Social media decision
Cross-Post
A capable developer can build a useful self-hosted scheduler/queue and basic publishing for a few platforms, but reproducing the full cross-platform connector coverage, reliability, and polish of the hosted product is substantial; consider using the cited open-source projects as a starting point.
Visit website↗Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$100one-off80 h to build
$0/mo6 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
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 Cross-Post alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Create a post (caption + media), choose destination accounts, schedule or publish now, background worker delivers to each platform, surface per-destination status and simple analytics.
What it still won’t have
- Production-quality connectors for every platform (edge cases, undocumented API behaviours)
- Hosted reliability, uptime guarantees, and managed retries for platform changes
- User-facing polish, billing, onboarding, and support
- Integration with any proprietary upstream publishing layer the vendor uses
What remains hard
- Product polish and ongoing maintenance
First-year cost
No published price
Cross-Post does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
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 cross-post clone using Node.js (Express) backend, React admin UI, Postgres for data, Redis for queueing, BullMQ worker processes, and S3-compatible storage (e.g., DigitalOcean Spaces). Core features in scope: OAuth connect for Instagram/YouTube/X (implement generic OAuth and one concrete platform), presigned media upload endpoint, create/schedule posts API and calendar UI, background worker that reads scheduled posts and attempts delivery via pluggable connector interface, per-destination status tracking, basic analytics (post counts by platform and success rate), idempotency handling, retries, and webhooks. Out of scope: building connectors for every platform (only implement one full connector and a stub interface for others), enterprise billing, multi-tenant isolation beyond scoped accounts. Include error handling, input validation, automated tests for API endpoints and worker logic, and infrastructure IaC (Terraform) with a one-click docker-compose dev setup and deployment instructions.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score64
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 · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productcross-post homepage
- official docscross-post API docs
- open sourcebrightbeanxyz/brightbean-studio
- open sourcegitroomhq/postiz-app
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
