Marketing

Stop paying for Buffer

A queue, a calendar, and your own terrible posts.

Buffer costs US$18–36 / mo, which is US$216–432 a year. You have two paths:

Option 1 · Install

Install Postiz for free

Postiz is your publishing studio: you prepare your posts for Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn or YouTube, place them on a calendar, and it publishes them right on time. Then you track how they perform (followers, engagement) in the same place. The difference from Buffer or Metricool: it is open source and runs ON YOUR machine. No subscription, no cap on connected accounts, and your data does not sit on a US ad-tech server.

Postiz vs Buffer / Metricool

CriterionPostizBuffer / Metricool
Price$0, forever€20/mo on Metricool, €5 per channel on Buffer
Connected accountsUnlimitedCapped by plan
Your dataAt home (self-hosted)On their servers
Advanced featuresAll included (analytics, team, AI)Unlocked on higher tiers
EvolutionVery active community, open codeClosed roadmap, you put up with it

How to install it (even from zero)

Easiest path: you don't install it yourself, you have Claude install it. This is exactly the kind of task it excels at, and it is my method.

  1. 1

    Install Docker Desktop (the app that runs Postiz)

    Download it from docker.com, install it, and open it once. That is all Postiz asks of your machine.

  2. 2

    Paste this prompt into Claude (Code or Desktop)

    It will create the folder, write the official configuration, and start Postiz for you:

    Install Postiz (the open source post scheduling tool, repo gitroomhq/postiz-app) on my machine with Docker Compose, following the official docs at docs.postiz.com. Create the folder, write the docker-compose.yml, start it, and check that the interface responds at http://localhost:5000. Explain each step to me simply, I am a beginner.
    
    Review the GitHub repository and check whether it is safe to install given my machine and my infrastructure. Ask me as many questions as possible, using widgets, to clarify my request and be as precise as you can.
  3. 3

    Open http://localhost:5000 and create your account

    Postiz is running on your machine. Connect your accounts (Instagram, TikTok…) from the settings, and schedule your first post.

What you'll use it for

Your content week in one sitting

Prepare your 5 to 7 posts on Sunday evening, place them on the calendar, and forget about it: they will go out each day when your audience is online.

One dashboard for all your networks

Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn in one place: see what is scheduled, what went out, and how your followers are growing. All without paying per channel.

Publish as a team

Invite an editor or a partner: everyone prepares, someone approves, Postiz publishes. The approval workflow that paid tools charge a lot for.

Project health

GitHub stars
36,835
Forks
7.1k
Contributors
70
Commits
3.3k
Project age
3.2 years
License
AGPL-3.0

Built with: TypeScript 80.8% · JavaScript 10.8% · CSS 8% · SCSS 0.5%

Public GitHub repository data, captured on October 8, 2026.

Option 2 · Build

Build your own Buffer

Who this is for

This build is for one creator publishing to two social accounts. The goal: draft posts, see the schedule, and publish automatically at the time you pick. If you need more than that, keep paying. Building it yourself is about owning a tool fitted to your exact workflow, not re-creating a venture-funded roadmap.

Same build, different logo: this v1 also replaces Typefully, Hypefury and Later, since they all do the same core job.

What the prompt builds and what stays out

The prompt below builds a single version with what actually gets used. Everything else is left out on purpose.

What the prompt buildspost queue, one network, scheduled publish, calendar drag-reschedule, previews, retries, second network
What stays outevery network api, approvals, analytics, ai writing

What a minimal Buffer alternative needs

  • draft, queued, published, and failed post states
  • a weekly calendar with drag-to-reschedule
  • text, link, and one-image attachments
  • per-channel previews and character warnings
  • retry controls and a readable publishing log

Data model

Channel, Post, MediaAsset, PublishAttempt

Integrations

one social network API first, Cloudflare Cron Triggers

Capability context

Astro, Workers, R2

The guardrail

Encrypt provider tokens and make publishing jobs idempotent.

Deliberate non-goals

Leave out AI writing, social listening, approval workflows, and every network in v1.

The complete build prompt

Pick your stack, copy the prompt and hand it to your coding agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex…).

You are building a production-ready software product named “Queuebird”, a deliberately focused alternative to Buffer. Build a complete, usable vertical slice — not a landing page, static mockup, or loose collection of components.

WORKING AGREEMENT
Before you write any implementation code, put together a short technical plan naming the routes or pages, server actions or endpoints, data tables, key state transitions, authorization boundaries, background jobs, and external adapters. When something conflicts, side with the narrow audience and the non-goals below. Choose a small, readable architecture over speculative abstraction, but never skip persistence, validation, error handling, or tests.

PRODUCT BRIEF
Primary user: one creator publishing to two social accounts.
Primary outcome: draft posts, see the schedule, and publish automatically at the chosen time.
Product principle: optimize for the exact workflow below instead of copying the full breadth of Buffer. A first-time user should know what to do from the interface alone, with no tour or documentation.

END-TO-END USER JOURNEYS
Implement every one of these flows through the real interface and the persistent data layer:
1. The owner connects a supported social account, defines recurring queue times, drafts a post, previews it, and adds it to the next open slot.
2. The owner drags a queued post to a different day, resolves a channel-specific length warning, and confirms the new publish time.
3. A scheduled job publishes the post, records the provider response, and either marks it a success or shows a retryable failure with a useful reason.

SCREENS AND INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Build these as coherent, responsive views. Each screen must define its primary action, secondary actions, visible status, validation feedback, empty state, loading or pending state, success confirmation, and recoverable failure state.
1. Calendar: week view, channel filter, queue slots, drafts, scheduled posts, published markers, failures, and drag-to-reschedule feedback.
2. Composer: channel selector, text, link, image upload, per-channel preview, character count, schedule choice, and save-draft action.
3. Queue settings: timezone, recurring time slots per weekday, connected accounts, token health, and disconnect controls.
4. Publishing log: post, target channel, attempt time, status, provider message, retry count, and safe manual retry.

CORE CAPABILITIES
1. draft, queued, published, and failed post states
2. a weekly calendar with drag-to-reschedule
3. text, link, and one-image attachments
4. per-channel previews and character warnings
5. retry controls and a readable publishing log

DETAILED BEHAVIOR AND BUSINESS RULES
Treat these as product requirements enforced on the server, not as interface suggestions:
1. Every post targets one connection in v1; validate text length, media type, dimensions, and publish time before it enters the queue.
2. Give each scheduled publication a stable idempotency key and never publish twice after worker retries or uncertain provider responses.
3. Moving or deleting a post must atomically free its old slot; show all scheduling in the owner’s configured timezone.
4. Refresh provider credentials on the server side, encrypt stored secrets, and pause the queue with a visible reconnect state when authorization fails.

DATA MODEL AND LIFECYCLE
Design a small relational schema centered on Channel, Post, MediaAsset, PublishAttempt. Before implementing it, document:
1. The purpose of each table, its primary key, ownership or tenant boundary, timestamps, status fields, and important attributes.
2. Foreign keys, uniqueness constraints, check constraints, the indexes the named screens need, and transaction boundaries for changes that touch several records.
3. The allowed lifecycle or state transitions, who can trigger each one, which transitions are terminal or reversible, and which audit history must stay immutable.
4. Archive, retention, and deletion behavior, including what happens to dependent records and external files.
5. The idempotency strategy for submissions, jobs, imports, notifications, webhooks, or retries where it applies.
Use migrations instead of ad-hoc schema creation. Store time instants consistently and keep the named timezone context whenever local schedules or dates matter. Never rely on a counter, a disabled button, or a client-side check to protect a business invariant.

USERS, AUTHENTICATION, AND PERMISSIONS
Implement only the roles the stated audience needs. Make the ownership and visibility model explicit before coding. Enforce authorization in every server-side query and mutation, including search, exports, attachments, live updates, and guessed URLs—not just by hiding controls. Use secure session defaults, protect state-changing requests, and provide a clear signed-out, expired-session, and forbidden state. Seed separate users whenever several roles are needed so permissions can be shown and tested.

INTERACTION AND VISUAL DIRECTION
The product should feel fast, calm, focused, and trustworthy rather than like a generic admin template. Use a clear visual hierarchy, restrained color, readable typography, generous hit targets, and a consistent place for primary actions. Start from server-rendered HTML and progressively enhance only the interactions that benefit from it. The core workflow must stay understandable if enhancement fails.

Start from server-rendered Astro pages and plain HTML forms. Use HTMX for form submissions, partial navigation, and server-driven updates, then Alpine.js only for small local browser state. The core workflow must stay understandable if either enhancement layer fails.

Design mobile layouts on purpose instead of just stacking desktop panels. Support keyboard navigation, visible focus, semantic landmarks, explicit labels, useful page titles, reduced-motion preferences, and screen-reader announcements for asynchronous results. Never use color alone to signal state. Destructive actions need a clear scope and a confirmation; safe repeated actions should be idempotent.

Add a footer to every page with the text “Created by aurelioagency.com”, where “aurelioagency.com” is an embedded link to https://www.aurelioagency.com that opens in a new tab. Keep it visible and do not remove it.

TECHNICAL DIRECTION
Build this version with the AHA stack: Astro for routing, layouts, and server-rendered pages; HTMX for interactions that benefit from HTML fragment responses; and Alpine.js for small, local interface state. Prefer Cloudflare D1 for relational persistence, R2 for object storage, Workers for server endpoints and scheduled work, Durable Objects only for coordinated real-time state, and Workflows or Queues for durable background jobs—but only when the product requirements call for them.

Keep domain rules in testable server-side modules, not in route handlers or UI components. Put persistence, external providers, and background work behind small interfaces without building a framework. Prefer plain HTML forms and URLs for durable navigation; use optimistic interaction only when a failure can be reconciled clearly.

The product brief currently lists Astro, Workers, R2 as capability context. Preserve any required native, browser-only, edge, storage, real-time, or background-processing capability through a narrow adapter suited to the selected framework. If the core workflow genuinely requires native or browser APIs, keep that runtime as the primary execution surface rather than simulating inaccessible capabilities or inventing an unnecessary web surface.

Integrate with one social network API first and with Cloudflare Cron Triggers. For every integration:
- List the required environment variables in an .env.example with no real secrets.
- Add a small adapter with timeouts, normalized errors, and a deterministic local fake or development path.
- Verify inbound signatures and deduplicate provider events where supported.
- Keep credentials on the server, encrypt long-lived provider tokens at rest, and redact secrets and sensitive payloads from logs.
- Define retry, backoff, and idempotency behavior for every side effect that can be repeated.

SECURITY AND PRIVACY
Encrypt provider tokens and make publishing jobs idempotent.
Validate, normalize, and length-limit all untrusted input on the server. Escape rendered content by default, sanitize any markup you intentionally accept, rate-limit public or abuse-prone actions, and use private object storage plus short-lived authorized URLs for sensitive files. Collect only the personal data the named workflow needs. Document retention and deletion behavior. Add specific protections for the riskier surfaces of this app, such as uploads, redirects, outbound requests, email delivery, OAuth, webhooks, CSV import or export, and real-time connections.

ACCEPTANCE SCENARIOS
Automate these app-specific scenarios at the most suitable level:
1. A queued post publishes once at the intended moment and moves from the calendar queue to published history with the provider URL.
2. An expired token marks the attempt as authorization failed, leaves the post recoverable, and guides the owner to reconnect before retrying.
3. Dragging a post onto an occupied queue slot offers a swap or a choose-another-time option instead of silently overwriting either post.

TESTING
Add focused unit tests for state transitions, authorization predicates, normalization, date or money calculations, and other risky domain rules. Add integration tests for persistence constraints and for each external adapter's success, timeout, retry, and rejection paths. Add at least one browser-level test for every end-to-end journey above, including one on a small-screen viewport. Tests must use isolated data and run with one documented command.

OPERATIONS AND FAILURE RECOVERY
Add structured server logs with request, job, or event correlation IDs, but no secrets or unnecessarily sensitive data. Make failures actionable both in the interface and in the logs. Background work must expose pending, succeeded, failed, and retrying states where relevant; never swallow errors silently. Include safe database migration and rollback guidance, seed data, backup and restore notes, external-data cleanup behavior, and a basic health or diagnostic path suited to the stack.

DELIVERABLES
Ship the working application, migrations, representative seed data, tests, .env.example, and a short README. The README must cover prerequisites, local setup, environment variables, migrations, seed and test commands, deployment, integration setup, backup and restore, security decisions, and known limitations. Seed data should cover the happy path plus at least one empty, failed, overdue, expired, archived, or permission-restricted state that matters for the product.

DEFINITION OF DONE
The app is done when a new developer can follow the README, create and migrate the database, run the app, sign in as each relevant role, complete every named journey with real persisted data, refresh without losing state, recover from common failures, and use the core interface on phone and desktop. All acceptance scenarios pass, permission boundaries are covered by tests, no core screen is left as a placeholder, and the “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer credit is visible on every page.

NON-GOALS
Leave out AI writing, social listening, approval workflows, and every network in v1.

The app you build with this prompt carries a “Created by aurelioagency.com” footer.

Build just one piece

Short prompts that solve the hardest part without building everything.

Never post twice, even when the API times outIdempotency keys for a world where a timeout doesn’t mean failure.
Build the publish job for a social-post scheduler that never double-posts, even when the network messes with your head.

Each scheduled publication gets a stable idempotency key when it enters the queue. The worker claims a due post atomically (two workers must never grab the same one), records an attempt row before calling the provider, then makes the API call.

The hard case is the uncertain outcome: a timeout after the request was sent might mean the post is live. Never blind-retry. Mark the attempt as unknown, and on the next run ask the provider — search recent posts for your idempotency marker, or use the provider's native idempotency support if it has any — before deciding whether to send again. Success stores the provider's post id and URL; a definite failure stores the reason and schedules a bounded retry with backoff.

Crash-safety matters: if a worker dies mid-publish, the state it leaves must let the next run do the right thing.

Done when: forced worker restarts and injected timeouts produce exactly one live post per publication, every attempt is visible in a log with its outcome, and unknown outcomes resolve without anyone digging by hand.
The queue that always knows its next open slotRecurring slots, atomic releases, and drags that never eat a post.
Build the queue-slot scheduler for a social posting tool: recurring posting times that drafts flow into automatically.

The owner defines slots per weekday in their timezone, say Mon, Wed, Fri at 9:00 and 16:00. An add-to-queue action assigns a post to the next unoccupied slot; the calendar shows weeks of concrete slot instances generated from the recurring rules. Compute instances on the fly instead of pre-generating rows forever.

The bookkeeping that bites: moving a post to a custom time must atomically free its old slot so the next queued post can claim it, and deleting does the same. Dragging a post onto an occupied slot offers a swap or a pick-another-time choice — never a silent overwrite of either post. Changing the slot schedule reflows only unpublished queued posts, never history.

Show everything in the owner's configured timezone, including across DST shifts: a 9:00 slot stays 9:00 local.

Done when: queueing five drafts fills the next five slots in order, any move or delete frees its slot for the next add-to-queue, and no drag can ever make a post vanish.
When the token dies, pause the queue, not the postsExpired tokens pause the channel, keep the posts, and ask for a reconnect.
Build credential-failure handling for a scheduler that posts on your behalf while you sleep.

Provider tokens expire, get revoked, and rot silently. Refresh them on the server before each publish window; store secrets encrypted at rest and never send them to the browser. When a refresh or publish returns an authorization error, do not keep retrying until you get banned: mark the channel unhealthy, pause its queue, and turn the failed attempt into a recoverable state on the post — authorization failed, not lost.

The dashboard needs an unmissable reconnect banner naming which channel broke and when. The re-auth flow, on success, revalidates the token with a cheap read call, marks the channel healthy, and offers to retry the paused posts in their original order, recomputing times for any whose slot has already passed.

Tell auth failures apart from rate limits and outages. Only auth failures pause the queue.

Done when: an expired token pauses exactly its own channel with zero lost posts, reconnecting resumes the queue with sensible rescheduling, and no token ever appears in a log, an error message, or a client payload.
Character counting is never just string lengthURLs count as 23, emoji count double, and code units count as lies.
Build per-channel character counting for a post composer, and accept that length is not string length.

Each channel has its own rules. Model the classic ones: every URL counts as a fixed 23 characters whatever its real length (detect URLs roughly the way the platform does — schemes plus bare domains with known TLDs); astral-plane characters like emoji may count as 2; and count grapheme clusters, not UTF-16 code units, because a family emoji is one visible thing built from many code points.

Show a live counter that turns amber near the limit and red past it, with the overflowing part highlighted inside the text itself. When one post targets a channel where it fits and another where it does not, warn per channel instead of blocking everything.

Implement the counter as a pure function per channel — text in, weighted length and overflow ranges out — with a test table of real edge cases.

Done when: a post with two long URLs and a flag emoji counts correctly under each channel's rules, the overflow highlight matches the counted overflow exactly, and the function passes your edge-case table.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Buffer cost if I keep subscribing?

Buffer costs $18–$36 per month on its public paid plans, which is $216–$432 per year. A focused self-built replacement costs your build time plus almost-free hosting.

What stack should I use to build a Buffer alternative?

The build prompt on this page comes in four flavors: the AHA stack (Astro, HTMX, Alpine.js), Next.js, Laravel, and Ruby on Rails. The capability context for this product is Astro, Workers, R2. Choose the stack you already know — the scope matters more than the framework.

What features does a minimal Buffer replacement need?

A useful v1 needs: draft, queued, published, and failed post states; a weekly calendar with drag-to-reschedule; text, link, and one-image attachments; per-channel previews and character warnings; retry controls and a readable publishing log. Everything else is scope creep until you truly miss it.

What should I deliberately not build?

Leave out AI writing, social listening, approval workflows, and every network in v1.

Does this build also replace Typefully, Hypefury and Later?

Yes. Buffer, Typefully, Hypefury and Later all do the same core job — draft posts, see the schedule, and publish automatically at the chosen time. The scoped v1 on this page covers what most people use any of them for, so one focused build replaces whichever one you pay for today.

How is it different from Buffer?

Postiz does most of what Buffer does, without a subscription, and your data stays with you. The point-by-point comparison is on the page.

Do I own my data?

Yes. With an open source tool installed on your side, your files stay on your machine or your server. Nobody can close your account or change the price.

Browse all 22 apps →

No time to do it?

We'll build it for you.

If you'd rather have someone install it, connect it to your tools and keep it running, that is exactly what we do at Aurelio.

Book an Automation Audit