Planaro

I'm building a social media scheduling tool, and for a while I was pricing on vibes. So I sat down and worked through what the established tools in the space actually charge.

Almost none of them price flat. Some charge per connected account. Some per seat. Some per workspace. The details differ, but they share one property: the more accounts you manage, the more you pay.

That's fine if you're one person with one account. It's punishing if you're a freelancer or a small agency — which is who most of these tools say they're for.

What the pricing revealed

Pricing models aren't neutral. They encode what a company thinks it's selling.

Per-seat says "we're selling access for humans." Per-account says "we're selling connections to platforms." Per-workspace says "we're selling containers."

None of them say "we're selling distribution."

That struck me, because distribution is the actual job. Nobody wants to schedule posts. They want the posts to reach people. Scheduling is the mechanism; reach is the outcome. And nearly every tool stops the moment the post hits the platform.

Meanwhile I kept doing this manually: publish a post, then open Discord and paste it in. Then Slack. Then Telegram. The people who actually followed me were sitting in those channels, and nothing would take them there.

The temptation to build more

With the current generation of AI models, building features has never been cheaper. You can spin up a rough version of almost anything in an afternoon. Which means the temptation — just one more feature, it'll only take a day — has never been stronger.

I felt it constantly. Social listening. An inbox. Approval workflows. Templates. Every mature tool in the category has things I don't, and each gap felt urgent.

But the pricing research reframed it. Those tools have those features and still nobody's solving the distribution problem. The gap wasn't in the feature list. It was in what happens after you publish.

So the last release I shipped was deliberately narrow:

• Automatic re-sharing to Discord, Slack, and Telegram once a post goes live

• Bluesky support alongside X and LinkedIn (including pages)

• Analytics in one place

No AI copilot. No inbox. No approval workflows. Every one ties into the core loop: publish → distribute → measure.

The hardest part wasn't building any of it. It was not building the other ten things on my list.

What I think this means

When a rough version of almost anything can be generated in an afternoon, features stop being the moat. What's left is the boring stuff: integrations that hold up, workflows people rely on, and a clear answer to what problem are you actually solving.

The pricing models told me what the category thinks it's selling. They also told me what none of it is.

I'm building Planaro around that gap — publish once, and your posts reach your communities automatically. Flat pricing, no per-account fees.