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Buffer pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Buffer (buffer.com) is a social media management tool. Priced per connected social channel per month; Essentials allows one user, and Team adds unlimited team members.. Free plan: 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel at a time, 1 user, 3,000 API requests a month..

What Buffer costs

  • 1 user, 5 profiles: $30/mo (Essentials at $6/channel/mo monthly x 5 channels = $30. Free covers only 3 channels; Essentials has 1 user and unlimited scheduled posts per channel, so 60 posts a month and 30 queued fit. The $6 monthly rate is inferred from '$60 billed yearly (save 2 months)', not printed on the page.)
  • 3 users, 15 profiles: $180/mo (Team at $12/channel/mo monthly x 15 channels = $180, with unlimited seats (Essentials is 1 user only). Channels above 10 cost less at an unpublished rate, so the true total is at most $180.)
  • 5 users, 50 profiles: custom pricing (custom: 50 channels on Team need the volume rate for channels above 10, which is not published. At the $12 standard rate it would be $600/mo, an upper bound; the official page lists no agency plan.)

Plan compared: Essentials, 5 channels, monthly billing. Prices are USD per month on monthly billing (annual-only plans divided by 12). The headline is 1 user scheduling about 60 posts a month to 5 profiles of one brand; the team figure is 3 users with 3 brands (15 profiles) and the agency figure 5 users with 10 client brands (50 profiles).

What Buffer does

Core: Team workspaces & roles (partly), Scheduling & content calendar, Instagram & Facebook publishing (partly), Queues & evergreen recycling (partly).

Important: Short link creation (partly), Link-in-bio page (partly), API & integrations (partly), Native mobile apps (partly), AI features (partly), Security & compliance (partly), TikTok & YouTube video (partly), LinkedIn, X & Threads, AI content assistant (partly), Analytics & reports (partly).

Also has: Click analytics (partly), UTM & campaign tracking (partly), Pinterest publishing (partly), Design & media library (partly), Unified social inbox (partly), Approvals & collaboration (partly), Client & agency tools (partly), Mobile apps (partly), API & integrations.

Buffer price hikes

  • Buffer quietly cut what you get · Jan 13, 2026
    Essentials and Team tags limit cut from unlimited to 250 tags, per PricingSaaS. Its diff ID points to an earlier change, so the effective date is unverified.

Cheaper alternatives to Buffer

At 1 user with 5 profiles, Buffer costs $30/mo. 1 social media management tool costs less:

  • Later: $25/mo (Starter plan, monthly billing (1 user, one 8-profile social set)), covers 76% of Buffer; missing or partial: Queues & evergreen recycling, Short link creation, Security & compliance, LinkedIn, X & Threads (partly), UTM & campaign tracking

Buffer alternatives: 3 social media management tools compared, at every size.

Other kinds of products that cover part of Buffer

  • Semrush (SEO tools): covers 48% of Buffer; missing or partial: Scheduling & content calendar (partly), Link-in-bio page, TikTok & YouTube video, LinkedIn, X & Threads, Pinterest publishing

Every change we logged

  • Jan 13, 2026 · Limits cut: Essentials and Team tags limit cut from unlimited to 250 tags, per PricingSaaS. Its diff ID points to an earlier change, so the effective date is unverified.

Sources

Pricing page: buffer.com/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Official pricing page (fetched 2026-10-17) prints only annual rates ($5 Essentials, $10 Team per channel per month, billed yearly); the monthly $6 and $12 are inferred from its 'save 2 months' label. PricingSaaS logs no increases; its 2026-03-03 -75% entries match a default-channel change (4 to 1) at unchanged per-channel prices, so they are not cuts, and the price-increase web search could not run because the turn's search budget was used up.