Postiz

Schedule and publish to every social platform from one self-hosted dashboard. The Buffer replacement that doesn't cost $120/year.

⏱ 30 min ◆◆◇ some copy-pasting ↺ reversible

What it does

Connect your X, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit accounts. Schedule posts, track engagement, recycle evergreen content - all from one interface you control.

Why it's on the shelf

Buffer charges $15/month for 8 social accounts and 2,000 scheduled posts. Postiz does unlimited everything, including AI-generated captions, for the cost of a $5 VPS. The catch: setup is 30 minutes instead of 30 seconds.

What it replaces

Buffer, Hootsuite, Later, Sprout Social. Whatever you pay for that today is what this page is here to delete. Worth being honest with yourself first though: if the bill is already small, the answer may still be that this isn't worth your Saturday.

Skip this one if... You don't want a server you're responsible for. Postiz runs on your own box, which is what makes it free and what makes it yours - but it also means the backups, the updates and the 11pm restart are on you. If that's a no, close the tab; it'll cost you 30 min to find out the hard way.

Setting it up

These are the steps in order. The time on the bar above is what this took us end to end, including the reading.

Install Docker and Docker Compose on your server
Clone the Postiz repository
Copy .env.example to .env and fill in your domain + database password
Connect each social account via OAuth (the app walks you through it)
Run docker-compose up -d and visit your domain

The code

The actual configuration, not a sketch of one. The highlighted lines are the ones you have to change.

What this doesPostiz's official compose file. Clone their repo to get all the pieces.

docker-compose.yml

services:  postiz:    image: ghcr.io/gitroom/postiz:latest    ports: ["3000:3000"]    environment:      - MAIN_URL=https://social.yourdomain.com  ← your domain      - DATABASE_URL=postgres://postiz:pass@db:5432/postiz  ← set a password    depends_on: [db]  db:    image: postgres:16

Before you run this Social platform API changes can break specific integrations. The project is actively maintained and usually fixes breaks within days.

What it costs to run

Needs a $10/month VPS (2GB RAM). Postgres + the app itself.

This keeps working without us Postiz runs on your own box under the Apache-2.0, with your data in your own database. If Growth Dudes stops existing tomorrow, nothing on this page stops working. That is deliberate, and it's the only promise here we can actually keep.

Field notes

What people found when they actually ran it - dated, named and specific, including the times our setup number turned out to be optimistic.

Nobody has posted one for Postiz yet.

We're not going to invent them. Run it, then tell the room what actually happened - the time you got, and the step that wasn't in the instructions.

Join and post one

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