Hootsuite. $99/mo.

The pitch: the social media management platform. One calendar for every network, AI-generated posts and images, a unified inbox, brand monitoring, performance reports. The Standard plan is $99 a month per user billed annually and caps you at 10 social media accounts. Hootsuite’s own FAQ quotes Professional at $199 and Advanced at $399.

The reality: the networks took the core job back. Meta Business Suite schedules your Facebook and Instagram posts, Reels, and Stories free, up to 75 days out, from one calendar Meta built and maintains. X schedules posts free in the web composer. LinkedIn schedules natively, also free. The scheduling buttons you’re renting for $99 a month already sit inside the platforms at $0. What’s left is the writing and the plan, and that’s a Claude job: one saved skill that takes your week’s angles and drafts every post in your voice, one scheduled Cowork task that hands you the week’s calendar every Monday morning. The whole loop costs the $20 a month Claude plan you’re likely already paying for, against Hootsuite’s $1,188 a year.

What Hootsuite still gives you that the free build doesn’t: every network in one calendar view instead of four tabs, a unified inbox so comments and DMs from everywhere land in one queue, cross-platform analytics in a single report, and approval workflows for teams on the higher tiers. If you’re an agency posting for ten clients with three people who need approvals, keep it. If you’re posting for your own business, you’re paying $1,188 a year to press buttons the platforms hand you free.

Replacing Hootsuite with the native schedulers and one Cowork task pays for the entire Vault subscription nine times over, with change left.