What a social media API actually costs to run
Most software companies treat their cost structure as a secret. We are opening a beta in September, our pricing page says “indicative while we build”, and the honest way to earn trust before launch is to show the arithmetic rather than assert a conclusion.
Why any of this is public
2 reasons, neither of them noble.
The first is that we are asking people to join a waitlist for a product that does not exist yet, on the promise of a rate locked for 12 months. That promise is only worth something if the price is defensible, and the only way to show it is defensible is to show where it comes from.
The second is that this category is full of pricing that nobody explains. Per-profile, per-seat, per-bundle, AI credits, analytics tiers. If we are going to argue that a flat price is fairer, we should be able to say why we can afford one.
Where the money actually goes
Running a tool that connects to 15 networks costs money in 4 places. Roughly in order of size.
Platform API access. Most networks do not charge for publishing access, which surprises people. Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit and the rest expose their APIs under rate limits rather than invoices. What they cost is engineering time, because each one behaves differently and each one changes without warning.
The exception is X, and it is a large one. We come back to it below.
Infrastructure. Hosting, the database, the workers that publish on schedule, and media storage. Media is the part that grows fastest: a video upload is orders of magnitude larger than a post record, and an agency uploading a month of content at once moves real volume.
Analytics storage. This is our own choice and it is not free. Platform APIs expire their numbers after about 30 days, so we take a daily snapshot of every connected account and keep it. Multiply accounts by days by metrics and the row count climbs steadily, forever, for every customer who stays.
It is the single most expensive promise on our pricing page, and we made it deliberately, because “the report you can still run next year” is the thing a per-month-window competitor cannot say.
AI generations. A real per-request cost, paid to our AI provider. A post generated across 6 platforms is one press of a button and one bill. This is why AI is metered per plan rather than unlimited: it is the one feature where a heavy user genuinely costs more than a light one.
The X problem, in detail
X is the only network in the set that charges per action, and the numbers are public: $0.015 for a standard post through the API, $0.20 for one containing a link. Deleting a post through the API also carries a charge.
2 decisions follow from that, and we want them on the record.
We pass it through at cost. Not marked up, not bundled into the subscription. You see the figure in the composer before you publish and it comes out of a prepaid balance.
We do not hide it in the plan price. The alternative would be to average X usage across all customers and raise everyone’s subscription to cover it. That is simpler to explain and it makes light users subsidise heavy ones, which we would rather not do.
There is a third thing worth saying plainly: X also removed analytics access at any price a small company would pay. So on X you can publish and you cannot measure, and no tool on the market is in a different position. Anyone showing you X engagement numbers has estimated them from elsewhere.
What this means for the price
Put the four cost centres together and a shape emerges.
Connected accounts cost us almost nothing. An account is a row, a token and a scheduled refresh. Whether you connect three or 400 barely moves our bill, which is exactly why we do not charge per profile. Tools that do are not passing on a cost; they are choosing a pricing model.
Team members cost us nothing at all. A seat is a user record.
Posts, replies and AI generations do cost. Each one is work: an upload, a call, a retry, sometimes a model request. So those are what we meter, on every plan.
That is the whole logic of the pricing page. Charge for the things that scale with usage, not for the things that scale with your success.
Where the margin sits at 50 customers
At small scale, none of this is a business. 50 customers on a mix of plans is a few thousand dollars a month, against infrastructure that costs a meaningful fraction of that and engineering time that costs far more than all of it.
The honest description of the first year is that the agency work funds the product, which is why this is built by people who already run an agency rather than by a funded startup. It also shapes what we build: features get made because a client needed them, not because a roadmap said so.
The model works at a few hundred customers, not at 50. We would rather write that down now than pretend otherwise and quietly change the pricing in month six.
What could change the numbers
3 things, and we will say so here when they do.
A platform starts charging. X did it. If another follows, it goes on the sub-processor and pricing pages with the real figure, passed through at cost.
Analytics storage outgrows the plan. If keeping full history becomes genuinely expensive at volume, the fix is a longer retention tier rather than silently trimming everyone’s history. We would tell you before, not after.
AI costs move. They have mostly moved down, which is why generations are included rather than sold as credits. If that reverses, the quotas change and the changelog says why.
EngageDigital is built by Proceed Interactive, a Cyprus agency that got tired of paying per profile. The changelog is dated, including the entries where something took longer than we said. Join the early-access list.