Buffer is worth paying for as a solo business once you want to schedule a month of posts in one sitting or run more than three channels. The free plan covers three channels with 10 scheduled posts each, so it runs out when you batch ahead. Paid plans start at $6 per channel a month, or $5 on yearly billing.
Most solo owners can stay free longer than they expect, because the limit is per channel and it counts only posts waiting to go out. The trick is to know which of your habits hits it. What follows is a month of posting, with the exact week the free plan stops working, and prices the fix.
What the free plan gives you, and what it holds back
According to Buffer's pricing page, Free supports up to three channels, with 10 scheduled posts per channel, 100 ideas in the ideas bin, 30 days of insights history, one user, one saved reply and one threaded post. Its AI Assistant is included on every plan; on Free the AI replies are limited to 5 suggestions a week. Essentials and Team lift scheduled posts to unlimited (with a fair-use cap of 5,000 per channel), remove the ideas cap and give unlimited insights history. Team adds unlimited included users.
On price, Buffer charges per connected channel. Essentials is $6 per channel a month on monthly billing, or $5 a month per channel billed yearly ($60 a year for one channel). Team is $12 per channel on monthly billing, or $10 billed yearly ($120 a year). The page's toggle opens on the yearly figures, which is why $5 and $10 are often the first numbers people see. Those rates cover channels one to ten; from the eleventh channel the rate per channel drops. Paid plans also come with a 14-day free trial. Read the figure at checkout before you click; the page is at buffer.com/pricing.
The limit that actually bites: 10 posts waiting, per channel
Read that limit carefully, because it is easy to misread in both directions. Ten scheduled posts per channel means ten posts sitting in the queue at once. It does not mean ten posts a month. Each time a post publishes, a slot opens, so a channel posting twice a week never feels the limit if you top up every couple of weeks.
The limit bites in two situations. The first is batching: sitting down on a quiet Sunday to schedule four weeks of content. At three posts a week that is twelve posts, and the free queue holds ten. The second is posting more often. At one post a day, ten queued posts last ten days, and at two a day they last five.
That gives a simple formula. Divide 10 by your posts per week to get weeks of runway: 10 / 2 = 5 weeks, 10 / 3 = 3.3 weeks, 10 / 5 = 2 weeks, 10 / 7 = 1.4 weeks. If your runway is longer than the gap between your planning sessions, you never hit the wall.
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Buy nowMain example: a solo florist's month
Take a florist who runs the business alone. She posts to Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, and her plan for the month is this.
| Channel | Posts a week | Posts in four weeks | Free queue of 10 lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 16 | 2.5 weeks | |
| 3 | 12 | 3.3 weeks | |
| 1 | 4 | 10 weeks | |
| Total | 8 | 32 |
Here is what happens if she tries to batch a month at once. Instagram needs 16 slots and has 10, Facebook needs 12 and has 10, LinkedIn needs 4 and has 10. She can schedule 24 of her 32 posts in the first sitting, and the remaining 8 wait for a second visit about two weeks later. That is a mild annoyance, not a failure: two planning sessions of 30 minutes instead of one of an hour.
Now cost the alternative. Three Essentials channels would cost $18 a month on monthly billing, or $180 a year billed yearly. What does she gain? One planning session instead of two, saving roughly 15 minutes of context-switching a month, plus unlimited ideas and longer insights history. That is not worth $15 to $18 a month on its own. The verdict for this florist, at this volume, is to stay free and plan fortnightly.
When the maths flips
Change the florist's habits and the answer changes. These are the situations where paying starts to make sense, in the order they usually appear.
- A fourth channel. The free plan stops at three. Add a Pinterest or a second Instagram account for a different brand and you pay for every connected channel, including the three that were free: Buffer's FAQ says plainly that upgrading means paying for each channel. Four channels on Essentials cost $24 a month on monthly billing, or $20 a month billed yearly.
- Posting daily on one or two channels. Seven posts a week means a runway of 1.4 weeks. If you want to plan monthly, you need about 30 slots.
- Seasonal bursts. A florist before Mother's Day or a landscaper at the start of spring wants to schedule six weeks of heavy posting in one go. Pay for the busy two months, then drop back.
- Needing more than 30 days of insights. Free keeps 30 days of history. If you want to compare this spring with last spring, paid plans keep the data.
- Bringing in a helper. Free and Essentials include one user. A second person posting means Team, at double the per-channel price ($12 a channel on monthly billing, $10 yearly).
You can pay monthly and cancel. For the florist's Mother's Day burst, Essentials on three channels for two months is $36 on monthly billing, and she would then drop back to Free. A burst of two weeks or less may fit inside the 14-day free trial instead: Buffer's FAQ says scheduled posts still publish after a trial ends, provided the channels are not locked, and channels beyond the free three are locked. The FAQ does not spell out what happens to a queue longer than ten posts when you move down, so let each channel's queue run down to ten before you switch.
An independent bookshop and a landscaper, compared
The bookshop. A single-person bookshop posts new arrivals on Instagram twice a week and a monthly event on Facebook. That is 2 channels, 3 posts a week in all, and a runway of five weeks on Instagram. The free plan is more than enough, and the owner should spend the effort on better photos. Nothing pushes her to pay.
The landscaping company. A landscaper posts before-and-after photos on Instagram, Facebook and a Google-linked profile, and wants regular tips on LinkedIn for commercial clients. That is four channels. Even at light volume the free plan cannot hold the fourth. Four Essentials channels cost $24 a month on monthly billing, or $240 a year billed yearly. If one commercial enquiry a year comes from the LinkedIn posts, the subscription is covered. Without that, the owner could drop LinkedIn and stay free, which is a perfectly valid choice.
What Buffer's AI Assistant adds, and the catch
Buffer's AI Assistant helps draft, rewrite and repurpose posts. A solo owner can get a similar result from ChatGPT or Claude, which are probably already open in another tab, so the question is convenience rather than capability. Writing inside Buffer saves a copy-and-paste, and that is its real advantage.
The limit worth knowing is on AI replies, which the pricing page puts at 5 suggestions a week on Free and unlimited on paid plans. That affects replying to comments, not writing posts. If you answer a lot of comments, count how many you reply to in a typical week before treating AI replies as a reason to upgrade.
Whatever tool drafts the text, read every post before it goes out. A sample prompt for a batch of posts, with a realistic reply:
I run a small florist. Write 4 Instagram captions for next week's posts.
Each under 40 words, warm but not gushing, no emojis, one clear action.
Facts you may use: peonies are in season, we deliver Tuesday to Saturday,
order by 2pm for same-day delivery. Do not invent prices or offers.
Output (illustrative): "Peonies are here. Soft, full and gone in a fortnight.
Order by 2pm for same-day delivery, Tuesday to Saturday. Link in bio."Notice the constraint "do not invent prices or offers". Without it, a model will sometimes add a discount you do not offer, and a scheduler will post it faithfully at 9am on Saturday. For more on how far to trust this, see Should a small business use AI to write its social media posts?.
Working within ten: a fortnightly routine that costs nothing
If the free plan suits your volume, a fixed rhythm makes the limit invisible. Here is one that works for the florist, with the time each step takes.
- Every second Sunday, 20 minutes: open the ideas bin (100 slots on Free) and pick the next ten Instagram ideas, eight Facebook and two LinkedIn.
- Same sitting, 20 minutes: write or paste the captions, attach the photos and slot each post into the queue at the times you choose. Ten per channel is the ceiling, so stop when a channel is full.
- Every Monday, 2 minutes: read the week's queue for stale details, as described above.
- Mid-fortnight, 5 minutes: if a channel is running low, add two or three more. Slots free up as posts publish, so there is always room.
That is about 45 minutes a fortnight for roughly 16 posts, around 2.8 minutes a post. A paid plan does not change the writing and photo time, which is where most of the effort goes. It only lets you do the queueing in one block instead of two.
What each extra channel costs, laid out
Buffer prices per channel, so the bill grows in steps. This table uses Buffer's published rates for one to ten channels: the monthly-billing price first, then the yearly rate per month in brackets. Confirm at checkout.
| Channels | Free | Essentials a month (yearly rate) | Team a month (yearly rate) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0 | $6 ($5) | $12 ($10) |
| 3 | $0 | $18 ($15) | $36 ($30) |
| 4 | Not available | $24 ($20) | $48 ($40) |
| 6 | Not available | $36 ($30) | $72 ($60) |
From the eleventh channel the rate falls (to $4 a channel on monthly billing for channels 11 to 25), which a solo business will not reach. What matters more for you is the jump from three to four channels. At that point the whole account moves from free to $24 a month ($20 billed yearly), so the fourth channel effectively costs $20 to $24 a month, not $6. That is the question to ask: is a fourth channel worth $240 to $288 a year? If it is a channel where you have no audience yet, the answer is usually to wait.
A consultant and a removals firm, two more checks
A one-person consultancy. Posts only on LinkedIn, three times a week, and wants to schedule six weeks ahead before a conference season. One channel, 18 posts, 10 slots. Essentials on a single channel is $6 a month on monthly billing. If the burst lasts two months, that is $12 in total, against saving a second planning session. For one channel it is cheap enough to pay without much thought, which is a different answer from the three-channel florist.
A removals firm. A small firm posts job photos on Facebook and Instagram, mostly in summer, and replies to reviews. It has two channels, which fits Free comfortably, with a 2.5-week runway at four posts a week on Facebook. The owner's real constraint is that photos arrive when jobs finish, not on a schedule. In that case a scheduler adds little: she posts when the van is unloaded. The free plan is plenty, and the effort belongs in asking customers for permission to share photos.
Cost per post, to keep the fee in proportion
A useful way to judge any subscription is cost per output. If the landscaper pays $24 a month and publishes 40 posts, each costs 60 cents in tooling. If she publishes 12, each costs $2. Neither figure is high compared with the time spent making the photo and caption. Where the number gets awkward is when you pay for four channels and post on two of them. Check each month that every channel you pay for earned its place, and drop the ones that did not.
You can also set a ceiling. For example: "I will not spend more than 1 percent of what social posting brings in on the scheduler." If social brings in two enquiries a month worth $200 each, that is $400, and $24 is 6 percent, too high; if it brings in $2,000, it is 1.2 percent, close. The calculation is rough, but it stops a small fee from becoming a habit that nobody reviews.
Before and after: one batch of captions, tidied for the queue
A scheduler only publishes what you give it, so the last edit before queueing matters. Here is an illustrative caption as drafted and as queued.
Drafted: "Our gorgeous peonies are absolutely stunning this week, don't miss out, order now before they sell out!!!"
Queued: "Peonies are in this week. Order by 2pm for same-day delivery, Tuesday to Saturday. Link in bio."
The second version drops the pressure language, states the one fact a customer needs and cannot go stale quickly, because it describes a standing delivery rule rather than a stock level. Prefer that kind of wording for anything that will wait in a queue for a fortnight. Save the stock-level posts ("only three bunches left") for the day, posted by hand.
A scheduled post that went out stale
The most common mistake with any scheduler is the stale post. A florist queues six posts three weeks ahead, one of which says "last orders for Saturday delivery" with a date that has changed. A supplier delay moves the date, but the post is in the queue, publishes on time and tells customers something false.
The habit that prevents it is a weekly two-minute scan of the queue. Open the queue every Monday, read the next seven days of posts, and delete or edit anything that has gone out of date. This is easier on the free plan than on a paid one, because a 10-post queue is a small thing to scan; a 60-post queue is where stale posts hide. In that sense the free limit is a quiet safety feature. For the bigger picture of what goes wrong when posting runs unattended, read Can AI run your social media on autopilot?.
A decision worksheet to fill in
Write down these five numbers. They take five minutes.
- Channels you post to every month (not channels you have accounts on).
- Posts per week on your busiest channel.
- Days between planning sessions.
- Whether anyone else needs to post.
- Minutes a month you would save by batching in one go.
Fill it in for the florist. Three channels, 4 posts a week on Instagram, 14 days between sessions, nobody else, 15 minutes saved. Channels are at the free limit but not over it, runway is 2.5 weeks against a 2-week gap, and the saving is small. Decision: stay free.
Fill it in for a landscaper who needs four channels, 3 posts a week, 28 days between sessions, and a business partner who also posts. The channels exceed 3, the runway is 3.3 weeks against a 4-week gap, there are two people. Decision: pay, probably Team, at $48 a month for four channels on monthly billing ($40 billed yearly). Worth it if the partner's posts bring in work; otherwise cut to Essentials at $24 a month and let one person do all the queueing.
How to check the decision after a month
Pick two measures. First, how often you hit the limit: count the times Buffer stopped you from queuing a post you wanted to schedule. If it happened once or twice, plan around it. If it happened every week, pay. Second, look at whether posting got easier or you just posted more. A scheduler that raises your output from 5 to 8 posts a week is useful only if the extra posts bring enquiries.
If you are comparing against other free tools before deciding, Free AI marketing software: Canva, Buffer, Mailchimp and Metricool limits puts the free plans side by side, and How much time can AI save on social media management? helps you put a number on the hours.
Buffer questions from solo owners
How many posts can I schedule on Buffer's free plan?
Each of up to three channels can hold 10 scheduled posts at a time. That is 30 queued posts across three channels, not 30 a month: when a post goes live, the space frees up and you can add another. The limit matters when you want to batch a month in one sitting.
Does Buffer's free plan include AI?
Buffer's pricing page lists its AI Assistant on every plan, including Free. Free has a limit on AI replies, with 5 suggestions a week at the time of checking. Check the page for current limits, as they change.
Is it cheaper to pay Buffer or post by hand?
Compare the fee with the minutes saved. Paying for three channels on Essentials costs $18 a month, or $15 a month billed yearly. If batching saves you two hours a month, that is a few dollars an hour, which is cheap. If you only post twice a week, posting by hand costs you nothing.
Can two people use one free Buffer account?
Not on the plans listed. Free and Essentials include one user, and Team has unlimited included users. A solo business rarely needs the extra seat, but if you hire a part-time helper for social posts, that is the point at which Team's price per channel is the question.
Further reads
- Best AI Social Media Tools for Small Businesses (2026) — Other scheduling and writing tools to weigh against Buffer.
- How Much Does It Cost to Automate Social Media With AI? — What it costs to automate more of the social routine.
- How to Create On-Brand Social Media Graphics With AI — Make the images that fill your queue consistent.
- Canva AI for Small Business: Which Features Save Real Time? — Which Canva AI features save real time on posts.
- Is AI Marketing Automation Worth It for a Small Business? — A wider test of whether marketing tools pay back.
- Free vs Paid AI Marketing Tools: What Is Worth Paying For — A rule for which subscriptions earn their fee.
- Coffee Shop Social Media With AI: Captions, Reels and Rhythm — Turn one 90-minute shoot into a month of posts: a shot list, AI-drafted captions and reels, a rhythm you can keep, and an approval step before scheduling.
- Buffer vs Later for a Cafe or Bakery's Instagram: Which Plan Fits? — A cafe's Instagram week priced on Buffer and Later: post caps, AI caption limits and what each plan costs over a year.
- Is Hootsuite Worth It for a Small Team? When Standard Beats Cheaper Tools — Hootsuite Standard at $99 a user against Buffer per channel and Metricool, with sums by team size and the one feature that justifies paying more.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Buffer pricing page and its plain-text pricing version (per-channel rates, plan features and FAQ), checked 5 November 2026.