Scheduling tools mostly compete on features. For anyone running more than about two brands, the feature list stops mattering long before the invoice does, because the dominant term is how the vendor counts.
Three ways vendors count
- Per channel or per account. Every connected profile adds to the bill. Buffer, Publer, SocialPilot and Vista Social all work broadly this way.
- Per seat. You pay for humans. Fine for a team of two with forty accounts; painful for one person managing six clients.
- Per brand or workspace. You pay for the container, and the accounts inside it are unmetered.
These converge at one brand and diverge sharply after that.
The arithmetic at thirty channels
Take a shape that is common and not extreme: six brands, five networks each. Thirty connected accounts, one person operating them.
| Model | Charges per | Roughly, at 30 channels |
|---|---|---|
| PostWharf — Plus | Workspace | $67 / month |
| Buffer — Essentials | Channel | $135 / month, or $112.50 billed yearly |
| Publer — Business | Account | $210 / month at $7 per account, or $151.20 billed yearly |
| SocialPilot — Ultimate | Account | $200 / month for 50 accounts |
| Vista Social — Advanced | Profile | $149 / month for 30 profiles |
| Metricool — Starter | Brand | $45 / month, or $36 billed yearly, plus $10 per X account |
Read from each vendor's published pricing page on 24 September 2026. Prices move; the shape of the difference does not.
The part the table misses
Per-channel pricing does not just cost more. It changes what you do.
When each account has a price, you start asking whether a brand's Pinterest is worth $5 a month before you have any data about whether Pinterest works for that brand. You end up testing fewer networks, which is the opposite of what a distribution tool should encourage. The tool has a financial opinion about your strategy.
The same logic applies to dormant accounts. A brand's YouTube might post twice a year. Under per-channel pricing you disconnect it and reconnect it later — except reconnecting means re-authorising, which means the token dance again, which means people just leave it disconnected and post manually.
Where per-channel is the right answer
It genuinely is, sometimes. If you run one brand on three networks, per-channel pricing is usually the cheapest option available — often free. Buffer's free tier covers three channels with ten queued posts each, and that is a real product, not a trap. Paying $15 a month for workspace pricing to hold three channels is worse value.
The crossover is somewhere around eight to ten channels. Below it, count-based pricing wins. Above it, the counting is the cost.
What to check before switching
- Count your actual channels, including the dormant ones you would reconnect if they were free.
- Check whether the cap is on accounts or on posts. A tier that allows unlimited accounts but 200 posts a month is a different constraint, and for a high-volume single brand it can bite harder.
- Check the per-network surcharges. X's API is paid, and several vendors pass that through separately.
- Check what happens at the limit. Silent overage billing and a hard refusal are very different things to discover in month two.
PostWharf prices per workspace and does not meter connected accounts — the tiers separate on posts per month and number of workspaces. The pricing page has the numbers, and every comparison page shows the arithmetic against one specific competitor.
Common questions
What is per-channel pricing?
A pricing model that bills for each social account you connect, so the cost rises every time you add a network or a brand rather than staying tied to the amount of work you do.
When does per-channel pricing stop making sense?
Once you run more than one brand. By around thirty connected channels the pricing model, rather than the feature list, becomes the deciding factor between tools.
Is per-channel pricing ever the right choice?
Yes. If you run a single brand on two or three networks and do not expect to add more, a per-channel plan is usually cheaper than a per-workspace one.
PostWharf is priced per workspace rather than per connected channel, and every plan carries unlimited channels. See per-brand pricing.