Social media decision
Aidelly
A competent developer can build a useful self-hosted replacement covering core scheduling, AI drafting, media storage, and a basic unified inbox in a multi-week effort using available OSS prior art; you’ll lose agency-grade polish, broad platform coverage, and advanced analytics.
Visit website↗$29/mo
$348/yr
Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off160 h to build
$180/mo6 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 7 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 Aidelly alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create post drafts with an LLM, store media, schedule posts to platform APIs, run a worker to publish at scheduled times, and surface a unified inbox for comments/DMs.
What it still won’t have
- Out-of-the-box integrations with 11+ platforms (you'll need to add connectors one-by-one)
- White-label, custom domain, and agency-scale features (client links, branded reports)
- Built-in AI credit pooling and metered credit UX
- Advanced analytics, competitor spy, Creator Clone, and video-generation credit system
- Polish, reliability, and scale-tested platform-level automation (e.g., destination presets, thousands of daily posts)
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 7 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 agentic social scheduler using Next.js (React) for the dashboard, Node.js (Express) for the API, PostgreSQL for persistent data, Redis for job queues, BullMQ for workers, and S3-compatible storage for media. Core features in scope: OAuth connectors for 3 platforms (Instagram, Facebook, X), a composer UI that sends drafts to the DB, scheduled publishing worker with retry and rate-limit handling, basic unified inbox polling for comments/DMs, AI text/image generation using OpenAI GPT/Image APIs with per-run credit tracking, and a media library with upload and CDN URLs. Out of scope: white-labeling, advanced analytics, video-generator credits, and support for 11+ platforms. Require error handling, retries, logging, tests for API endpoints and scheduler logic, and a README with deployment steps (Docker + docker-compose).
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAidelly — homepage
- official pricingAidelly — pricing
- official docsAidelly — features
- open sourcebrightbeanxyz/brightbean-studio
- open sourcegitroomhq/postiz-app
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
