Later Pricing (2026): Your Bill Is Set by Your Busiest Network, Not Your Account Count

If you searched "later pricing" you probably already saw the three numbers: $25, $50, $110. What the pricing page will not tell you in one place is that the number that decides your bill is not how many accounts you have. It is how many accounts you have on your single busiest network. Eight accounts, one on each of Later's eight networks, fit in one $25 plan. Ten TikTok accounts cost $170 a month.

We loaded later.com/pricing on September 28, 2026, read the page, its FAQ and the JavaScript bundle that holds the monthly figures, and cross-checked two help-centre articles. Everything below comes from that pass. Prices are USD before tax.

What does Later cost per month in 2026?

The page defaults to yearly billing and labels it "3 months free | 25% off". The monthly figures sit in the pricing bundle as monthly 25 / yearly 18.75, 50 / 37.5 and 110 / 82.5. The FAQ confirms the mechanism: "Save 25% when you choose an annual subscription instead of a monthly subscription."

Add-ons exist on Growth and Scale only: an extra social set is $15 a month ($11.25 on yearly billing), an extra user $5 ($3.75), and 100 extra AI credits $5 ($3.75). The Starter card says it in one line: "Extra Social Sets, users and AI credits not available." Non-profits get 50% off the yearly Growth plan. Every plan has a 14-day trial.

One thing to flag. The pricing page shows no free plan, but Later's Social Sets help article still says "Free & Starter plans have access to 1 Social Set", and a Capterra reviewer in July 2026 wrote "You only get 12 Instagram posts with the free version." We could not find a free tier on the public page. If your account has one, plan on a single set and a low post cap.

The same bundle also carries an unrendered Scale configuration at $200 a month ($133.33 yearly) for 15 sets and 10 users, and the page loads an A/B testing script. We did not see that price served on September 28 and every figure here is the rendered list price; if your pricing page shows Scale at $200, the six-set break-even below moves to twelve sets ($50 + 10 × $15 = $200).

What is a social set, and why does it decide your price?

The FAQ defines it: "A Social Set includes one of each profile we support: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads and Snapchat." So a set is eight slots, one per network. It is not eight accounts of your choosing.

The help centre then states the rule that matters: "to add 2 Instagram profiles to your Later account, you need to be on a plan that allows at least 2 Social Sets." A second Instagram account needs a second set even if the other seven slots of the first set are empty. That gives you the formula for the whole page.

Sets needed = accounts on your busiest single network. Total account count is irrelevant. Everything else on the pricing page follows from that one line.

Work it through. A brand with one account on each of six networks needs one set: Starter, $25. Three brands, each on five networks, need three sets: Growth plus one extra set, $65. Ten TikTok accounts need ten sets: Scale plus four extra sets, $170, and the same $170 if you route it as Growth plus eight sets. The chart shows the cheapest route at every set count.

Two consequences hide in that step chart. First, on Growth, four extra sets cost $60, and $50 + $60 = $110, which is the Scale price to the cent. The same holds on yearly billing: $37.50 + 4 × $11.25 = $82.50. So at six sets you should never be on Growth. Scale gives you the same six sets plus unlimited posts, four users instead of two, 100 AI credits and longer analytics history for the identical amount. Below six sets, buying sets on Growth is cheaper than upgrading. We have not seen a third-party pricing guide point this out, and you can verify it with two multiplications.

Second, the set contains no X slot. Later's supported list on the page reads "Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Threads, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Snapchat". One long-time customer wrote on Trustpilot on August 30, 2025, under the title "Dropped Support for X/Twitter", that losing X removed "at least 33% of the value" for them and that Later offered no price reduction or prorated refund. That is one customer's account, not a company statement. It does show what buying by set means: you pay for eight slots whether or not all eight are networks you use. The set composition differs from Planoly's, which includes X and omits Snapchat; we cover that in Planoly vs Later.

Why do Starter and Growth cost the same per profile but not per post?

Divide the plan price by the profiles it holds and Starter and Growth land on the same number: $25 ÷ 8 = $3.125 and $50 ÷ 16 = $3.125. Scale is $2.29. Ranked on that column, the first two plans tie.

They do not tie on output. Starter allows 30 scheduled posts per profile per month, Growth 180. Fill every slot and Starter gives you 240 post slots for $25, about 10.4 cents each; Growth gives you 2,880 for $50, about 1.7 cents each. Six times cheaper per post for double the money.

Now read how the cap is counted, because this is the line reviewers keep tripping over. From the FAQ: "Your post count is the number of scheduled posts you can create per month per social profile — not per Social Set. That includes all types of content, like Reels, Stories, and carousels. Posts count when they're scheduled — not when they're published." The worked example on the page: "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."

Two things follow. The cap is per profile, so a Starter user with one Instagram account gets 30 slots, not 240, and pays about 83 cents per slot. And the cap is a queue-depth meter charged at scheduling time; the page says nothing about slots being returned when a post is deleted. Compare Buffer's free plan, whose pricing page says "Once a scheduled post is published, you can schedule another post for that channel." Same sentence shape, different refill rule. This is the row nobody reads and everyone pays for.

Users describe it in their own words. On Capterra, a media head wrote in July 2022 that "The number of scheduled posts per month was too low for us to continue using Later for large scale organizations," and a digital asset manager wrote in November 2023 that "You're limited in how often and what you can post." Both were describing the 30-per-profile line before they had a name for it.

Which Later plan should you pick?

Start from your busiest network and your monthly volume per profile, not from the headline price.

1. One brand, up to eight networks, under 30 posts per profile a month: Starter, $25. Know that you cannot buy anything extra on it; the day you need a second Instagram account or a second user you move to Growth at $50.
2. Two to five brands, or two to five accounts on one network: Growth plus $15 per extra set. Do the count on your busiest network, not your total.
3. Six or more sets: Scale. At six sets it costs exactly what Growth plus four sets costs and removes the post cap.
4. Many accounts on one network (ten TikTok or ten Instagram accounts): $170 a month on Later, because each account needs its own set with seven idle slots. Per-account tools charge for what you connect; the SocialBee comparison is in SocialBee vs Later and the per-channel one in Buffer vs Later. This is also the shape where a scheduler solves the smaller half of the job. If ten accounts each need their own post rather than one post copied ten times, a desktop tool like NoobClaw takes a different route: it runs each account in its own local browser profile on your machine (you log in yourself; no passwords are handed over), drafts different content per account with AI, and paces posting at a human rhythm with a review step you should keep on. It is priced per action and per piece rather than per account slot; current figures are on its site and in the app.
5. YouTube is a Shorts slot, not a channel slot. Later's YouTube article says Shorts "must be between 15 seconds and 3 minutes", scheduling is "available on Later for desktop and iOS (not on Android)", Shorts "will always be auto published", and "all other plans are limited to 1 Short per month" outside current paid plans. Long-form uploads are not in scope.
6. Check the auto-publish list. The page's Auto Publish row names "Instagram business profiles or creator accounts, TikTok, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, and LinkedIn." Personal Instagram accounts are not in that sentence.

Where Later is worth its price: a visual calendar, grid preview, Link in Bio, best-time-to-post, and creator collaboration for teams that run one brand per set. For them the set model is not a penalty; a $15 set holds eight slots; at five slots in use it ties SocialBee's $3 a profile, and from six it is cheaper per slot than per-account plans. For the other post-cap model on the market, RecurPost's daily limits, see RecurPost vs Later.

FAQ: Later pricing

Does Later have a free plan?

Not on the pricing page we loaded on September 28, 2026: it lists Starter, Growth and Scale plus a 14-day trial. The help centre still mentions "Free & Starter plans" with one social set; if you are offered one, expect one set and a small post cap.

How many accounts can I connect on Later's Starter plan?

One social set, which is one profile on each of eight networks: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads and Snapchat. A second account on any one network needs a second set, and Starter cannot add sets, users or AI credits, so a second Instagram account means moving to Growth at $50.

What happens when I hit Later's post limit?

Starter allows 30 and Growth 180 scheduled posts per profile per month; Scale is unlimited. Posts count when scheduled, not when published, and the page does not say a slot is returned if you delete a post. The fix is either to schedule closer to publish time or to move to Growth, where the per-post cost falls six-fold.

Sources

1. Later Pricing — Later — page and pricing bundle read 2026-09-28; bundle also lists an unrendered Scale $200 / 15-set configuration, not used here — later.com/pricing
2. Create & Manage Social Sets — Later Help Center — read 2026-09-28 — help.later.com/hc/en-us/articles/360044369654
3. Schedule & Publish YouTube Shorts — Later Help Center — read 2026-09-28 — help.later.com/hc/en-us/articles/14720878941463
4. Buffer Pricing (machine-readable) — Buffer — read 2026-09-28 — buffer.com/pricing.md
5. "Dropped Support for X/Twitter" — Trustpilot user review — 2025-08-30 — trustpilot.com/reviews/68b248b280e76a61d9ea5594
6. Later Social reviews — Capterra — reviews dated July 2022, November 2023 and July 2026 — capterra.com/p/152254/Later/reviews