How to Evaluate a Social Media Scheduler Before You Depend On It

Scheduler evaluations tend to happen in the wrong order. The demo looks fine. The composer works. The queue does what a queue does. So you connect eight accounts, move your calendar over, and fourteen months later you find out what you actually bought, usually on the day the bill changes or the day you try to leave.

The monthly price is the least interesting number in this decision. What matters is how much of your operation ends up living inside one vendor, and how expensive that is to reverse. None of the five questions below are answerable from a landing page, which is rather the point.

1. Channels: count them, then read the fine print

Channel count is the headline number and the most misleading one, because the word channel is quietly doing several jobs at once.

First: is a channel an account or a network? Ten channels can mean ten accounts on one network, or one account on ten networks, and the difference decides whether the number is generous or irrelevant to you.

Second: what does supported mean for each network? A network can be listed and still not do the thing you need. Text but no video. Images but no carousels. No native threads. No Stories or Reels scheduling. No first comment. The logo on the grid tells you almost nothing about the post types behind it.

Third, and most consequential: who holds the API access? For several networks the vendor must hold approved API credentials, which makes their access a dependency of yours. If they lose it, your channel goes dark, and you had no vote and no warning. Ask what happened the last time a network changed its API terms.

For disclosure, since this is our checklist: postqueen supports 30 channels, and the plans cap how many you can connect at once at 5, 10 and 30, with the top plan uncapped. Find the cap before the trial ends, whatever tool you pick.

2. Data ownership: where the content lives and who can read it

There is an export button in every tool. The question is what comes out of it.

• Does the export include drafts and scheduled posts, or only what already published?
• Does it include media, or URLs pointing at media the vendor hosts (which stop resolving once you leave)?
• Does it include analytics history, which usually exists nowhere else?
• Is it a real format you can import somewhere, or a CSV of text that recreates none of the structure?

Then the quieter questions. Where is it hosted and under which jurisdiction. Which subprocessors touch it. Where your OAuth tokens sit, and what the blast radius is if that store is breached, because those tokens can post as you.

Self-hosting is the strongest available answer to all of this, and it is not free even when it costs nothing. postqueen is AGPL-3.0 with a public Docker image, so you can run it yourself at no license cost, having then signed up to run a database, manage backups, and apply upgrades. That trade is right for some teams and wrong for others. What matters during an evaluation is whether the option exists at all, because a tool you could leave behaves differently from one you cannot.

3. Automation surface: what can you drive without a browser?

This is the question that separates tools that stay useful from tools you outgrow. Run one test: can you create, schedule, and publish a post without touching the UI?

If the answer is no, every automation you build against it is browser automation, which breaks on the next redesign. If yes, look at what the surface actually includes.

• A documented REST API with the same power as the UI. Plenty of APIs are read-only, or expose a fraction of what the composer can do.
• A CLI, if your drafts already live in files and your workflow already lives in a terminal.
• An MCP server, if you want assistants driving it through a typed contract instead of guesswork.
• Outbound webhooks, so your own systems learn what happened without polling for it.
• An SDK in your language, which mostly saves you from writing the retry logic yourself.
• A workflow node for whichever orchestrator you already run.
• Published rate limits. An unpublished rate limit is a rate limit you discover at the worst possible time.

# the only integration test that really matters
postqueen integrations:list
postqueen posts:create --channel linkedin \
  --at "2026-08-01T09:00:00Z" \
  --text "Scheduled from CI, no browser involved."

postqueen's answer to that list is a CLI (the postqueen package on npm), a REST API, webhooks, a Node SDK, an n8n node, and a built-in MCP server. Hold every candidate to the same list, ours included, and give the trial an afternoon with a real script rather than a click-through.

4. Pricing traps

The useful question is not whether a plan is expensive. It is what happens to the bill when things go well, since that is the scenario you are buying for.

• Per-seat pricing where a seat is a seat, even for someone who only needs to look. Ask what a read-only user costs.
• Channel caps that push you a full tier for one extra account. Count your accounts, including the ones you know you will add.
• AI credits that expire monthly and are quietly the reason a tier exists. Metered means the tier is a floor, not a price.
• Annual discounts that are annual contracts. A discount you can walk away from and a contract you cannot are very different products at the same number.
• Post limits. Ask whether posts are metered at all, and what happens at the ceiling.
• Feature gating on the exact thing you evaluated it for. API access appearing only on the top tier is the classic version.
• Overage behavior. When you cross a line, does it stop posting or does it bill you? Both are defensible. Not telling you is not.

Ours, plainly, so you can read it the same way: postqueen is $20, $33, $49, and $99 per month, with four or five months free on yearly billing, a 7-day free trial and no cancellation friction. Posts are unlimited on every plan. The metered things are channels (5, 10, 30, then uncapped), AI images (20, 100, 300, 500), and AI videos (3, 10, 30, 60). You may well decide another tool's table suits you better. The point is to read every table with the same suspicion.

5. Exit costs, the number nobody quotes

Every scheduler is cheap to start and expensive to leave, and the second half never shows up in the comparison. Price it before you commit, while you still have the leverage of not having committed.

Reconnecting thirty OAuth channels is a real day of work, and a few of them will fight you over account types and permissions. Scheduled posts in the old tool usually do not migrate at all, so somebody re-enters them by hand. Automations written against a proprietary API get rewritten. Analytics history living only in the vendor's database is simply gone, and with it your ability to compare this year to last.

A scheduler's real price is not on the pricing page. It is the cost of the day you decide to leave.

You can lower that number from day one, and it costs almost nothing while you are not under pressure. Keep the source of your content in files you own and treat the scheduler as a rendering target. Export monthly, and actually open the export once. Build against documented APIs rather than UI habits. Prefer an open license where the option exists. None of this is disloyalty to a vendor. It is the ordinary hygiene of depending on something.

The short version

Bring your real posting mix to the trial. Then answer five things honestly, for every candidate, in the same words:

• Channels: does supported mean the post types you actually publish, and who holds the API access?
• Data: what comes out of the export, where do the tokens live, and can you run it yourself if you ever need to?
• Automation: can a script do everything the UI can, and is it documented?
• Pricing: what is metered, what expires, and what happens when you cross a line?
• Exit: what does the day you leave cost, and what can you do now to make it cheaper?

A scheduler becomes infrastructure the moment more than one person depends on it. Evaluate it like infrastructure: ask what it looks like when it goes wrong, then pick the one whose answers you can live with.