Later Pricing 2026: Every Tier, and No Publishing API

Later pricing is quoted two different ways online, and both quotes are real. Some write-ups say Starter is $25 a month. Others say $18.75. Neither is wrong, and sorting out why is the first step to comparing Later against anything else.

The bigger issue is what Later actually sells you. Its primary billing unit is not the social account and not the seat, it is the Social Set, a bundle of one profile from each platform it supports. Seats exist as a paid add-on on top of that, but the Social Set is what sets your tier, and that single decision is what makes Later cheap for one brand and expensive for two.

If you are here to point an agent or an n8n workflow at a scheduler, you can stop reading at this paragraph: Later Social has no publishing API on any tier, and Zapier is on Later’s own unsupported list. No price unlocks programmatic posting, so the rest of this is a rate card for a human-operated calendar. I cover why the internet keeps saying otherwise further down, because the answer is a different Later product.

For everyone else, this post breaks down all three paid tiers at both billing periods, prices what a second and third brand really cost, and settles the other question Later’s own pages answer inconsistently: whether there is still a free plan.

Credit where it is due first. If you plan a feed visually before it publishes, Later’s drag-and-drop planner is built for exactly that, and Later publishes its add-on prices openly rather than behind a sales call.

Later Pricing in Brief

• Starter: $18.75/mo billed yearly, or $25/mo billed monthly. 1 Social Set (8 profiles), 1 user, 30 posts per profile per month, 5 AI credits.
• Growth: $37.50/mo billed yearly, or $50/mo billed monthly. 2 Social Sets (16 profiles), 2 users, 180 posts per profile, 50 AI credits.
• Scale: $82.50/mo billed yearly, or $110/mo billed monthly. 6 Social Sets (48 profiles), 4 users, unlimited posts, 100 AI credits.
• Annual billing is exactly 25% off on all three paid tiers. Later markets it as “3 months free,” which is the same statement.
• Add-ons, Growth and Scale only: extra Social Set $11.25/mo yearly or $15/mo monthly, extra user $3.75/mo yearly or $5/mo monthly.
• Starter cannot buy extra Social Sets or users. This is the constraint that drives everything below.
• Free plan: exists, but is not on the pricing page. 12 posts per profile per month, 0 AI credits, a 2-week calendar window.
• Trial: 14 days, credit card required, one per account ever.
• No publishing API on any plan. The “Later API” you may have read about belongs to Later Influence, a separate product, and it is read-only reporting that cannot publish. Zapier is on Later’s own unsupported list.

The Meter Is the Social Set, Not the Account

A Social Set is one profile from each platform Later supports. Its help center defines it as a group that “can include up to one profile from each supported platform: Instagram, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Snapchat.” Eight platforms, so one Social Set is up to eight profiles.

The consequence is easy to miss. Your Social Set count is not how many accounts you run, it is how many of any one platform you run. Later states it plainly: “to add 2 Instagram profiles to your Later account, you need to be on a plan that allows at least 2 Social Sets.”

So a creator on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest is one Social Set at entry price, while an agency with two Instagram clients and nothing else is two Social Sets at double the price, despite connecting fewer accounts. Breadth across platforms is free. Depth on any one platform is what you pay for.

What each tier includes, from Later’s pricing page:

Tier	Social Sets	Profiles	Users	Can buy add-on sets?
Starter	1	8	1	No
Growth	2	16	2	Yes, $11.25 each
Scale	6	48	4	Yes, $11.25 each

That last column is the pricing story. Because Starter cannot buy a single add-on set, the jump from one brand to two is a tier change rather than an incremental charge. Above two sets the add-on rate is a flat $11.25, so the pain sits entirely at one boundary, and it is the boundary most buyers cross.

The Free Plan Later Does Not Put on Its Pricing Page

Later has a free plan. It is also absent from Later’s pricing page, which is where most write-ups go wrong in one direction or the other.

Three Later-owned surfaces, two different answers. The in-app plans page carries a live link reading “Don’t need all these features? Switch to our free plan,” and the help center states that “Later Social offers the following plan types: Free, Starter, Growth, Scale,” then documents it in detail. The marketing pricing page shows three tiers and never mentions it. The surfaces an existing user sees confirm the free plan. The one a prospective buyer lands on does not.

Later’s plan availability reference, which it calls “the single source of truth for which Later Social features are available on which plan,” puts hard numbers on it:

• 12 posts per profile per month, and drafts count toward that total
• 0 AI credits. Caption Writer and Ideas are both off
• Photo uploads capped at 5MB, video at 25MB
• 1 YouTube Short per month
• A Link in Bio page, introductory analytics and 1 Access Group

The binding constraint is not in that list. Per the Choose a Later Social Plan article, calendar access on Free “is limited to 2 weeks in the past and future” against a year on paid plans. You can still run a rolling two-week schedule, but batching a month of content ahead is out, and that is what most people buy a scheduler to do.

Starter: One Brand, and No Way to Add a Second

Starter is $18.75/mo on annual billing or $25/mo monthly, and it is built for exactly one brand. You get 1 Social Set, 1 user, 30 posts per profile per month, and 5 AI credits.

The 30-post cap is per profile rather than per account total, which is more generous than it sounds. Later’s own example: “on the Starter plan, you get 30 posts per profile per month. If you have 1 Instagram and 1 TikTok account, that’s 30 posts for each, 60 total.” At eight profiles that is 240 posts a month, more than most single brands publish.

The hard limit is structural. Later’s plan card states it directly: on Starter, extra Social Sets and users are “not available.” So the moment you need a second Instagram or a second teammate, there is no incremental purchase to make. You change tiers.

One caveat on credits, because Later’s surfaces disagree. The pricing card marks add-on credits unavailable on Starter, while the credits help article says they are “only available for current paid plans,” which reads as including Starter, and prices 100 credits at “$5 USD/month” or “$40 USD/year” against the $3.75 on the plan card. Extra sets and users are unambiguously off on Starter. For credits, check at checkout rather than trusting either page.

Growth: Where the Second Brand Lands You

Growth is $37.50/mo yearly or $50/mo monthly, and it is where Later becomes a real tool. It brings 2 Social Sets, 2 users, 180 posts per profile, 50 AI credits, the social inbox for DMs and comments, approval workflows, and a year of analytics history instead of three months.

It is also the tier every second-brand buyer is forced onto. Because Starter cannot buy an add-on set, going from one brand to two means the full jump from $18.75 to $37.50, exactly 2.00x, buying capacity you may not have asked for.

Above two sets, add-ons take over at $11.25 each on annual billing: 3 sets is $48.75/mo, 4 sets is $60.00, 5 sets is $71.25. If you manage three to five brands and do not need Scale’s analytics depth, this is the efficient place to sit.

Scale: The Tier That Ties With Growth and Wins Anyway

Scale is $82.50/mo yearly or $110/mo monthly, with 6 Social Sets, 4 users, unlimited posts, 100 AI credits, custom analytics, competitive benchmarking against up to 20 competitors, and two years of history.

There is a clean piece of design here worth naming. Six Social Sets on the Growth path costs $37.50 plus four add-on sets at $11.25, which is $82.50. Scale is also $82.50. The two paths tie exactly, and keep tying above six because both add sets at the same $11.25.

Which makes Scale the better buy at six sets, because it also bundles two more users. Matching Scale’s four users on the Growth path costs $37.50 plus $45.00 in sets plus $7.50 in users, or $90.00 against Scale’s $82.50. The analytics and listening features come for less than nothing. If you are on Growth buying a fourth add-on set, move to Scale.

One Cliff at the Front, a Flat $11.25 After It

Annual billing, the headline number, cheapest paid configuration at each capacity level:

Social Sets	Profiles	Configuration	Cost/mo	Cost/year	Average per set
1	8	Starter	$18.75	$225.00	$18.75
2	16	Growth	$37.50	$450.00	$18.75
3	24	Growth + 1 set	$48.75	$585.00	$16.25
6	48	Scale	$82.50	$990.00	$13.75
10	80	Scale + 4 sets	$127.50	$1,530.00	$12.75

Read that last column as an average, not a rate. Past the second set every added Social Set costs the same flat $11.25, and the average falls only because that flat charge spreads across more brands. On monthly billing every total rises by a third: $25.00, $50.00, $65.00, $110.00 and $170.00.

Note the shape of the ladder. One step costs 100% of the bill, and every step after it costs $11.25.

Five Credits Buys Captions, Not Content

Later’s AI credits buy two things, Caption Writer and Ideas, and the pricing page defines the unit precisely: “1 credit generates 3 ideas or 1 caption.” Hashtag suggestions are bundled in separately and do not spend credits.

What it does well:

• Generates on-brand captions for a post you are already scheduling
• Generates content pillars and content ideas when you are planning
• Suggests hashtags, including automatic suggestions based on your caption

Where it stops:

• No image generation. No video generation. No voiceover.
• Five credits a month on Starter works out to roughly one caption a week.

This is a text assistant bolted onto a scheduler, not a content engine. If your bottleneck is producing the asset rather than writing the caption, Later does not address it and you will be pairing it with something else. Our roundup of AI content repurposing tools covers what that pairing looks like.

Does Later Have an API? Two Products, One Brand

This is the most confused fact about Later online, and if you are pointing an agent at a scheduler it is the only question that matters.

Later does operate an API with public documentation, which is why so many roundups say it has one. That API belongs to Later Influence, the influencer-marketing product. It is read-only campaign reporting, gated behind credentials requested through an account team, and it cannot schedule or publish anything.

Later Social, the scheduler this post is about, documents no publishing API on any tier. The string “API” does not appear anywhere on its pricing page or in its plan feature comparison, and the only integrations named in its plan availability reference are Dropbox, Canva, Mailchimp and Mavely. No MCP server is documented either, hosted or self-hosted.

The usual workaround is not available either. Later’s supported platforms article lists Zapier by name under “Unsupported Platforms & Features,” alongside Reddit, Bluesky, HubSpot and Google My Business, and Zapier’s own directory carries no official Later integration. So “no API, but you can wire it through Zapier” does not apply here.

The AI assistants have not sorted this out. Perplexity, asked whether Later offers a publishing API, called its own sources “conflicting” and could not resolve it. ChatGPT, asked to list Later’s plans, produced a $0 Free row and filled it with invented limits rather than the documented ones. Two products under one brand is the whole explanation.

So what does an agent reader do instead? The real alternative is not Later versus one rival. With Zapier out too, the fallback is a separate API per platform, Meta plus TikTok plus LinkedIn plus YouTube Data plus Pinterest, each with its own app review, OAuth flow, rate limits and bill. That is five or six vendors deep before anything posts, which is the actual thing worth pricing against.

The category answer is a scheduler that ships a publishing API, and several do: Postiz, Zernio, Ayrshare, Buffer, Post Bridge and Blotato all run MCP servers, so MCP presence tells you almost nothing on its own, and for a single platform going direct beats all of us. What separates them is breadth behind one key and how the bill behaves at volume.

Blotato is mine, so weigh this accordingly: one key covers 9 platforms, and the bill is flat rather than moving with your agent’s volume. The social media API and MCP server, the platform and analytics coverage, and the n8n and Make nodes are all documented, so check them against your own stack rather than my summary. One thing worth knowing before you sign up: the 7-day trial excludes the API, and generating a key ends the trial and starts paid Starter, so plan on subscribing rather than trialing.

What Else No Later Plan Includes

• Add-ons on iOS. Later notes they “are only available if you subscribe to Later through desktop. They are not available for subscriptions purchased through Later’s iOS app.”
• Consistent media limits. The pricing page advertises “Unlimited Media Storage” with flat caps of “20MB/photo & 512MB/video” across all tiers, while the plan reference gives per-tier limits: 5MB and 25MB on Free, 20MB and 512MB on Starter, 100MB and 1.5GB on Growth and Scale. Growth buys larger video uploads than the pricing page suggests.

Who Should Buy Later, and Who Should Not

When it makes sense:

• You run one brand across four or more platforms, where $18.75 for up to eight profiles beats both per-channel pricing and the flat-rate tools, ours included.
• Your feed aesthetic is the actual job. If planning how a grid looks before it publishes is the work, Later’s visual planner is built for that and ours is not.
• Instagram is your center of gravity and you want product tagging, first comment, collaborators and stories scheduling in one place.
• You are a registered nonprofit. Later’s pricing FAQ offers “50% off our annual Growth plan,” which makes two brands unusually cheap.
• You want a human-in-the-loop calendar rather than an automated pipeline.

When it starts to bite:

• You add a second account on the same platform. That is the 2.00x step, with no incremental option on Starter.
• An agent or automation has to do the posting, which no tier supports.
• Your bottleneck is asset creation rather than scheduling, given the text-only AI.
• You bill month to month, where the 25% annual gap becomes a real tax.
• You are an agency with many single-platform clients, the worst possible shape for a Social Set model.

None of this makes Later a bad tool. It makes it a tool built around brand-first planning, with pricing that faithfully expresses that design. The mismatch only shows up when your shape differs from the one it was drawn for.

Where Later Lands Against the Usual Shortlist

Tool	Cheapest paid tier	What you get at entry tier
Later Starter	$18.75/mo annual ($25 monthly)	1 Social Set (8 profiles), 1 user, 30 posts/profile, visual planner, Link in Bio
Buffer Essentials	$6/mo per channel monthly ($5 annual)	One channel, scheduling and basic analytics, billed per channel
Metricool Starter	$20/mo annual for 5 brands	5 brands, analytics and scheduling, with the API gated to Advanced at $53
Blotato Starter (I am a creator and tester on Blotato)	$29/mo flat	20 social accounts across 9 platforms, social media API plus a hosted MCP server with 35 tools, official n8n and Make nodes, unlimited AI writing, AI image and video

At one brand, Later is the cheapest flat-rate row in this table, ours included, at $18.75 for eight profiles. On annual billing Buffer’s per-channel model still beats it below four channels ($5 each against Later’s $18.75), so if you post to three accounts or fewer and want a visual calendar, price Buffer against Later before either.

The picture inverts at two, where two Social Sets is $37.50 a month against Blotato Starter’s $29 for up to twenty accounts with AI generation included. Compare capacity honestly, though: three Social Sets is 24 profiles, which is past Blotato Starter’s twenty-account ceiling, so the like-for-like comparison only holds while your profile count fits. Read that last row as an interested party’s and check it against your own account count.

The honest limit on our side is the engagement surface. Later’s social inbox handles Instagram, Facebook and TikTok conversations from Growth up, while Blotato’s comments and DMs cover Instagram and Facebook only. If TikTok comment management is part of the job, that is a real gap on our side. Our pricing page lists what each tier does include.

The Number to Count Before You Pick a Tier

Before you look at a single price, count the most accounts you run on any one platform. Not your total accounts, not your platforms. That one number sets your Social Set count and therefore your tier, and it is not the number most people bring to a pricing page.

If everything you run sits on one profile per platform, Later at $18.75 is a strong buy and I would not talk you out of it. The visual planner earns its keep, and the add-on prices are published rather than quoted, which is rarer than it should be and is why the math in this post was checkable at all.

Where I would push back is the second brand. Doubling the bill to add one Instagram account, with no incremental option on the entry tier, is the sharpest edge in this rate card and worth pricing before you commit to an annual term. And if there is an agent anywhere in your plans, Later is not a candidate at any tier, because there is no API to point it at. Run the 14-day trial on the workflow you actually have, and if you find you need programmatic access, look at Later alternatives with an API before you sign for a year.

Later Pricing FAQs

Can I use Later for free?

Yes. Later has a free plan, though you will not find it on the pricing page. Later’s own plan reference puts it at 12 posts per profile per month, 0 AI credits, 5MB photo uploads, and a calendar limited to two weeks past and future against a full year on paid plans. That two-week window is the binding constraint, so it suits maintaining a Link in Bio page rather than running a real content calendar.

Is Later no longer free?

Later is still free at one tier, despite what most write-ups say. The confusion is real and it comes from Later itself: the marketing pricing page shows only Starter, Growth and Scale, while the in-app plans page links to the free plan and the help center documents it as one of four plan types. Later did remove the more generous free tier that built its reputation, which is why the “no longer free” claim spread.

What does Later cost per month?

Starter is $18.75 a month billed yearly or $25 billed monthly. Growth is $37.50 yearly or $50 monthly. Scale is $82.50 yearly or $110 monthly. Annual billing is exactly 25% off on every tier, which Later also markets as three months free. Both figures describe the same discount.

Why is Later priced per Social Set?

A Social Set is one profile from each of the eight platforms Later supports, so the model prices depth on a single platform rather than breadth across many. One brand on eight platforms is one set. Two Instagram accounts is two sets, even with nothing else connected. It suits brand-first planning and penalizes agencies with many single-platform clients.

What’s the difference between Starter and Growth?

Growth doubles Social Sets and users to two each, raises the post cap from 30 to 180 per profile, and adds the social inbox, approval workflows and a year of analytics instead of three months. The structural difference matters more: Growth can buy add-on sets and users, and Starter can buy neither.

Does Later have a free trial?

Later offers a 14-day free trial on any paid plan, and a credit card is required to start it. Later’s trial FAQ is clear that you are not charged during the trial but the subscription starts automatically after it, so cancel before day 14 if you are not staying. You also get one trial per account, ever, and past paid subscribers are not eligible.

Does Later have an API?

Later Social has no public API for scheduling or publishing on any plan. The API you may find referenced belongs to Later Influence, its influencer-marketing product, at reporting.api.later.com. It is read-only campaign reporting, gated behind credentials requested through an account team, and it cannot publish. If you need an agent or automation to post, Later is not the tool.

Does Later have an MCP server?

No, and there is no publishing API to wrap one around either. Schedulers that do ship servers include Postiz, Zernio, Ayrshare, Buffer, Post Bridge and Blotato. Do not pick on MCP presence alone, though, since most of the category now has it. Compare platform coverage and how the bill behaves at volume instead.

Can I connect Later to Zapier, n8n, or Make?

Not through Zapier, which Later names explicitly under “Unsupported Platforms & Features” in its own help center, alongside Reddit, Bluesky and HubSpot. With no public publishing API, n8n and Make have nothing official to call either, so the practical route is a tool that publishes official nodes for those platforms.