Our platform pricing philosophy: open APIs are free for users. Gated APIs that charge per post — we pass the cost through. Here's exactly what each platform costs us, and why.
# Why X/Twitter Costs Extra (And Why TikTok Is Free)
We get this question a lot. Why does posting to X/Twitter require Pro while Bluesky and Discord are free for everyone? Why is TikTok going to be free? And what's the actual logic here?
Here's the honest answer.
---
X (formerly Twitter) changed their API pricing in 2023. To post a tweet through the API, developers pay **$0.01 per tweet**. Not a subscription. Not a flat rate. Per. Tweet.
That's the X business model. They're monetizing API access at the transaction level.
So when a SocialMate user posts to X, it costs us a penny. That doesn't sound like much — until you have thousands of users posting daily. At 500 free users posting 28 times a month, that's $140/month in API fees just for free users. That's not sustainable when we're charging $0/month for free plan.
So we made a simple decision: **X posting is Pro and above.** Pro is $5/month. Agency is $20/month. That covers the API cost and keeps the lights on.
If you're on Free and want to post to X, you have two options:
We're not adding the gate arbitrarily. Every single gate in SocialMate has a real cost behind it.
---
Here's where it gets interesting.
TikTok's Content Posting API charges developers **nothing per post**. Zero. Their model is different — they want content on their platform, so they make it easy for developers to push video at scale.
The only cost on our end is **Supabase storage egress** — about $0.09 per gigabyte. A 30-second TikTok video is roughly 10–50MB. So per video posted, we're talking fractions of a cent.
That means we can give TikTok posting away generously:
Most competitors (Buffer, Later, Hootsuite) charge $18–$65/month to get TikTok scheduling. We're doing it free because we actually can.
---
This is the principle we built the whole platform around:
Open social is free. Gatekept social costs extra.
Platforms that have open APIs with no per-post charges:
Platforms that charge developers per post or require paid tiers:
It's that clean. We're not arbitrarily paywalling features. We're passing real costs through at cost, and giving away everything that's actually free.
---
TikTok Studio is live right now at /tiktok/studio. You can upload videos, trim them, add filters, captions, and schedule them. The connect button is live on /accounts.
The hold-up is TikTok's developer app review process. We submitted for Production API approval and are in queue (typically 2–4 weeks). Once approved, posting goes fully live for all plans — including free.
---
We built SocialMate because the tools creators need cost too much for no good reason. $99/month for a scheduler is a joke. We charge $5.
But we can't pretend there's no cost. When X charges $0.01/tweet, that's real money at scale. We're transparent about it. We gate it at the minimum tier required to cover the cost. Nothing more.
Everything else? We're giving it away.
— Joshua, Founder
Schedule to 7 platforms, get 15+ AI tools, and grow your audience — all for free. No credit card required.
Create free account →7 platforms · 15+ AI tools · Free forever
Comparing tools?
❤️ 2% of every SocialMate subscription goes to SM-Give — our charity initiative. Learn about SM-Give →