, X and Instagram stays on free unless they want unlimited scheduling, in which case Essentials is $18 a month, or $15 billed yearly. A small brand on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and a YouTube channel is six channels: $36 a month on Essentials ($30 yearly), $72 on Team ($60 yearly).

An agency running those six channels for two clients is twelve channels, so $68 a month on Essentials (ten channels at $6, two at $4) and $128 on Team if several people need logins and approval steps. None of those numbers are unfair for what Buffer does. They are simply not $5, and the gap between the marketing price and the real invoice is what most people are trying to work out when they search for the cost.

Is Buffer's free plan actually usable?

Yes, more than almost any competitor's. Three channels covers the majority of solo creators, 10 queued posts per channel is roughly two weeks of a sane posting cadence, and the slots recycle as posts go out. You also get the AI Assistant, basic Insights and API access on free, which are usually the first things a vendor strips out.

The ceiling shows up in two places. You cannot add a fourth channel without paying, and the 10-slot queue means you cannot batch a month of content in one sitting, which is exactly what people who repurpose tend to want to do. If your workflow is "one afternoon a month, load everything," the free tier will frustrate you long before the channel limit does.

Does Buffer's AI Assistant write your posts?

It edits and reshapes, which is not the same thing. The AI Assistant lives inside the composer and works on text that is already there: shorten this for X, expand this into a LinkedIn version, change the tone, split this into a few posts, suggest a reply. On the free plan you get 5 AI reply suggestions a week; Essentials and Team make those unlimited.

What it does not do is go and read the 2,500 word article you published on Monday, or the 40 minute podcast you recorded on Tuesday, and come back with the week of channel-native posts hiding inside them. It works on the post in front of it. That distinction matters when you are pricing your stack, because an empty queue is not a scheduling problem and no scheduler tier fixes it.

Buffer versus a repurposing tool and the cost that really counts

Schedulers and repurposing tools get compared as if they were alternatives, and they are not. Buffer's job starts when a finished post exists. A repurposing tool's job ends there. The reason this shows up as a pricing question is that teams buy the scheduler first, keep paying for it, and still miss three weeks of posting because nobody wrote anything.

Put a number on the other half. If a source piece takes two to three hours to turn by hand into a thread, a LinkedIn post, captions and an email, and you publish four pieces a month, that is roughly ten hours. At any professional hourly rate, ten hours dwarfs both subscriptions. That is the comparison worth running: not $6 a channel against $49 a month, but the subscription against the posts that never got written. The full Buffer comparison lays out where each tool wins, with a plain cross on every row where we do not.

How does Buffer compare to Hootsuite on price?

They are not in the same bracket. Hootsuite starts at $99 per user per month billed annually, verified on hootsuite.com in July 2026, and rises to $199 and $399, with no free plan (the full Hootsuite pricing breakdown covers why the per-seat math surprises most teams). Buffer starts at $0 and charges by channel. The difference in price buys governance and intelligence: a unified inbox, social listening, approval workflows, competitor benchmarking and executive reporting.

For a team of one or two, almost none of that gets opened, and the honest recommendation is Buffer plus something that writes. For a marketing department where four people touch social and legal wants an approval trail, Hootsuite's price is doing real work. If you are weighing schedulers against writers, the content repurposing tools rundown sorts every category by what it is actually for, with verified pricing. If LinkedIn is the one channel you actually care about scheduling well, the LinkedIn post scheduler page covers what the LinkedIn API will and will not let a scheduler do. If X is the channel you care about, the per-post rates behind X API pricing decide more about your real cost than any subscription tier does.

How does Buffer compare to SocialBee on price?

This is the closer comparison, because both price by account rather than by seat. On monthly billing Buffer's Essentials is $6 per channel, so 4 channels is $24, 5 is $30 and 10 is $60. SocialBee, re-checked on socialbee.com in October 2026, is $29 for 5 profiles and $49 for 10, or $24.17 and $40.83 on annual billing. Buffer is cheaper only below five accounts. At five the two are a dollar apart, and from there SocialBee pulls away: 10 accounts is $60 on Buffer against $49, 15 is $80 against $64, and 50 is $195 against $179 on SocialBee's Pro50, with Buffer's volume tiers already counted. On yearly billing the picture is the same a little lower: $50 against $40.83 at ten accounts.

The sharper difference is what each one charges for a second person. Buffer moves you from Essentials to Team, which doubles the rate on the first ten channels: 10 channels for a two-person team is $120 a month, though Team then allows unlimited users. SocialBee includes one user on both its cheapest tiers but sells extra seats flat at $10 a month, so the same setup is $59. SocialBee is far cheaper for small teams, and Buffer's unlimited-user Team plan wins back the advantage somewhere past five or six logins.

Buffer keeps one advantage outright: a genuine permanent free plan for 3 channels, where SocialBee has none at all, only a 14-day trial with no card and a 30-day refund window. A creator on three networks should stay on Buffer. The full SocialBee pricing breakdown works the add-on arithmetic through four real setups.

How does Buffer compare to Zoho Social on price?

This is the most interesting price comparison Buffer has, because the two tools meter opposite things and the winner flips depending on the shape of your accounts rather than how many you have.

Buffer charges $6 per channel per month on Essentials, or $5 billed yearly, with no notion of which network a channel belongs to. Zoho Social charges per brand, where a brand is one complete set of channels holding a maximum of one profile per network. Standard is $15 a month, or $10 billed annually, and covers twelve channels: Facebook, X, Instagram, both LinkedIn types, Google Business Profile, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky.

Read the third row carefully, because it is the one that catches people. Zoho Social has no way to put two Instagram accounts in one brand. A second account on the same network means a second brand, and Standard accepts no add-ons at all, so you are moved to Professional at $30 a month before you buy the extra brands at $14.50 each. Buffer simply charges for one more channel, $5 billed yearly. If your accounts cluster on a few networks, Buffer is dramatically cheaper and Zoho Social is close to unusable at the price.

Flip it around and Zoho wins just as decisively. A single business posting one account each to a dozen networks pays Buffer about $57 a month billed yearly and Zoho $10. That is close to $560 a year, pointed the other way. The twelve and twenty channel Buffer figures use the yearly rates implied by Buffer's own 10 and 25 channel totals.

Two more things belong in the comparison. Buffer has the better free plan for testing, with three channels and refilling scheduled slots, while Zoho Social’s free tier covers six channels but drops YouTube, Pinterest and TikTok entirely. And Buffer charges per channel for unlimited users on Team at $12 a channel ($10 billed yearly), where Zoho meters seats separately at $10 each on top of the brand. The full breakdown, including the add-on ladder and the point at which the Agency tiers take over, is in our Zoho Social pricing article, and the Zoho Social alternative page covers what neither tool does.

How does Buffer compare to Planable on price?

These two meter completely different things, so the winner flips on how many people touch the account rather than on how many accounts you run. Buffer charges per channel and charges again for teamwork: Essentials is $6 a channel for one user, and Team is $12 a channel, which doubles the rate on the first ten channels the moment a second person needs a login. Planable, verified on planable.io in August 2026, charges per workspace and never charges for seats: Basic is $39 a month for 4 social pages and Pro is $59 for 10, both with unlimited users.

Count channels alone and Buffer wins up to about ten. Add a team and the ranking inverts much sooner. Buffer figures below are monthly billing.

For a team the crossover sits at four channels, where Planable is already $9 cheaper; for one person it sits at ten. From four channels upward any team of two or more pays less on Planable, with the gap widening as channels grow because Buffer's team surcharge multiplies across every one of them.

Two caveats keep this honest. Buffer discounts channels above ten, so narrow the top of that gap slightly. And Planable caps how many posts you can create, at 60 a month on Basic and 150 on Pro, which Buffer does not do at all: across the 4 and 10 pages those plans cover, both work out to 15 posts per page per month. If you publish daily on every channel, Buffer's higher bill buys a limit you will not hit, and that is worth more than the saving. The full breakdown is in the Planable pricing article.

If you are still deciding whether Buffer is the right scheduler at all, our Buffer review goes through the Capterra and Trustpilot feedback, the pros and cons, and how it compares to SocialBee and Social Champ for a two-person team.

Hidden costs to watch in Buffer

There are no surprise overage fees, which is a genuine strength: Buffer does not meter AI credits or charge you for going over a post count. The costs that creep in are structural. Every new platform you decide to try adds a channel and a line to the invoice, so experimenting is not free the way it is on a flat-priced tool. Adding a second person who needs their own login pushes you from Essentials to Team, doubling the per-channel rate.

The third is the one nobody budgets for: the content upstream. If the posts come out of articles you publish, those articles have to exist and be found, and pushing new URLs through the official Google indexing API is its own separate job from anything a social scheduler touches. Buffer sits at the very end of that chain.

Which Buffer plan should you buy?

Stay on free if you post to three channels or fewer and two weeks of queued posts is enough runway. Move to Essentials when you add a fourth channel or when the 10-slot queue starts blocking a batching habit, and expect $6 times your channel count on monthly billing, or $5 billed yearly, up to ten channels and $4 each after that. Move to Team only when a second person genuinely needs their own seat or an approval step exists, because it doubles the rate on your first ten channels for collaboration features rather than publishing ones.

If you get to the end of that and the queue is still running dry, the plan was never the problem. The fix sits upstream, in turning content you already published into the posts that fill it. The content repurposing tool shows what one article turns into across every channel, and the honest test for whether you need one covers the break-even point where it stops being cheaper to do by hand.