Comparing Ayrshare alternatives on price is harder than it looks, because almost nobody bills the same thing. Ayrshare's unit is the social profile, meaning one customer connected to any number of networks. Of the nine tools on this page, two bill by profile, four bill by connected account or channel, one bills by post, one bills by posts per month, and one charges a single fee and hands you the source. Five units, nine tools, and the entry prices sitting side by side in every roundup on page one are not measuring the same quantity.
Key takeaways
- Ayrshare bills the customer, not the network: one profile holds up to 13 accounts.
- Its entry tier is $149 a month for exactly one profile, billed at signup with no trial.
- Upload-Post uses the same word for the same unit and charges $16 for five.
- At 100 customers, Ayrshare's own calculator returns $1,228 a month.
- Three of the nine publish no rate card that reaches 100 customers at all.
What is an Ayrshare profile, exactly?
One customer, however many networks they use. Ayrshare's pricing page is unusually clear about it: "We bill by social profile: one customer, brand, or location connected to any number of social networks" (Ayrshare). Its own worked rules follow: "Multiple Networks = 1 profile", and "A franchise with 10 locations posting independently counts as 10 different profiles."
That is the most generous unit in this comparison, and it is worth saying so before any criticism of the price. A customer on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, Pinterest and YouTube costs the same as a customer on LinkedIn alone. Premium's fine print puts the ceiling at up to 13 social accounts across 13 networks inside that one profile.
The unit also shrinks when your usage does. "Delete the profile via the API, and billing for that profile stops." For a SaaS product whose customers churn, that matters more than a headline rate.
So the question is not whether the unit is fair. It is what the base rate on top of it costs.
What does Ayrshare cost in 2026?
Billed monthly: Premium $149 for 1 profile, Launch $299 for up to 10, Business from $599 with 30 included, and Enterprise from 300 profiles at custom pricing. Yearly billing saves 17%. Above 30 profiles, Business tiers down: $8.99 each for profiles 31 to 100, $3.49 for 101 to 500, and $2.49 beyond that.
Two add-ons sit outside the ladder. Max Pack is $300 a month and unlocks maximum posting limits, though the comparison table marks it "Trial only" on both Premium and Launch. Facebook Boosted ads cost $100 a month.
The trial rules deserve a careful read, because they are easy to get backwards. Ayrshare's pricing page states that "Premium, Business, and Enterprise are billed at signup (no free trial)", while its FAQ confirms "The Ayrshare Launch plan includes a 28-day free trial with no credit card required", running on full Business access. So the trial exists, but not on the tier most people arrive at. There is no free tier on any plan.
One thing Ayrshare does not charge for, and says so plainly: "You're not charged for engineers, product managers, support staff, internal users, or dashboard logins." Team members are unlimited everywhere.
Which alternatives bill by something else?
Four of the five units on this page are not the profile. Sorting the field by what the meter actually counts is the only way the prices become comparable, and it splits nine tools into five groups that have almost nothing to do with each other.
Per profile. Ayrshare from $149 a month, Upload-Post from $16.
Per connected account or channel. Zernio meters each account with no plans at all: the first 2 are free, accounts 3 to 10 cost $6 each, 11 to 100 cost $3, and everything past 100 costs $1. Postiz sells channels in blocks: $29 for 5, $39 for 10, $49 for 30, $99 for 100. Blotato sells accounts in bundles: $29 for 20, $97 for 40. Zilfu sells them flat: 2 free, 10 for $19, 100 for $79, 300 for $179.
Per post per month. bundle.social meters posts and leaves the account count alone. Asked directly whether it charges per connected account, its pricing FAQ answers "No." Free covers 20 posts a month against 3 accounts; Pro is $100 a month for 10,000 posts with unlimited accounts; Business is $400 for 100,000.
Per post. Outstand's home page prices "3,000 posts included, then from $0.005/post at volume" across 11 platforms.
Once. Mixpost sells a self-hosted licence at $299 or $1,199, with no recurring fee and no vendor running it for you.
Upload-Post uses the same word for a ninth of the price
Two tools on this page use the word "profile", and they mean close enough to the same thing that the comparison is fair. Upload-Post's own tooltip: "Each profile lets you connect one account per platform. With 2 profiles you can connect: 2 TikTok, 2 Instagram, 2 YouTube." That is Ayrshare's definition, arrived at from the other direction.
The ladders are not close. Upload-Post runs Free at $0 for 2 profiles and 10 uploads a month, Basic at $16 for 5, Professional at $33 for 25, Advanced at $118 for 75, and Business at $350 for 225, all with unlimited uploads above the free tier. Ayrshare's $149 buys one.
Two caveats keep that from being the whole story, and both cut against Upload-Post. It caps seats where Ayrshare does not: 1 seat on Basic, 2 on Professional, 5 on Advanced, 10 on Business. And its profile add-ons are priced annually on cards that quote the plan monthly, so "+ 25 profiles +$650/yr" sits directly beneath "$118 / mo". Same card, two billing periods, no note explaining it.
There is also a surcharge worth knowing about if you post links. Upload-Post sells X link-posting as "+ $19 / mo ... up to 50 link-posts/mo", which is its answer to X charging $0.200 for a post carrying a URL.
What does 100 customers actually cost?
Take an agency or a product with 100 customers, each connecting 3 networks. That is 100 profiles in Ayrshare's unit and 300 accounts in everyone else's, and it is the point where the units stop being a technicality.
Ayrshare: $1,228 a month. This is not a derived figure. Its own pricing calculator, set to 100 profiles, returns $599 for the first 30 plus 70 more at $8.99, and prints "Effective rate: $12.28 per profile".
bundle.social: $100 a month. Pro covers 10,000 posts against unlimited accounts. Three hundred accounts posting daily comes to roughly 9,000 posts, which fits.
Upload-Post: about $172 a month. Advanced at $118 covers 75 profiles, and the 25-profile add-on at $650 a year adds about $54 a month.
Zernio: $518 a month. Two accounts free, 8 at $6, 90 at $3, then 200 at $1.
Zilfu: $179 a month, with a condition. Scale covers 300 accounts and unlimited posts. It only applies if you connect those accounts yourself, which an agency does and a self-serve product cannot, for reasons the last section deals with.
Three of the nine publish nothing that reaches this far. Postiz's rate card stops at 100 channels, Blotato's published account counts stop at 40, and Outstand's per-post rate carries no base price on the pages we fetched. Mixpost's $299 covers any number of accounts, but you are running the servers.
So Ayrshare is roughly 7 times Upload-Post and 12 times bundle.social at this shape. The gap is not the unit, which is the most generous here. It is the base rate.
What does the higher rate actually buy?
Infrastructure the cheaper tools mostly do not sell, and it is worth being straight about this rather than pretending the price gap is pure margin. Ayrshare publishes 30M+ daily API calls and a 99.99% uptime figure, and ships history, analytics, engagement and creator-data APIs beside the publishing one. Its plan pages are written for companies embedding social publishing into their own product, with a documented multi-tenant architecture behind it.
That is a different purchase from a scheduler with an API bolted on. If your customers connect their own accounts and your support burden is their broken tokens, the comparison worth running is Ayrshare against bundle.social and Outstand, not against a per-account scheduler.
If you publish to accounts you own, none of that infrastructure is doing anything for you, and $149 a month for one profile is a lot to pay for it.
Which of these can you start on for nothing?
Three of the eight alternatives publish a genuine free tier, and the distinction between a tier and a trial does real work here. bundle.social's free plan covers 3 accounts and 20 posts a month with API access included. Zernio starts with 2 free accounts and states "No credit card required". Upload-Post's free plan covers 2 profiles and 10 uploads a month.
Ayrshare and Blotato run trials instead, which is not the same thing. Ayrshare's 28 days sit on Launch only, not on the $149 tier most people arrive at. Blotato runs 7 days on every plan, with one restriction that matters if the API is why you are evaluating it at all: the trial covers "Access to all features - except the API".
Postiz and Mixpost are the other route entirely. Both are open source, so the free version is the one you host yourself, and the recurring bill becomes a server.
Where Zilfu fits, and where it does not
Zilfu bills connected accounts, flat: 2 free, 10 on Pro at $19 a month, 100 on Business at $79, 300 on Scale at $179. The REST API, webhooks and MCP server ship on every plan including Free, which is capped at 20 posts a month. Nothing about the developer surface is gated behind a tier, so evaluating it costs nothing and needs no card.
For the job of publishing to accounts you own, on a schedule, from your own code or an AI assistant over MCP, that is the whole comparison: $0 or $19 against $149.
Where Zilfu does not fit is the job Ayrshare is actually built for, and it is a hard limit rather than a soft one. Zilfu's OAuth connect flow is web-only. The API can list accounts, read their boards and disconnect them, but it cannot connect one, so a customer of yours cannot authorise their Instagram from inside your product. If you are building multi-tenant software where end users bring their own accounts, Ayrshare, bundle.social and Outstand are built for that and Zilfu is not. No pricing table changes that.
Zilfu also publishes to seven networks, against the 13 Ayrshare counts, and ships no history API, no creator-data API and no ads endpoints.
So the honest split is by who owns the accounts. If they are yours, the profile unit is charging you for tenancy you do not have. If they are your customers', the unit is doing real work and the question is only whether bundle.social's post meter is cheaper for your volume, which at the shape above it is by a factor of 12.
Two accounts on Zilfu's free plan is enough to run the API, fire a webhook and connect an assistant over MCP before deciding, which is more than Ayrshare's entry tier allows without a card.
Sources
All pages fetched 1 August 2026 and parsed from raw HTML rather than read. Prices are the monthly-billed figures unless noted.
- Ayrshare. Pricing: billed per social profile.
- Upload-Post. Pricing and profile definition.
- Zernio. Pricing: pay per connected account.
- bundle.social. Social media API pricing.
- Blotato. Pricing, plans and free trial.
- Postiz. Pricing.
- Mixpost. Pricing: one-time payment.
- Outstand. Unified social media API.
- Zilfu. Plan limits are read from the application's own plan definitions rather than a marketing page; the API surface is described at /docs/api.