Social media decision
AuthoredUp
Build — a competent engineer can replicate the core editor, extension-assisted scheduling and analytics over a few months; AuthoredUp's value is product polish, team features and a closed beta AI which are harder to match but not fundamental moats.
Visit website↗$19.95/mo
$239/yr
Per seat. Read off the official pricing page.
$100one-off80 h to build
$50/mo8 h/mo upkeep
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 3 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 AuthoredUp alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Compose and format a post in an editor, save as draft, schedule/publish to LinkedIn via a Chrome extension, collect post and engagement metrics, surface analytics and reuse suggestions.
What it still won’t have
- Chrome-extension polish and edge-case handling for LinkedIn UI changes
- Refined AI coauthor that learns individual voice (closed beta feature)
- Enterprise/team features such as organization billing, roles and invoicing flows
- Polished onboarding, documentation and support responsiveness
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 3 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 LinkedIn content studio (Next.js frontend + React for extension UI, Node/Express backend, Postgres DB, Redis for jobs) that supports: 1) a rich-text editor with bold/italic/emoji and preview, 2) drafts and unlimited snippets library, 3) calendar view with scheduling and reminder emails, 4) a Chrome extension that injects editor into LinkedIn and executes scheduled publishes via the user's session, 5) a collector flow (extension-assisted + manual import of LinkedIn archive) to ingest historical posts and metrics, and 6) basic analytics (impressions, reactions, engagement rate, best time heatmap, top posts and one-click reuse). Out of scope: paid billing, enterprise SSO, advanced AI voice-learning, and multi-tenant invoicing. Include error handling for LinkedIn UI changes, retry logic for publishes/collects, automated tests for backend endpoints and scheduler, and CI deployment scripts to a VPS (DigitalOcean) with secure environment config.
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
- 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 · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productAuthoredUp - All-in-one LinkedIn Content Creation Tool
- official pricingAuthoredUp Pricing - Grow Your LinkedIn Presence
- official docsDashboard | AuthoredUp
- open sourcebrightbeanxyz/brightbean-studio
- open sourcegitroomhq/postiz-app
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
