Social media decision
Adpollo
A capable technical user can build a narrower scheduling + AI caption/image generator and self-host it, but reproducing the full paid product experience (polish, reliability, analytics, connector breadth) is multi-week work with ongoing maintenance.
Visit website↗$5/mo
$60/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$50/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 12 seats.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All Adpollo alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Generate caption + image with an AI model → schedule post → post to Instagram/Facebook via APIs → store and surface post performance/insights.
What it still won’t have
- Polish, UI/UX and production hardening (retries, rate-limit handling, edge cases)
- Advanced analytics and cross-account reporting
- SLA, monitoring, and operational scale
- Built-in 3rd-party integrations beyond Facebook/Instagram and ongoing connector maintenance
- Customer support and onboarding tooling
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 12 seats.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a minimal self-hosted AI social-post scheduler using Node.js (Express), React, Postgres, Redis (for queue), and a worker (BullMQ). Core features in scope: OAuth account linking for Facebook/Instagram Pages, prompt-based caption generation and image generation via an external model API (e.g., OpenAI or other), create/schedule posts in a web UI, a worker that publishes scheduled posts via platform APIs with retries and rate-limit handling, periodic fetcher to import post insights, and a dashboard showing scheduled and published posts with metrics. Out of scope: multi-platform catalogue beyond Facebook/Instagram, team billing, multi-tenant SaaS billing, advanced analytics. Include input validation, error handling, retries, unit tests for API routes, and basic end-to-end test for the scheduling+publish flow.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 3 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- Evidence score63
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 3
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAdpollo home / pricing
- open sourcegitroomhq/postiz-app
- open sourcegrowchief/growchief
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
