Counting brands, not connected accounts

The first scheduling tool you try is priced for one brand on a couple of platforms. The bill only starts to matter once you are running several, and by then the thing you are paying for is rarely the thing you thought you were buying.

Two ways a tool can count you

Almost every scheduler meters one of two units. The first is the connected account: one X profile, one LinkedIn page, one Instagram business account, each counted on its own. The second is the workspace, sometimes called a client dashboard: a container per brand, priced per container. Both are reasonable ways to build a business. Neither matches how running several brands actually feels.

Per connected account puts a price on reach

Under per-account metering, what a brand costs is the number of places it posts. A brand on X alone is cheap. The same brand on X, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Bluesky costs five times as much, for the same queue, the same schedule, and the same person writing the posts. The unit you are billed for grows every time you decide a brand should show up somewhere new, which is the opposite of the decision a tool should be encouraging.

• Adding a platform to a brand you already pay for raises the bill.
• Two Facebook pages for one brand count as two.
• The cheapest configuration is always the one with the least reach.

Per workspace puts a price on having many brands

Per-workspace pricing fixes the reach problem and introduces a different one. A workspace is usually a full copy of the product: its own members, its own approval chain, its own settings. That is exactly the right shape for an agency with a different client contact standing behind each brand. It is a great deal of machinery, and a great deal of money, for one person running eight projects that all sound like them.

What Postrim counts instead

Postrim's unit is the brand. A brand carries one queue, one posting schedule, its persona documents, and the list of platforms it publishes to. Connecting a sixth platform to a brand does not change what you pay, because the platform list belongs to the brand rather than being counted beside it. The free plan is 3 brands and Pro is 25.

The practical effect is small and compounding: putting a brand on one more platform goes back to being a product decision rather than a billing one.

“The cheapest configuration should never be the one with the least reach.”

When per-account pricing is the honest answer

If you run one brand on one platform, per-account pricing is probably cheaper and you should take it. Counting brands only pays off from the second or third one, and it pays off most when those brands post to more than one place each. It is worth working out which side of that line you are on before comparing monthly prices, because the headline number tells you almost nothing on its own.